America the insane

 And now will come the disclaimer, as phony as plastic vomit: This is not how we do things in America.

To which the Blob has this response, on the morning after yet another crazy with yet another gun tried to take out Donald Trump:

Since when?

Violence is who we are, what we are, what we have always been. It's been baked into our DNA since we (violently) threw off British rule. We glorify it, even as we profess to be horrified by it. Our heroes practice it in word, thought and deed; the rest of us worship God and guns, and not necessarily in that order. 

We are the nation of Rambo and The Equalizer and John Wick. Of William Muny and Rooster Cogburn and, yes, Donald Trump -- arch defender of Second Amendment absolutism, and weaver of spells over his yahoo cult.

The violence of his rhetoric -- calling desperate brown people coming across the border "vermin" and "parasites" who "poison the blood" of America, for instance -- makes his cult roar with approval. The persecution complex that feeds his utter lack of perspective (and more often than not takes him to the rim of madness) only invites the same sort of violent rhetoric and lack of perspective from those on the other end of the political spectrum.

Both are out there on the fringes of the lunatic fringe now, seeing nothing but darkness and  ruin across the void. Already, in the immediate wake of last night's shooting, they were assuming their usual positions: The MAGAs claiming it was an attempted hit by President Biden and his acolytes, already holding up their boy as some sort of half-assed Martyr For 'Merica; the fringe left in some cases making jokes about the shooter (reportedly a 20-year-old with, what else, an AR-15) being too poor a shot.

Both are ridiculous. Both are vile. Both are something you scrape off your shoe after walking through a cow pasture on a hot day.

 And here at the center of it all?

The perpetually aggrieved Donald John Trump -- who more than anyone has sowed this wind, and who last night reaped the whirlwind.

The unfettered gun rights his cult holds as a sacrament, after all, surely smoothed the sick path of the shooter last night. If so-called good guys with guns regard any inconvenience as a violation of their right to arm themselves like a Ranger battalion, such absolutism made it yea easier for a bad guy with a gun to bloody a presidential candidate and kill one of his followers.

And so, yet again, the familiar pop-pop-pop of gunfire echoed through the clear July air.  People screamed. Trump was grazed in the ear by either a bullet or flying glass from a shattered teleprompter. The Secret Service hustled him off with his fist in the air -- a gesture seen by his cult as a manly man show of defiance, and by those less enamored as Trump hot-dogging it again.

And then, of course, the disclaimers about violence never being the answer in America.

An America that has seen four of its presidents assassinated, and at least three more (Andrew Jackson, FDR and Gerald Ford) nearly so.

An America that has seen another presidential candidate assassinated, and a civil rights icon assassinated, and another sitting president wounded, and yet another presidential candidate crippled for life.

America the violent, boys and girls. America the insane.

God help us.