Dear editor:
We, the people, are about to roll the dice and elect our next president. Just enough time left to dash off a few well-deserved thank you notes ...
So first of all, a great big thank you to our ever-vigilant tea parties, and to their patron saints the Brothers Koch, for breathing new life into the smoldering ashes of daddy's John Birch Society. Good old-fashioned, flag-waving, Bible-thumping, patriotic paranoia never goes out of style.
And a special thanks to our very own, intrepid letter writers -- les enfants trĂšs terribles -- who, every few days, confess all that moulders in their inky souls. Their hatred of the black man in the White House, their love of Fox News and fake websites, and their fixation on some dead guy named Saul Alinsky. Their heroes are legion, demigods of the email underworld, supermen like Dinesh D'Souza and David Barton and Robert Jeffress and Franklin Graham. Always pro-life and yet always eager for more smiting. Always peddling an improbable, mythical American History to beguiled folk along the desperate fringes of reality.
Thank you, Republican Party, for your three-ring political circus that gave us blow-dried, blowhard, scary-clown Donald J. Trump. He almost makes us miss George Bush and his bloody wars and blown-up economies. Almost.
Thank you, religious zealots, for showing us your real family values. If you ever held dear the radical example of your long-ago messiah, you've clearly left it all behind for a last-stand mess of Machiavellian pottage, a Devil's deal to somehow save the Supreme Court from godless Liberals. We marvel at your mountain-moving faith in a madman who promises to build a beautiful wall that others will pay for, banish dusky strangers from this fair-skinned land, and bring us into a millennium of it-will-be-so-fantastic gospel prosperity.
Thank you, Mr. Trump, for making us believe again in the magic of hair spray.
Thank you, America, for scaring the bejeezus out of every sentient being on our fragile planet. The world waits and wonders -- and trembles -- that we could even remotely consider this preening, predatory trumpery of a little man.
And finally, a brief apology to our neighbors in Canada and Mexico. We're really, really sorry.
John Ragland
Hot Springs
Editorial on 10/23/2016