Editorial: A time for protest – and here is mine

The swamp has returned to the White House.

Column By John Young

The reprise of all things Dylan (great movie; see it) raises the question: What happened to protest singing?

Listen around. T’ain’t been heard for years, and we need it more than ever.

Taylor Swift has the chops, but her tunes are tightly engineered around Taylor Swift.

Chappell Roan has the guts, but “Pink Pony Club” is not the stuff to levitate the Pentagon.

Listen around. Listen to the apathy and the ignorance by which fascist theatrics took center stage in Washington on a recent stay-inside January day.

Blowin’ in the wind. Avengement paraded as policy. Hatred saluted as patriotism. A rube with a king complex and all the tools of king-ery.

Singers, alert. Look at the people we awarded power:

Herr gazillionerr Heil-on Musk, shadow president.

A.I. Vance, vice president. (No typo there – no human, either. From the Silicon Valley Workshop, a lifelike, boy-like means by which tech bros can run a nation remotely.)

Mike “Mr. Roboto” Johnson, House speaker: a Roomba in good shoes.

Too much to take in assessing the goon squad nominated for Cabinet posts:

The new secretary of defense is a white supremacist. Just read his tats.

The national intelligence director-designate couldn’t say enough good things about the self-exiled Butcher of Syria, and she thinks the rapist of Ukraine is a suitable date.

The person tabbed as education secretary owes her fortune – and thereby her influence — to men in tights.

The new head of Homeland Security killed her little dog and thought it worthy of her memoir.

This leads us to the person who thinks all of these people are the best and brightest and that just about anyone on a public payroll not of his (natural) skin color is a DEI hire.

“DEI hire” reframed: donors, enablers, incompetents.

Protest singers: Don’t leave all the heavy lifting to “Saturday Night Live.”

Me – I can’t sing. That doesn’t mean I can’t protest.

So here goes: I will challenge vigorously, as a citizen and commenter, what this power-addled man does as president. I will write about him more often than many readers may wish to read.

But as often as I mention him, I will not write his name. Repeat: not write his name.

For now, I’ve settled on President Blob.

Blob. Empty of form. Empty of virtue. Empty of human decency.

It’s my statement of calculated disrespect – toward a person who showed no respect for me and all who voted him out in 2020. He tried to lie away his defeat. He used coercion and a host of underhanded means to subvert the results.

He is owed no respect from me, for he is a study in disrespect.

With the policies he now unveils, he shows no respect for the disenfranchised and marginalized.

He treats public employees like dirt — torrents of abhorrent generalizations.

Don’t forget officers of the law. His supporters spit fire over Black Lives Matter protests. They spoke of “backing the blue.” Then, when President Blob pardoned assailants who battered and trampled Capitol police, they stabbed the blue in the back with their assent. They also played along with Blob’s transparently self-serving assault on agents of the FBI for following his tracks as he broke the law.

Face it. He shows respect to no one, not even the obeisant partisans whose faces reflect from his shoe tops.

This is a man who told the Republican Georgia secretary of state he was breaking the law by following it, who likely would be facing jail if he hadn’t cast his spell over the hinterlands and just enough over the rest of the land on Election Day.

“Working-class” voters who delivered to him an “X” on Election Day will soon see jobs X-ed out because snuffing what remains of the stunning job-creating works of Joe Biden’s infrastructure and clean-energy legislation is the order of the day.

Watch, also, the job-killing nature of a full-on trade war.

President Blob will not lower unemployment. He sure as heck won’t lower the price of eggs. After all, he doesn’t control them. And why should it matter to him now? The Egg McMuffin is ever a bargain.

He will not make the world or the nation safer. He will not make the government work better. What he’ll do is watch television like a blob and be informed by his favorite cable channel that whatever he does — or doesn’t do in, say, a pandemic or a riot he incites — is right for the country.

Where are the protest singers?

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.