Castles Built on Racist Sands

Donald Trump’s road to the presidency was founded on a lie. This fallacious basis is what the man aggressively, volubly built his early campaign upon, persistently issuing a particularly insidious dog whistle to the toxic Race Hatred simmering just beneath the surface in the United States.
The uniquely American brand of racism is a volatile mix of shame, protectionism and defensiveness over the attachment to historic slavery. The persistent dream of White Supremacy is the socio-cultural sickness still plaguing much of the White South — the toxic come-back/revenge fantasy still propping up notions of White privilege in much of backwoods, depressed, rural America.
Toxic ideologues like Bannon, Miller and their poster boy, Trump, capitalize on this and cynically exploit it toward their own financial and political ends. In the cases of Miller and Bannon, they do, also, actually believe their own cant. In the case of Trump, he uses the dog whistle to coerce Boy Scouts to ‘boo’ Barak Obama before getting them to riotously cheer and pledge their undying loyalty to him.
This ‘oath’ that he got them to swear was to him, personally — not to the office of the president, not to America, not to God, democracy, goodness, honour — not to any principles or values, but, in a chillingly cult-like manner, to his own person. The Boy Scout Oath: “To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight,” was nowhere in evidence — was brutally shoved aside so that a fragile ego could bask in the aroused adulation of a 40,000-strong assembly of American boys.
Trump began his rise by cruising on incipient racism in the United States with his oft-trumpeted insistence on the following falsehood: Barak Obama was not born in the United States, had a falsified birth certificate, and was therefore ineligible as President of the United States; hence, Barak Obama’s historic presidency, the first U.S. presidential office ever held by an African American, was illegal and illegitimate.
The regressive reaches of the deep South, the backward recesses of backwoods America, and the backwards-looking agricultural breadbasket of the sprawling Midwest resounded, clutching at it, desperately clinging to their sense of wrongness, of having been personally and collectively wronged, ignored, and callously overlooked by the better educated, better privileged, and better fed, as the scant survivors of the sinking of the Titanic clung to its pitiful wreckage in an icy, hostile, inscrutably heaving sea.
But, all of this aside, the current situation begs the question: Can any edifice built on the deceptively shifting sands of a flagrant (cynical, manipulative, coercive, ill-motivated, callous, conscious, and pernicious) lie remain standing?
