If there’s one thing this country leads the world at it is creating villains.  Why we have so many villains we could lend a few hundred to countries in need and never miss them.

Maybe we should make this part of our foreign aid packages. Okay, we will give you a hundred million in food to feed your people. And we’ll toss in fifty villains for you to feed your media.

There would be no worry that we would run short back home. We have a reserve army of villains. And because we can create hundreds more most any time. Its our GDP. Gross and Disgusting Product.

New Guinean natives make lamp shades out of palm leaves. (Among other things. Don’t turn your back on ‘em if you’ve got a lush tush.) New Zealanders make salad dishes from sea shells. The Irish make booze out of anything. Here we make villains out of simple comments.

You whisper the magic word on immigration. Why overnight you are a racist. You yearn to bring back the Holocaust. You suggest that IDs for voters might make sense. Wham!! You are a racist s.o.b. who wants to “slap y’all in chains again”. So sayeth our ex-Vice President.

You say she is pretty and you are branded a sexist. You think it’s a good idea to check that guy for bombs and you are an Islamophobe. You figure vetting of refugees from Yemen might make sense. You hit the jackpot. Before your morning omelette arrives you get called racist, sexist, Islamophobe, Hitler-like and the sort of guy who would warm up to Mussolini.

Do you suppose this maybe comes from our Hollywood history?

Watch old British movies. “Tut, tut.  I say, old chap. These are rather nasty brutes we are dealing with, eh wot?  What they are up to is just not cricket, is it now?”

Then watch an old American western. “Why you yellow-bellied, mongrel-mouth, varmint of a skunk of a bad-breath weasel sniffin’ low-life dirty rassafrass! And besides that, I don’t like ya.”

Now it used to be we had people who disagreed with us. They had different points of view. They had different degrees of concern. And different ways of attacking a problem. Those people are extinct.

Nowadays if you disagree you are branded a deplorable racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobe, Hitler-loving, Holocaust-denying, Super Bowl-hating, global warming denier nitwit. For starters. Your motives are despicable. You want to destroy ________. Fill in the blank.

Maybe we ought to invent one word that groups together all those insults.

Hey, whatever the word, it sort of makes reasonable discussion an endangered species around here.  These days US stands for U Scumbag. My local paper ran a cartoon depicting four horrific-looking monsters. Bleeding from their eyes, snorting flames. These were supposed to depict Trump’s first four cabinet picks. As the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse. War, Famine, Conquest and Death. Nice. I complained to the editor. “It’s just a cartoon,” he said.

I remember a Doonesbury cartoon. Two guys speak to each other at a college reunion. One admits that as students people had a lot of disagreements. But isn’t it wonderful that after all these years everyone can get together and share the memories in harmony. The other guy says “May you burn in hell for all eternity.”

It is attitudes like this that make us want to transform innocents into villains. On Inauguration Day we see the Obamas and Trumps being gracious to each other. What the hell is this? How can he be nice to that s.o.b.?

The new president suggests we may have some common interests with the Russians. What? With that beady-eyed, hairless, mongrel-mouth varmint of a skunk Putin?

Used to be we had ladders of engagement. They had rungs. Labelled disagreement, attempts to compromise, understanding of opposing views, disappointment, dismay, concern, etc.  Now we have ladders with two rungs. “Our way.” And “May you burn in hell for all eternity.”

Used to be we had “We think the same on some points. On others, we agree to disagree.” Today we’ve got “She wants to lob grenades into our public school system.” “He wants to bring back segregation.”

And, never forget this: A lot of this villainization comes from groups funded by George Soros. That America-hating, seditious, yellow-bellied insurrectionist. For starters.

The master community organizer Saul Alinsky urged followers to deal with opponents by shaming them, shunning them and ridiculing them. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Don’t get me started on him, that no good, yellow-bellied…..

       From Tom…as in Morgan.           

       Find Tom on Facebook. You can write to Tom at tomasinmorgan@yahoo.com.