"… Many sides, many sides…"

“… Many sides, many sides…”
by David Benjamin

“We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump.”
— David Duke, former Imperial Wizard, Ku Klux Klan

MADISON, Wis. — Well hooray for David Duke.

Duke scolded Donald Trump for chickening out Monday, when the president grudgingly chided the racist mob who rioted in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer. Said Duke, “President Trump, please, for God’s sake, don’t feel like you need to say these things. It’s not going to do you any good.”

Duke is right. Trump gets no traction from bowing to “political correctness.”

However, looking at the president from a longer historical perspective, Trump’s surrender to civility is hardy a deviation from the norm. Since he began his unlikely White House campaign, Trump has been, ironically, the most politically correct public figure in America.

Certainly, on one hand, Trump has torn up the rhetorical playbook in U.S. politics. On the other hand, however, whenever he’s had the chance to candidly express his true feelings, he has backed down, as he did Monday in the least convincing presidential denunciation of racism since Andrew Johnson. Yes, Trump has pushed the envelope to its breaking point. But his signal failure — as a public speaker and the leader of a popular movement — is his reluctance to keep going and bust the envelope wide open.

Trump’s dilemma is one of the great rhetorical challenges in political history. All it takes to be conventionally PC is to practice the thoughtfulness, good taste and common courtesy that most people learn in childhood from parents and teachers. But when you style yourself as the patron saint of anti-PC, you have a responsibility to your insatiable believers to strip away the veneer of polite society, to seek out and articulate, brazenly, the vilest, most hateful and inflammatory, most “incorrect” terms available in the vast and vivid English language.

To suggest that Trump has fallen short of that ideal would be a big-ass understatement. Consider, for example, his terminology for the ethnic minority whom his father, Fred, systematically banned from his tenements in Queens. While most polite people prefer to say “black people” or “African-Americans” (I’m nostalgically attached to W.E.B. DuBois’ usage, “black folks”), Trump’s earliest euphemism was “the blacks.” If you listen carefully, you hear in that superfluous “the” an awkward air of condescension. Whenever Trump invoked “the blacks,” my memory heard the ugly word, “nigra,” which was adopted by genteel Southern bigots in the civil-rights era as a reluctant compromise between “Negro” and the déclassé “n-word.”

Trump finally got around to adopting the PC term, “African-American,” but it tripped not lightly off his tongue. He sounded like a first-year French student trying to pronounce “l’avenue des Champs Elyseés.”

Of course, “African-American,” or even “Negro,” was not the word bandied about the mansion when little Donny was growing up in Jamaica Estates. Nor is it the word his believers yearn — ache — to him him roar. David Duke has Trump pegged. He knows how much Trump wants to call a spade a spade — and a Scaramucci a wop. Duke can imagine — as can I — what would happen if Trump stood up on his golfcart legs before the faithful and said, without fear of consequences, “My fellow white Americans, I am devoted — as every true patriot must be devoted — to our never-ending, sacred mission of keeping the niggers down!”

Kaboom! The result would be a standing — no, jumping up and down — ovation, punctuated by a goose-step conga line, so ecstatic and riotous that Donald would be unable to utter an audible syllable for at least 15 minutes. He would be reduced to simply watching the grateful pandemonium he hath wrought, glowing orangely, strutting like a fatted rooster behind his presidential seal, applauding himself, sticking up his little thumbs now and then, and basking in the racial adoration that will be his lasting legacy in the American saga.

If he ever dared to abandon the prissiness pressed upon him by his pussyfooting advisors, Trump could unleash all the epithets that now stick in his politically correct throat. He could shout “jigaboo” and holler “hebe,” “spic” and “raghead.” He could indulge — cathartically! — in all the terms that demean the biggest minority of all, the group with whom his love/hate relationship will never be resolved: the bitches and broads, sluts, whores and pieces of ass who inflame his lust and (afterwards) incite his manly contempt.

Since Charlottesville, Donald Trump is — more than ever — the Great White Hope. If he’s true to his perfervid disciples, he has to end his flirtation with civilized discourse. If he keeps blowing his dog whistle without providing red meat, eventually even Lassie will turn on him. Trump owes it to the worst of his supporters — the only ones he has left — to be as crude, blunt, hate-filled and bigoted as they would like to be. They can see his heart thumping with spite and fear beneath his mortician’s suit and phallic necktie. But they want to hear it.

Cast off your shackles and spit it out, Donald! Answer the call of Steve Bannon, James Fields and the Daily Stormer. Trade that cockamamie U.S. flag pin for the Stars and Bars. Pull your dad’s white robe out of mothballs. Plant a giant, gasoline-soaked cross on the White House lawn — where Michelle used to grow veggies — and set it on fire. And then shout, Donald! Cry out, for all (white Christians) to hear you, the words of the colored preacher George Lincoln Rockwell used to call “Martin Luther Coon”:

“Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”