Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is welcomed as a breath of fresh air by some. To others, he is more like a gust of the wind blowing across the city back in the 1950s when I was growing up, with its acrid smell of exhaust fumes from V8 engines that had yet to be filtered by politically correct catalytic converters.
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It was the same decade when my classmates would call each other the N-word while roughhousing in the playground during recess, with even the girls chanting the familiar rhyme: “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a N-word by the toe,” while jumping rope.
As per his campaign slogan, Trump wants to “Make America Great Again,” presumably like the America back in ’50s, before the demise of Joe McCarthy or the Ku Klux Klan, and before the popularization of political correctness, which Trump says he abhors, and which 77 percent of his supporters say they like most about him, according to a Reuters poll.
How else to explain 78-year-old John McGraw sucker-punching African-American Rakeem Jones, who was protesting at a Trump rally. Encouraged by Trump’s coded language to white supporters to “knock the crap” out of protesters who are “bad, bad people,” McGraw felt emboldened by the mob and at one with the Trump movement: “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him,” McGraw said.
It may be a movement, but it’s far from new. A significant number of Trump’s disciples are like the elder McGraw, raised on those same pre-politically correct playgrounds. McGraw and his contemporaries did not change in those intervening years, but simply put their viperous urges on extended stand-by, waiting for liberation.
George Wallace, David Duke, Frank Colin — all pretenders to the throne, without sufficient charisma or ground game to unify a large enough number of people.
Finally, thankfully, along comes The Donald with the money, the celebrity, the timing and his tell-it-like-it-is, white-identity message.
Which is that under Trump, political correctness will be dispensed with, and that it’s even OK to sucker punch an opponent, if you love this country, which was Trump’s rationale for promising to pay McGraw’s legal expenses.
Voters won’t soon forget Trump showing that a “spastic,” the term formerly used for the “handicapped” on that same 1958 playground, is again fair game for humor, after he performed his infamous impression, mocking disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski. Just some to harmless, honest fun from when America used to be great!
And though we only had one Mexican family at my elementary school, we learned from our uncles that they were called “spics,” another term gone dormant because of annoying political correctness, and which in Trump’s world is barely even an insult, after he went much further by calling illegal Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers.”
Only Trump had the chutzpah to poke fun at Jewish stereotypes linked to money and greed and negotiation, in an address to the Republican Jewish Coalition, paving the way for Americans to feel no longer shackled from making 1950s-era jokes about “Hebes” and sheckels.
And whether the target was Megyn Kelly or Rosie O’Donnel or Carly Fiorina, Trump loyalists can feel empowered by their leader’s well-documented misogynist wisecracks, to disregard all the damned niceties and judge a woman, not by journalistic standards or presidential potential, but by the precise measurements of their chest, waist and hips, in the way it used to be with Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe (35, 22, 35) when men were men and women were still “broads.”
That seems to be the America Donald promises to bring back. And to think, some believed the world would get better when those representing the old order and the bigoted notions would disappear through death and irrelevance. But Donald Trump has unified the older and white silent majority by resurrecting an era thought to be dead and gone.
Donald, save us.
Lord, help us.
David McGrath, a former resident of Evergreen Park and Oak Forest, is an emeritus English professor at the College of DuPage and author of “The Territory.”