First Debate: Draining the Swamp to Waterboard America with the Firehose of Falsehood

The anti-George Washington seeks another term. The incumbent in the White House is ‘draining the Swamp,’ with his “Firehose of Falsehood” plumbed in reverse and directed out his mouth at our eyes, ears, noses, and throats, waterboarding us with the bacterial corruption of the Swamp. ‘Toxic waste dump’ is a more apt term, yet we are all-in with the Allegory of the Swamp by now.

This incumbent demagogue occupying the Presidency is the anti-George Washington because with each false choice he assumes, he divides his audiences, provoking strife inside them. This, so the demagogue may rise over the fallen.

The Swamp does not break the laws, crass, lawless people do that, lie about it, and then turn their surroundings into a stagnant wasteland unfit for human habitation. It is where the oxbows of craven, stupid plans drain. Once done, they move on to bring ruination elsewhere. It is how some do real estate. It is how womanizers do women and abandon or abort children. It is how frauds run schemes, leaving investors broke. It is how dictators do satellites.  It is how genocidal rulers do humanity.

To believe that Donald Trump is a genius playing 3-dimensional chess instead of a faux-king with a radioactive, inner-tomb for a mind, leaking like Chernobyl, emitting Moscow’s lethal narratives and suggesting moves for his acting-pawns; once evangelical bishops; misguided knights; and rooked-rooks; is to devolve oneself into a Q-follower. To believe that the Firehose of Falsehood implantee is a genius requires a belief that Vladimir Putin would make a criminal genius his mark in controlling the United States Executive branch.

Putin, possessor of secrets from a criminally-informed KGB, would not cultivate a savvy competitor to subvert and sabotage the United States, but a controllable mark with the right combination of compromises to make him an obeisant, willing weapon.

Putin would sooner compromise a delusional shapeshifter with international branding synonymous with what is ugly about America to Europeans (new money, no class, exploitative), and, a man whose mouth and soul are cavernous enough to fit commands to incarcerate migrant men, women, and children in detention camps. Whose actions put a clanky Berlin Wall on the U.S. border with defense dollars; whose inactions leave the Arctic ice in the hands of a KGB regime and totalitarian partner with icebreakers and nuclear submarines gunning for first strike advantage.

Putin would want a mark with a history of vindictiveness toward those who he perceived had wronged him, whether ex-wives, ex-friends, ex-business partners, ex-paramours, ex-employees, ex-appointees, ex-lawyers, ex-presidents, or ex-party buddies. And don’t wait for it, American citizens of all backgrounds who disagree with his master.

All that toxic water comes from a symbolic, analogical Swamp, sure, but which would be the best symbol today? Not the Everglades, which is really a great, slow moving river wilderness, according to scientists. There is a more aptly named swamp for this symbolism crossing from North Carolina to Virginia called “The Great Dismal Swamp.” It has a history that better describes the symbolic strain of ideology added to the ‘swamp water’ as it passes through the abomination of Donald Trump’s mouth and into the fire-blackened skies, the “abomination of desolation,” if you will.

The Great Dismal Swamp was once the refuge for fugitive slaves during America’s white supremacy era, according to Smithsonian Magazine, and it seems a time-warped symbol by which, if Trump could, like his KKK-rally attending father, he would go back in time to seize that last refuge of black American slaves and return them to their masters.

In the Smithsonian, British journalist Richard Grant wrote beautifully of his journey through the Great Dismal Swamp with Archaeologist Dan Sayers of American University in Washington DC, “Each ripping thorn and sucking mudhole makes it clearer. It was the dense, tangled hostility of the swamp and its enormous size that enabled hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of escaped slaves to live here in freedom.” Just like the colonies, once.

Interestingly, Grant’s piece was published in September 2016, in symbolic timing with Donald Trump’s promises to drain the sedimentary, manmade conflicts of interest of the smaller DC swamp that by comparison of corruption makes the Great Dismal Swamp more like a basecamp in the foothills of the heavens where increasingly powerful people live hard-knock freedom from the hell of slavery.

And it seems Purgatory is not an inapt symbol for what the nation now goes through, in which we can hear the chaotic din of hell behind and before us as the election approaches. Yes, today the 50 states and the stalwart Americans manning the election processes stand against that chaotic pursuit of dictatorship over the U.S.A. from the past, roaming the earth for the United States it would possess.

Channeling hell’s chaos and speaking it as law and order, one presidential power the incumbent exercises with seeming executive dispatch are appointments. As did King George III, whose early reign was “turbulent, with frequent changes of ministers.” Incumbent Trump, appoints sacrificial lambs to save his Oval Office occupancy frequently, as in the chaos of one-thousand revolving doors opening under Washington DC at any given time, like a scene from Disney-Marvel’s Dr. Strange; with prematurely elevated political acolytes popping-up to exercise unseasoned, unwise power in service to an alien villain that (surprise) seeks to dominate. There it is again: dominance, autocracy, mastery, then slavery.

You can’t make this up because you don’t have to – it is right in front of us slithering, smiling, biting, and poisoning in the darkness. Grant continues, “In the awful heat and humidity of summer, Sayers assures me, the swamp teems with water moccasins and rattlesnakes. The mosquitoes get so thick that they can blur the outlines of a person standing 12 feet away.”

Yes: but for the smoke and mirrors, the people could perceive that the blood suckers in power are blurring their reality that they may forget who they are and enslave themselves willingly. In the newer American words of Lin-Manuel Miranda who wrote “Hamilton”:

Foes oppose us, we take an honest stand

We roll like Moses, claimin’ our promised land

And? If we win our independence?

Is that a guarantee of freedom for our descendants?

Yes it is. It is if we rise up and vote, refusing to throw away our vote. Just for a day, with your ballot, be young scrappy and hungry just like your country, and don’t throw away your vote. If you’re in the electoral college, that goes for you too.