No one in the US House of Representatives will confuse Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) as the gentlelady from Michigan. How is that possible after her first day on the job in which she called the nation’s chief executive a Mother, you know what?
Perhaps I should not be so mild mannered that I cannot say the word in public. Let’s have a go at it.
She called Trump a “Motherfucker.” I see no need to put an asterisk in between the f and the r. We are in an era when the terms of communication have changed. In the age of Trump, political discourse is no longer the niceties of the King’s English. Its blunt, in your face raw political jargon in the vernacular of confrontation.
It’s a word the President had no problem with several months ago when he hosted Kanye West in the oval office. West dropped an avalanche of “Motherfucker” bombs in a half-hour rant on how the “Motherfucker-in-Chief makes him feel like a Motherfucking superhero each time he dons his Motherfucking MAGA ball cap.
Tlaib brings a breath of fresh air to the swamp. As a member of the House of Representative, she was elected by a community of folks, Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, who knew exactly who they were sending to Washington.
It was only a matter of time before someone would throw the vile language of Trump back into his face. After all, over a year ago Trump averred that Black professional football players had been birth by a female dog in heat. Now Rep. Tlaib posits that the President has an Oedipus Rex Complex. When the gutter language smacked him square in the face, Trump opined that “it was very disgraceful.”
The real disgrace is the travesty that Trump has made of the US Presidency. By separating babies from their parents, creating a refugee crisis at the border,leaving Puerto Rico to pull themselves up out of the muck and miry clay by their own bootstraps, which were washed away in the hurricane, puts a blighted stain on American exceptionalism and in graphic terms reveals the lie told by the founders that America is a government for and by the people.
Yea, it is a government for and by the rich elite, who don’t mind shutting down the government when 800,000 families depend on their federal job to provide for their families.
When I was a student at Tuskegee Institute in the early 1970s, history professor W. J. Fluker after overhearing the repeated use of the word “motherfucker” by Institute students decided to explore a topic introduced by Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, a Washington psychiatrist. She had a theory about the word “Motherfucker.” For two weeks Professor Fluker posited the dichotomy: “The motherfucker and the real motherfucker?”
Fluker investigated why young, gifted and Black students used the term “motherfucker” so freely. We concluded those two weeks with a better understanding about who historically and from a mental health perspective was the real “motherfucker.” Thus having demystified the word motherfucker, I pushed it out of my vocabulary.
This is not to say in my youth, I did not hurl an anonymous “motherfucker” in reference to Richard Nixon, I probably did. But this pales in significances to what happened January 3 in the year 2018, because this is the first time in history that a congressperson has publicly called the President of the United States a “motherfucker.” Let this historical note sink into the history books.
Getting down in the gutter language of Trump, now “that’s a real mother for ya.”
Harold Michael Harvey is an American novelist and essayist. He is a Contributor at The Hill, SCLC National Magazine, Southern Changes Magazine, Medium, and Black College Nines. He can be contacted at hmharvey@haroldmichaelharvey.com
The gutter is too good a place for his behind!