"Make America Great Again" is a phrase completely dominated and altered by the word "again."
Without that word, it is simply "Make America Great," which is so prosaic and non specific the triad sinks into an oblivion swampland of empty phrases.
But add that word "again," and you are saying something edgy, subversive, nasty even.
"Again" brings you to that imagined world of an idyllic time when things were better, and implies we are now living in a fallen state, expelled from the Garden of Eden, suffering, punished.
We have lost that halcyon time when men were men, women were barefoot in the kitchen, bearing children and America ruled the world in the American century.
Being old now, Mad Dog can actually remember the twentieth century, lived it, in fact, and he wishes to inform you, that was a century we were lucky to escape.
It was a time when white men got points simply for being white, when Black American veterans, returning from Europe where they fought to defeat Hitler, found that, unlike their white fellow vets, they could not get the GI bill mortgage deal, and thus could not buy homes the way their white comrades could.
It was a time when women could not have their own credit cards, because they had to have permission from their husbands to do so, to have bank accounts, and in fact were mostly owned by their husbands and they got mail addressed to Mrs. John Smith, meaning the letter was for Jane Smith, but she really did not have an identity of her own.
It was a time of back alley abortions.
It was a time when "sex" was dirty and not spoken of in polite company, when sexual repression was pervasive and girls got pregnant in their teens often because they didn't know any better.
It was a time when All American boys in Lt. Calley's platoon mowed down women, children and old people in a Vietnamese village and buried some in a ditch, because, after all, they were just gooks, gooks who may have been sympathetic to the Viet Cong, who were fighting to rid Vietnam of American soldiers.
It was a time when a white gunman shot Martin Luther King to death and when someone, not really clear who, also shot John F. Kennedy to death, and later another psychopath shot his brother.
And, it was a time when Negroes (as they were known then) lit afire major American cities, and Mad Dog, being an idiot, hopped in an open MG sports car with a friend and drove downtown to see the action, and driving along Independence Avenue, Constitution Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue, saw American soldiers holding their M-1 rifles on every street corner, peering suspiciously back at Mad Dog and his White companion, and the image of American soldiers in the streets was somehow shocking, a sort of apocalyptic vision--soldiers in their olive drab uniforms and helmets were what you saw on TV, in other countries, not in America.
The days when America was great was a time when White men had no fear of being "replaced" by colored people, or immigrants. The invasion of dark skinned infestation insane asylum rapists was not happening then--people moving across the Southern border was just business as usual--workers coming in to harvest crops mostly.
It was a time when non college educated ordinary citizens in places like Kent, Ohio, loathed the college students at Kent State University, and sent their sons with their rifles, members of the National Guard to murder college students protesting the War in Vietnam and the bombing of neutral Cambodia. And the President (Nixon) called those students "bums."
It was a time when polluted water in major American lakes and rivers was the norm--so you could not swim or fish in the Potomac and the Cayahoga River near Cleveland literally caught on fire as the oil polluting it combusted.
And there was a place called, ironically, "Love Canal" near Niagara Falls where industry dumped its toxic chemicals so prodigiously, it killed and sickened unsuspecting citizens for miles around.
It was a time when Negroes trying to attend the University of Alabama were met by the Governor who said, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"
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| Upstate, New Hampshire, 2012 |
And during the Freedom Summer a white man and two Negroes trying to register Black voters were murdered in Mississippi and found under a bridge.
It was a time when lynching occurred with such regularity in the South it wasn't even news. It was a time "Easy Rider" brought to life the casual hate and violence endemic in the South.
It was a time of air pollution, before regulatory agencies of the federal government finally brought it under control and the "Chevron deference" allowed the federal government to protect the air, water and soil.
America was great, Mr. Trump and his acolytes would have you know, when White men had all the privilege and power and Black men and women were kept under their thumbs. It was a time Randy Newman's song "Rednecks" depicted, with its refrain, "Keeping the Niggers Down."
Of course, it was also a time you could say the word "nigger," if only to condemn it; you didn't have to say, "The N Word" as if speaking that would somehow cause Black people to fall over from heart attacks.
The 1950's was a world of racial segregation and sexual repression; the 1960's were when people began openly suggesting premarital sex might not cause the collapse of Western Civilization and racial oppression might not be inevitable; the 1970's actually saw a shift toward correction as the arc of history started to bend toward justice, but that brought the Reagan years of reaction in the 1980's and by the 1990's progress in race relations and opportunities was entrenched enough to strike fear in all those feckless White boys in the South who realized they may not be given jobs and houses and social position simply for being white and by the 2000's those same White boys were marching in Charlottesville, Virginia chanting "You Will Not Replace Us."
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| History Lesson |
So that's what the MAGA crowd wants to go back to, "again."
