Presidential power

Amache Internment camp, Colorado

What's going to get our President tossed is behavior he's appears powerless to control. Take "kung flu" for example. 

I'm in no position to judge the relative offense of that line. I'm not Asian. But one morning in eastern Colorado, I got up with the sun, drove out into the boiling plains and ran into the remnants of a Japanese war camp whose cement foundations stood witness to the immense size of an enterprise long gone. Once upon a time tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans lived out there, quarantined from white America because of their ethnic origins. 

And I know that during that war thousands of Japanese prisoners of war ended up on our shores, where they were stuck into prison camps not at all dissimilar to the camps created for their German compatriot prisoners. They're all, of course, long gone, but some of those camps, ghost towns really, still exist today, enough of their skeletons to get a sense of how Axis-power POWs lived. 

One significant difference between the two are the friendships that grew between prisoners and locals--in rural Iowa as elsewhere. Such friendships happened only in German POW camps, not among the Japanese. American farmers in need of it could count on the ex-Wehrmacht for help. Japanese POWs were not so requested nor received.

If Asian-Americans take offense at calling the near-and-present killer virus "Kung Flu," then some of us--me, for instance--have the same moral right to use that language as we do to yell "fire" in a crowded theater. 

Our President knows that, but he can't help himself. He knows--and he's right--that his continuing use of an offensive tag will get him a houseful of grins whenever he takes the podium, as it did in Phoenix at a mega-church in a congregation of Trump-loving Christian kids, most all of them white. You could feel the enthusiasm rise in this house of Trump worship when he started on a riff  they'd heard before: ". . .never heard of a disease with so many names," and then started in, giggles mounting into cheering and applause when he reached the big line all those white kids were waiting for--"kung flu." That's Trump magic.

Isn't that cool? He just comes right out and says it. He don't care. I love that.

It's funny only if you don't care about offense, and you deliberately and pathetically look past 125,000 dead Americans and fully as many patients alive but sentenced to suffer with a coffin full of maladies, some of them for the rest of their lives. The corona virus may well have a ton of names, but one of them isn't comedy. 

When your and my President repeats the name riff one more time, the words his minions can't wait for him to repeat feeds the bigot in us. "Kung flu" becomes a badge of his refusal to toe the line to the p.c. police, makes him a rebel at war with powers bigger than all of them, a bow-and-arrow Robin Hood of all dispossessed white men. And thus, a hero.

He knows it, and he can't help himself. He may not drink, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have an addiction. 

Can you really design something more idiotic than our President having mass events in cities where the virus is growing wildly? 

What a man! What a brave man, fighting back the way he is--no mask, none of that "social distancing." To hell with all of that. Kung Flu too--take that, you fools. He's a big billionaire rebel, a guerilla gorilla, and he's going to take down every last enemy because they're all around, aren't they? They're all around and they want our guns and our money and our power.

So how about that? 'Kung Flu.' Isn't that a riot? 

Is it any wonder he's tanking?