Slave To The Kitchen, Slave To The Job - Why The Outrageousness Of Donald Trump Is So Appealing

Harlan Banks worked two jobs and a little on the side.  There was always something to deliver or dig or fetch, and he made ends meet.  His life in a small town in the Mississippi delta was unremarkable for its regularity and its sameness.  Everyone was in the same boat, paddling in the slow current of the bayou, watching time pass with little to show for it. 

Yes, he loved his children, put up with his wife and his in-laws, enjoyed a week on the Gulf every few years or so, but soldiered on like others in his regiment - born poor, raised poor, and lived poor.  Not colored poor, but poor enough, not trailer trash but living in a trailer. 

He was a complaisant, uncomplaining worker at Walmart and The Live Oak, a popular restaurant where he worked seven till closing. Living on the margins meant he could never complain, act up, or make demands.  He was as much a slave and no better off than Isaiah who had worked the Ottaway Plantation where his great-grandfather had been overseer.  Dawn till dusk in the cotton fields, cornpone and fatback, working his fingers to the bone for nothing. 

His family remained on the plantation during Reconstruction as tenant farmers.  It didn't take long for Harper Middleton, the former grandee of Ottaway, run off his property by the Freedmen's Bureau, to regain his land, and he was quick to hire whomever was still in the county, white or black, to work as tenant farmers. 

Life as a tenant farmer was little different from slavery.  Harlan's forbears managed a living on the fertile bottomland recovered by Middleton, but were as beholden to him as former slaves were to him as Massa. 

Life went on for succeeding generations of Banks until the present day when Harlan Banks reflected on his history. For how many generations longer would Banks be owned, tethered and tied, beholden and corralled? 

The election of Donald Trump changed everything.  Not that he expected to be a guest at Mar-a-Lago or at the White House, nor even that expected prosperity to come his way.  That might come once attention turned towards people like him - patriotic, hardworking, Americans of faith who asked nothing from government but opportunity - but the real reason for the fresh air was the personality of the President, a man who had nothing to do with the pedantry, sanctimony, and righteousness of the Left. 

He was a Super Hero, a comic book action figure come to life.  He was an Ubermensch with no patience for small minds and infantile idealism.  He was a Colossus.  It wasn't so much that Harlan would ever be like Donald Trump - his yachts, mansions, and arm candy - but that thanks to him he might regain his dignity.  

After years of being told he was a white supremacist, a racist cracker, a fundamentalist fool, an airheaded swamp rat, he was suddenly his own man.  After years of the configuration of society around the assumption of the black man's native superiority, the white man was once again in focus. 

He was again told that his Scotch-Irish roots were noble, that the European civilization from which his ancestors had come was valorous and built the foundation for liberal democracy; that there was no such thing as systemic racism; that there was no distinction between the working man and the leader of government. 

Most importantly, Trump was outrageous. He bulldozed his way down Independence Avenue and got rid of the do-nothing hangers-on in one bureaucracy after another.  He was building a grand ballroom, an Arch of Victory, and a Field of Heroes.  He was wielding a mighty Christian sword crushing the infidel and razing his cities.  He was reprising Joshua in the battle of Jericho, ridding the Holy Land of the heathen enemies of Israel. 

Professional wrestling matches would be held at the White House, and tinsel, sequins, and sparkle would return.  The days of ugliness, faux propriety, and absurdity would be gone and forgotten.  Harlan's America was back!

This of course was exactly what drove the Left to distraction.  It wasn't so much the President's conservative policies - lower taxes, freer enterprise, less regulation, a more muscular foreign policy, an embrace of capitalism and Wall Street investment - but his embrace of what they saw as a lowbrow, cheap culture.  

After years of progressive promotion of gay men, lesbians, transgenders and the black man, the beautiful people were back - the blonde, blue-eyed women and handsome, chisel-jawed men.  It was the return of a much maligned culture that they thought they had thoroughly disparaged and dismissed that rankled. 

The President didn't just change the cultural ethos on little cats' paws, but like gangbusters - with an in-your-face, fuck you braggadocio - and it was this that Harlan cheered.  The explosive anything goes ethos of the old America. 

Why, the Left asked, would anyone like Harlan Banks vote for Donald Trump, a crony capitalist whose policies would only benefit the rich and the privileged?  Their policies and programs would be designed for the marginalized, the disadvantaged, and the poor.  

Yet as Harlan knew these programs were fictions, enabling charades for minorities, giveaways in the name of equity but nothing more than posturing.  During the Biden years Harlan hadn't seen one dime of the purported equity money so widely promised.  Trump made no fictive promises, but only pledged to recalibrate and reconfigure the American economy to do its job, to spread prosperity.  

Harlan would wait but in the meantime was energized, spirited, and awakened by the President.  Every time he called out a reporter for their dumb questions; every time one of his Cabinet members refused to toady up to Congressional committee members and snapped back at their preposterous sanctimony, he cheered. 

This is what the Left missed.  America is not a progressive, serious, compassionate place.  It is lowbrow, simple, and honest about its lack of pretention.  It is a country of Las Vegas and Hollywood, con men, pimps, and charlatans, catfish noodlers and alligator hunters.  It is a country of men like Harlan who have limits - and they have had enough of the Biden progressive freak show. 

Northern liberals are proud of the fact that they have never set foot below the Mason-Dixon line, for to do so would be giving support to the racist, proto-segregationist, perennially Jim Crow cracker South.  They have never met a Harlan Banks and never wanted to do so.  Anyone born and raised as he was would not be worth their time. 

Progressive arrogance plus Trump outrageousness is the perfect political storm for continued conservative victory.  Americans like Harlan want their country back.  Let it become more 'diverse' but on Jeffersonian terms, terms of integration, patriotism, and subscription to a core moral ethos.  Not the progressives'  arrogant, politically expedient, absurd, and divisive 'inclusivity'. 

'Fuck 'em', said Harlan, catching the President's drift.