Standing in line at a store the other day, I was nearly overcome by a malingering stench. I glanced around, sniffing.
I couldn’t tell where the smell was coming from.
A woman in front of me, sixtysomething, hair bleached blonde and lips botoxed to the max, was waiting with aspirin. A beefy white dullard in front of her was sorting through coupons for a purchase of Dude Wipes in front of a Black female cashier, his MAGA hat gleaming crisply over his narrow, beady eyes.
I sighed, impatiently.
Trump made America grate, that was for sure.
Maybe Americans — their gullibility and childish naivete — had long been grating, but now the predicament was Orwellian. Except Big Brother couldn’t just surveil you. He could rape your sister (or daughter), mow down protesters with his King Ranch pickup, and execute Black and Brown people on sight. All this while tainting public lands, tapping civic coffers (for testosteronal spandex spectacles on the White House lawn), poisoning and decimating public water supplies, defunding public health institutions (like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), appointing obsequious fops to serious policy departments, and staging military flops that endanger (or clearly demonstrate — ouch) our current standing in the world.
These United States are a regressive shitshow. Donald Trump has reduced this country to a Turd Reich.
And that smell?
That’s Uncle Sam.
That olfactory affront?
That’s us.
The recent explosive-diarrhea outbreak is the perfect metaphor for what America has become, and here in Texas, it’s much worse. Gov. Greg Abbott, AG Ken Paxton, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are human strains of projectile diarrhea, which Lone Star conservatives fecklessly extrude on everything meaningful and worthwhile. Abbott and the raw orifice that is the current Texas Legislature have shat on women, education, environmentalism, immigrants, free speech, due process, equal representation, voting rights, the middle class, affordable healthcare — you name it, they deface it.
If it’s good and/or reasonable for Texans — and, by that, I mean all Texans, not just white chauvinists, the dollar aristocracy, robber barons, rabid ranchers, oil and gas fascists, or apartheid billionaires — Abbott, Paxton, Patrick, et al. — ceremoniously drop trou and “damn the torpedoes!”
(Pardon the previous pun, but their political alliances and asinine policy have relegated us to a malingering torpor and their party is beholden to pedos.)
The Turd Reich is upon us. The Turd Reich is far from throwing in the towel. The Turd Reich’s platform is a nod to latent coprophilia, and it’s jammed up the bowels of the republic.
There’s no easy fix.
We need real political change.
We need a more informed — not misinformed — electorate.
We need serious public education, not spurious private miseducation.
This is obviously still America, so folks are still permitted to behave and vote as stupidly and selfishly as they like. But none of us should delude ourselves.
If you have no problem with piggish politics, priggish, phony self-righteousness, and the increasingly pervasive, unprecedented stink, keep dousing yourself in eau de idiot. There will never be enough to disguise your idiocy.
The reek comes from within.
We stink because we don’t think. Especially for ourselves.
Especially of others.
Our rank and file is rank and foul.
The majority of our elected officials are only effective in urinals.
Texas reeks of Red State mistakes, and we may already have let them seal our fate.
They’re making this country indefensible and this planet unlivable.
Wrinkling our nose isn’t enough.
South Park infamously iterated and reiterated that Trump’s former attorney general, Pam Bondi, had excrement on her nose. Funny, accurate stuff, sure — but we all do.
Every minute of every day.
The Turd Reich isn’t just a bad vote, a crude cult, or a deplorable majority’s only-choice lesser evilism. It is willful degradation. It is political, psychological defecation on a national and international stage.
And the Lone Star didn’t even bother to wipe. — E.R. Bills
Fort Worth native E.R. Bills’ eighth nonfiction title, Devil of Devils: Unspeakable Crimes in Southwest Texas, will be released in September by The History Press.
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.
