The Circus Leaves Town - The Left's Diverse Menagerie Heads For The Hills

The diverse cabal of the Left was one and done as a new white, straight Administration came to town - not just in a quiet transition, but in a bandwagon with floats and sequined dancing girls.  It seemed like Trump had emptied Las Vegas and brought the whole lot of them with him.  It was his show now, an extravaganza of lowbrow, showy, glitzy America.  

Gone would be the moroseness of progressive worry - worry about this, worry about that until a grey, threatening penumbra had settled over the entire city.  The sky was falling, the climate was warming, Jim Crow was at the gates, oppression and greed were daily assaults on good black people, cripples were wheeling themselves to higher ground, asylum-seekers were in the crosshairs of ICE sharpshooters, yada yada, on an on ad infinitum ad nauseam. 

'A new broom sweeps clean', was your grandfather's way of describing a turnover in government; but the Trumpists were coming with sparklers, rockets, and Roman candles in an avant garde ahead of the bulldozers and backhoes.  No sweeping here, more than a broom was needed to get rid of the dirt and trash that had piled up for four years, scoop it up and away and while you're at it, tear up the cracked and crumbling foundations that propped up the whole dismal lot. 

There was more than just show in this straight, white, able-bodied, no-nonsense crowd come to run the government.  Collectively they made a statement of solidarity - gone would be diversity and in its place rock-solid, unshakeable intelligence, talent, and creativity.  The Cabinet was to look like nothing except be the locus of ability, drive, and commitment. Gone would be affirmative action, identity box-checking (black, gay, transgender, disabled, and any and all combinations and permutations thereof), and the dull, slavish, prescriptive hires of the past. 

'What will become of us?', wailed Roberta Perkins, nee Robert Perkins flouncing up and down in her Capitol Hill office as the movers took stock.  'Ya gotta go, Bobby, time's up', a hairy brute of a man grunted as he lifted Roberta's cute little settee on his dolly and wheeled it into the corridor in a migrant stream of desks, swivel chairs, and lamps. 

'Where will I go?', she screamed to no one in particular, but her howls of grief could be heard up and down Pennsylvania Avenue as offices were emptied of progressive faithful, pushed aside by the juggernaut of that man whose name would not be spoken.  She hugged and kissed her way to the street and stood there disconsolate but surrounded by the very menagerie put in place by her patrons.  

It was a well-dressed group - the new Left had left the Upper West Side Jewish shabby, concerned look long ago, and had bella figura, expropriated from Italian dons and Venetian women, lookin' good, attractive but beneath the veneer beat the same progressive heart of Eugene Victor Debs and Samuel Gompers. 

Yet this well-dressed coterie was standing around looking like they were waiting for an Uber, talking and gabbling among themselves, snatches of 'Boise....New Orleans...Europe' heard among them.  They and the whole Democratic progressive Left had been caught with their pants down.  They had never in a million years ever considered electoral defeat.  Their candidate, a proud black woman of intelligence, experience, and commitment would ipso facto take her rightful place in the Oval Office.  This now supernumerary, shell-shocked cabal, standing disconsolate, grieving, and wounded on the corner of 18th and Constitution never believed it could happen, and made no plans for if it didn't. 

With DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) over and done with, their chances of employment were slim.  They had been propelled upward by their gender, race, and ethnicity alone, and now faced the no-nonsense competition of the private market.

Horror of horrors, Roberta even considered changing back - yes, God forbid and forgive such apostasy, go back to being a man, sexually wobbly at first but recognizable and flying no red flags during interviews.  He once followed the Bears and the Cubs and could do so again.  Anything to avoid this awful drifting feeling. 

 

Of course poor Jackie Phelps, ghetto recruit, wheelchair bound, and dyslexic would have a harder time changing his spots.  He had a remunerative sinecure in the White House, a kind of sentinel or banner-bearer of multi-minority stature who had to do nothing but show up for work; and now what would he do?  It was one thing to stop sashaying and walk like a Marine another thing altogether to alter an identity which was already too deformed for a fix-up. 

The only recourse of the gold-toothed, steel-grilled former Anacostia pimp, Pharoah Jones who represented 'authentic blackness', as the Vice President had mentioned when she introduced him to the press, would be to return to the 'hood, pick up where he left off, the 'Monsieur of Anacostia', whose stable of women beggared the imagination of even street-savvy black men. 

It was one thing to change Administrations, but this Trump thing was simply intolerable - all these square-jawed goons with their blonde wives acting all business and authority, muscling aside their betters as they rushed in, ripping down rainbow flags, Hate Has No Place Here signs, Black Lives Matter festoons, and pink and roseate throw rugs.  This was not a transition, it was a Genghis Khan marauding invasion and their heads were to be chopped off and impaled on spikes up and down Independence Avenue. 

 

'Folded back into the body politic', snipped one streetcorner exile, but since that body was now bloated and proud of its misogynist, homophobic, racist ways, there would be no room for them, not even in the creases. Devotedly secular, they didn't even have the church to turn to.  In more religious times, there would always be a home for them in God's house, but their persistent banging and hammering at the falsity and pretention of religion closed those doors forever. 

So, the circus tent was taken down and the ringleaders, acrobats, clowns, lion-tamers, and freaks all headed for the hills, weird-looking asylum seekers in inhospitable parts unknown.  They had no patriotism to speak of, nothing consummate about American goodness to fall back upon, no ties to the heartland, no nothing, identity flotsam and jetsam floating about, drifting in and out on the tide. 

Or so it seemed to Roberta, always of a poetic bent. Didn't do her a bit of good, however, for no matter how you cut it, her kind was in one sweep of the broom unnecessary, supernumerary, dismissed, and forgotten.  

'We'll be back!', she shouted to no one in particular, but one of those square-jawed straight white Trumpers in a BMW with the top down, shouted back, 'Not for a long, long time, sweetheart'.