Index

The Pied Piper of Washington

The midterms have come and gone, and the American public had the intellectual courage to at least pull one of the vampire’s fangs -the fascists and oligarchs no longer own all of Washington. That said, we still have the worst “president” in history wasting space in the Whitehouse, and it looks like he might have a chance of lasting his full term.

As a child, I was taught that everyone has a purpose and that someone that is “bad” can at least find use as a bad example. I think I might have seen a use for this particular one.

One of the fairy tales we all heard or read as children was “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and that story holds the key to finding a use for the current problem. In the story that I grew up with, the Pied Piper was initially hired to lure all of the rodents out of the village.

The current occupant of the Whitehouse has lured all of the economic and social right wing rodents out of the woodpiles they have been hiding in and given them their time in the spotlight. From his coded support for the Nazis and KKK in Charlottesville to his emptying of the treasury into the pockets of the wealthiest oligarchs in the country, his actions have lured the rats into plain sight - the question now becomes what to do with them.

Since Trump seems to have made himself the head cheerleader of the whole collection, the one use I can find for him is the same use the Hamelin villagers had for the Piper - lead the rats out of town and drown them. Since at least the social right wing has shown their lemming pedigree anyway, he has no problem luring them on, but it is he oligarch rodents with their more highly developed survival instincts that are less likely to follow the clown into the river.

This is where the con artist would need to shine and show that he is actually good for something. He has proven that he can con his own kind - the former republican party fell right in line, leaving their entire ideology in the dust as they walked over each other to troop in behind him. Some of them had managed to hang onto some pretense of moral grounding for decades until Trump came along and stripped all pretense of anything but greed off of them.

This is where the president from hell can actually become useful. He just needs to keep his followers conned as he continues on his current path back to hell, a task that will test all of his con-artist skills as the survivor instincts of the more elite oligarchs kick in. These are creatures that have survived decades of social change unscathed, collecting power and money while the world around them grew up, and the instincts that allowed them to thrive as greedy juveniles in an increasingly adult world will make them resistant to following their chosen cheerleader the rest of the way down.

I am pretty sure that Nixon’s spiritual heir is up to the task. He plays his “greed” note well, and that is what lured the oligarch-rats into his parade to start with. That same note, played loud and long, may well serve to distract even their best survivor instincts as they walk the primrose path.

If he succeeds, the result could be a far brighter future for all of humanity.