Republicans anoint anti-Christ for a third try...

My left coast education included high school Spanish where we read Bernal Diaz "Discovery and Conquest of Mexico," and English lit class where we read Malcolm X and MLK. At Foothill JC I learned about Semantics - and flunked Black Political Science when the instructor, a conservative black preacher didn't appreciate my "Last Poets" inspired term project.

Both sides of my family came from immigrants who left Europe to avoid World War I - Danish/Icelandic and German. Grandmother Anna Fredericksen was a founding member of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

I joined the USAF in 1962 and quickly discovered that my American experience differed from other geographies! The weight of generational tradition creates resistance to change, and a snarky dismissal of "California queers" and a reverence for "the South will rise again" sentimentality was (and probably still is) widespread and intransigent.

Respect and value for unbiased education seems antithetical to various manners of traditionalists who seek to promote narrow agendas cloaked as "faith based," "family values," "law and order" when in reality they are misogynistic, racially biased, historically entrenched, destructive and divisive. Those who relish their alignment with other blindered lemmings participate in a self-perpetuating alliance that is more a dance with the devil than a coherent and positive agenda for prosperity and necessary growth and change.

If one had the stomach to witness the RNC and suffer through the anointing of the son of a KKK sympathizer and insurrection promoter, as if the incongruity of a philandering deadbeat as a presidential candidate was no problem, then the vacuous applause and approbation accorded this thinly veiled anti-Christ should provide a clue to the intransigence and danger of a major political party bent on dismantling aspects of a democracy they don't understand and secretly deny and decry.

I'd like to think that media manipulation (broadcast that which helps sell products) and the focus on isolated sensational events is a distraction not shared by great numbers of hard working, essentially good-hearted fellow citizens. I hope the Democratic Party gets their act together and provides an alternative to the backsliding and decay of the "red hats." The first trick of the demagogue, the hawker of snake oil solutions, is to convince an audience that they have lost something that their "remedy" will revive. "Make America Great Again," my ass. Previously termed "the silent majority" in previous election cycles, I hope our true American patriots will quietly go to the polls and provide a resounding defeat for the nihilism we just witnessed in the Republican attempt to create a King Donald.