Bombs.
Bombs away.
Another bombing. Another American bombing
And the bombed?
They’re brown, of course.
It’s not just a place. It’s not just a people.
It’s brown people.
We pretty much stopped bombing lily-white folks 80 years ago, but we’ve never stopped bombing brown people.
Sure, we bombed some Asians in the Korean War and some more in Vietnam — but the Koreans, the Chinese, and the Vietnamese have turned out to be as good at making things cheaply for us as the Japanese after WWII. Can’t bomb Amazon’s profit margin, can we? That would be un-American.
But bombing brown people is very American — even on our own turf.
The first aerial bombardment on American soil accomplished the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Black people are more brown than Black, right? Just like most white people are more pink than white. Like swine, I suppose.
Heck, bombing brown people is the U.S. military-industrial complex’s M.O. We’ve done it openly and regularly for the last 50 years, and no wonder. It’s less complicated to justify. Brown people are easier to denigrate, dehumanize, and vilify. We can limit their representation, throw ’em in cages, separate their families, and ignore their American and human rights. How many white people do you think rotted or are still rotting in Guantanamo?
Every pack of lies our leaders serve up to bomb countries full of brown people goes down easy, almost as if it were the American way. And, of course, it is. Baseball, hot dogs, and vapid lies.
It’s a byproduct of capitalism, ratified by copious amounts of misinformation, blind patriotism, and proud, willful ignorance.
Taco Trump is a joke, yes. A cruel, bad joke. And he obviously isn’t making America great again. He’s making us a historical joke. Not funny, for sure, but no serious deviation from the script.
As a nation, we haven’t been a force for good (if we ever were) for a long time.
Cue: the rubes who always say, “Well, why are so many people trying to get here?”
That’s simple.
They are the downtrodden. We are the boot.
They’d rather be the boot than the ass. They’d rather be the boot than the bodies under our heel.
We obviously no longer observe or care for the words writ now meaninglessly at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
“Beacon-hand”?
“World-wide welcome”?
“Golden door?”
We’re no longer a beacon of hope or an inspiring refuge. We’re the home of “grope” and a haven for assentient deluge. We don’t offer a worldwide welcome or even observe principles of empathy or human decency — especially where immigrants (who are mostly brown) are concerned. And the only thing “golden” about us these days is the “showers” our feckless leader enjoys from Putin, prostitutes, and the Israelis.
We don’t believe in our “New Colossus,” Lady Liberty, anymore. We manufacture wretched human refuse and sneer at their attempts to escape teeming shores. We sanction and multiply poor, huddled masses around the world. And — wow! — there are plenty of mighty women here, but we almost always settle for cowardly men.
And these cowardly men bomb more and more brown people.
It wasn’t Taco Trump who said, “We stand with Israel” on October 7, 2023, after the convenient “Hamas” attacks. It was Joe Biden. This was never about Republicans or Democrats. It was about brown people. And most of us will buy into every lie our government spouts about Iran because, to us, it’s just more real estate populated by brown people. And if they’re brown and Muslim, even better.
The Statue of Liberty is no longer matronly in regards to “Exiles” — the United States is not even a century into its role as a dominant bull ape, but it creates exiles at will, and will, and, well, just did again.
We just “stood” with Israel and bombed more brown people, mostly innocent bystanders.
And we don’t care.
We are simply standing by. We are the tempest disrupting and destroying brown lives, brown peoples, brown nations. The “ceasefire” is a dumpster fire. We’ll be bombing brown people again soon.
We are no “New Colossus.” We are a dangerous, diminutive cretin with orange makeup
Fort Worth native E.R. Bills is the author of seven nonfiction titles, including Tell-Tale Texas: Investigations in Infamous History.
This column reflects the opinions and fact-gathering of the author(s) and only the author(s) and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.
