The Emperor Has No Clothes
You and I Are So Much More Real Than He Is
Perhaps this doesn’t matter to you. Perhaps you’ve been so super-saturated with this man’s image and presence hovering over your life and nightmares that, to you, this is just one more ridiculous step in the logical progression of his trajectory, as plottable as the course of a comet across the heavens.
But it means a great deal to me.
The emperor has no clothes. For the last eight years, this evil man and his parade of lies and treachery have attempted to dehumanize people like me, and destroy American democracy … and plain human dignity. In this mugshot—I’ll repeat that: MUGSHOT—he attempts to intimidate the witnesses and juror pool that will be summoned against him.
See this little man, his face turning red.
Though his story’s often told, you can tell he’s dead.
He tried to dehumanize me and you until every form of decency was turned upside down and freedom meant slavery, and liberty meant bowing to his petty tyranny.
Now, here he is, using a MUGSHOT to delay the inevitable moment when he, like a host of petty tyrants from ages past—so many that we can’t list them but we can list the few persons who always stay on our heroes and heroines lists—goes down in the ash heap of history as another instance of Nature balancing a silly flaw.
He was never Nature’s. Or yours. Or mine.
Forget about the ragtag mob that still shouts his name in slavish applause. We’ll always have them, the weaker angels of our nature, ready to bow to whatever feeds rage and hatred of the other.
This picture shows I am not other, and that I never have been.
He is other. Totally other to what you and I know to be human. To be real. To love.
He’s emptied himself of any meaning but to threaten … and he does that to no one but himself.
It’s time we appreciate ourselves for who we are and have always been—people doing our best to love, live, and embrace the goodness of this world.
He can’t even stand up to our shadows.
Be free, America.
He’s a very bad—and shucked-away—nightmare.
Long live the you and me who love and live and wake up to another day. We’re not shells of ourselves like he is.
Baby, we’re real.