"… Have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water?"

“… Have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water?”
by David Benjamin

“Rock ’n’ roll music and why I preach against it. I believe that it is a contributing factor to our juvenile delinquency of today. I know what it does to you. And I know the evil feeling that you feel when you sing it. I know the lost position that you get into in the beat… the beat, the beat…”
— Anonymous preacher, ca. 1959

MADISON, Wis. — Whistle past the graveyard though he might, Donald Trump has lost this one. As his comeuppance becomes more manifest with every cry of “rigged, rigged, rigged!,” the punditocracy grows increasingly alarmed that Trump’s intemperate troops will linger in the body politic and make it impossible for steadier hands to mend the raveled sleeve of American democracy.

My contention is that the sleeve has been raveled since the slave trade and the Salem witch trials. I contend that Trump was a symptom not a source, that the divisions he has so crudely exploited will thrive in his litigious aftermath, very likely through the agency of TrumpTV (under the connivance of Roger Ailes). As long as the nation’s reactionary fifth have cheerleaders like Alex Jones, Breitbart, Drudge, Limbaugh and his talk-radio cohorts, Fox News and other bastions of alt-right paranoia, they will hold hostage the Republican Party, the conservative ethic and political weenies like Ryan, McConnell and Priebus. The trampling of Trump — by a girl — will prove by Thanksgiving to be a mere rumble-strip on the delusional superhighway to right-wing Armageddon.

What pundits (always) misjudge is the persistence of the boogyman (often spelled “bogeyman”) in reactionary politics. The Salem witches were an early example. Soon after that, we were waging fearful genocide against a continent of native boogybraves. The South trembled for a century in delicious terror of the Negro sex demon wildly ravenous for white nookie — a boogyman stamped onto the American psyche through the mythic melodrama of D.W. Griffith and embodied years later, in tragic real life, by an uppity kid named Emmitt Till.

Over the years, we’ve found ways to to ostracize and demonize a wondrous range of boogyfolk and boogyfun, from Catholics and Jews to DC Comics and Hollywood Commies, to the moral degeneracy of Cab Calloway, Elvis Presley and the Twist. Remember all those pious parents scared to death of rock ’n’ roll? More recently, “superpredator” teenagers were supposed to turn every urban block into a jungle crawling with — let’s see now — Negro sex demons wildly ravenous for white nookie.

Candidate Trump (a self-declared sex demon who winkingly confessed his ravenousnous for you-know-what) not only exploited the “superpredator” boogyman to wedge his way into politics. He clung to that racist fancy even after the objects of his wrath — the so-called Central Park Five — were proved innocent, through DNA analysis, after years in prison.

If Gallup were to poll most rightists, reactionaries, and conservatives on the innocence of these once-young black males, they would agree overwhelmingly that the DNA was rigged, that the discovery of the real rapist was faked and that a liberal cabal in New York’s City Hall engineered the exoneration of five savage punks who should have been lynched in ’89 by Donald Trump in person (I picture little Ivanka goosing one of the gallows horses with a pink Prada parasol) from the tallest tree in Central Park.

This sort of mass abhorrence of reality isn’t hard to understand. Once concocted, a cherished boogyman lodges like a limpet in the one-track mind. The boogyman becomes immutable and immortal. After this election blows over, the lunatic fifth will necessarily forsake Trump as their hero. But they’ll hold inviolate their villains — both actual and imaginary. They will still revile Obamacare as the most monstrously conceived and dangerous plot we’ve ever had to face. They will cling to their faith in Barack Obama as a Kenyan usurper whose miscegenating mom and boogydad launched a Socialist conspiracy to elevate an illicit Muslim to the very pinnacle of the Zionist Occupation Government.

(I know, I know. But it’s not supposed to make sense!)

Among other boogymen who will easily survive the Trump debacle will be the millions of drug-muling rapists pouring across the Rio Grande to murder, pillage and commit voter fraud (and serve Big Macs). The poor will remain a vast horde of boogypaupers in Cadillacs who buy caviar with their food stamps.

After a 16-year hiatus, Hillary and Bill will take over from the Obamas as the First Boogyfamily. Once again, there will be no crime against decent Christians to which the Clintons can claim innocence. Soon after Hillary takes office, the Supreme Court majority will resume its traditional status as two judicially hyperactive boogymen, a pair of boogywoman Jews and a Mexican boogyshiksa.

There are myriad other boogymen who will not fade from the fevered fantasies of the fearful right in the immediate — or distant — future. They are forever. Prominent among them are the media — boogymessengers who foster, with their every mendacious paragraph, the corruption of our values and contamination of our precious bodily fluids.

The eternal boogyman is the prowling homo in our public toilets. He’s the dead Democrat who votes over and over in Cook and Cuyahoga Counties. He’s the alien killer holed up in the cathedral of a sanctuary city. He’s the ghosts of Benghazi and the seditious contents of three million deleted e-mails. He’s the sadistic abortionists of Planned Parenthood and the pornographers of the ACLU. He is teachers misleading our children, politicians and clergy, librarians and poets, greedy scientists seeding hurricanes. She is an army of sluts who ruin the lives of the gullible young athletes and fraternity boys whom she has enticed with her skimpy clothes and befuddled with Budweiser.

And, of course, he is the blue-bellied thugs of the Union who trampled the Stars and Bars into the mud, and strangled the ancient, glorious traditions of American chivalry.