Somebody once told me olive oil was a good thing to put in your body, so for six months, I got up in the morning, poured myself a shot glass full of olive oil, and banged it back like a shot of whiskey. Then, I made coffee.
I proudly told the woman who gave me the olive oil tip what I was doing.
“My God!” she said. “You’re drinking it?”
“You said it would reduce my cholesterol,” I told her. “I drink a shot of it every morning.”
“You’re supposed to use it in your cooking, you know, in place of butter. And how in heck do you drink a straight shot of olive oil without vomiting?”
I felt pretty stupid, and that night I told the olive oil story to my mother, who was 80 that year.
“Ma,” I told her. “She said she couldn’t believe I could drink a shot of olive oil without vomiting.”
My mother laughed.
“You tell her my son can drink anything that comes in a shot glass,” my mother said.
That’s the great thing about mothers — if you don’t give ‘em much to be proud of, they’ll find something.
About half the country is the same way when it comes to President Donald J. Trump. They want to be proud of him, so they are, and if they have to find a reason, they will.
If he’s crude and insulting, he’s speaking his mind.
If he’s made millions while going bankrupt, he must be smart because he’s rich.
If he doesn’t know how things work, it’s because he’s not a politician.
He’s not like us; he’s better because he’s rich.
He’s just like us because he’s crude and bigoted.
My mother’s been telling people I’m six feet tall for decades, and she says it with pride. Six feet was plenty tall in her youth, when guys who would be considered short today were playing college football.
“My son is sooo tall,” she’s always told her friends.
That’s one of the easiest brags I’ve had to live up to, and I carefully didn’t tell her when advancing age knocked a quarter inch off of my height.
I go to see to mother in the nursing home now, and sometimes she doesn’t know me, but when she does, if there’s a nursing home staff member in the room, my mother will say, “This is my son. Isn’t he nice and tall?”
This is how we the people handle Trump’s undeniable skin color. It is, after all, the very best thing about him. No matter what he does next, he’s white. He’s not Spanish or Italian white, either. He’s American white, piney woods white, Klan white.
He doesn’t have one of those dicey names, either, like Obama or Pope Francis. Donald Trump is a midwestern shop teacher name.
“My name is Mr. Trump,” the guy would say in front of junior shop class. “Today we’re going to build a wall.”
Of course, when I was young, Mr. Trump the shop teacher was usually a World War II veteran, and may well have stormed ashore at Normandy Beach. Sometimes, he’d been in a prisoner of war camp. He owned a small white house, and he never went bankrupt. He’s dead as decency now.
And, in this time of dead decency and broken promises, we look at England and Germany, and every place but Russia and we say, “This is our president. Isn’t he nice and white?”