Not quite gallows humor. Yet!

It was a few months ago, well before the elections when the current POTUS was only a candidate.  The rhetoric was already heating up.  The candidate was on quite a roll with hits after hits.  During dinner with the friend and two friends/neighbors, I said, "I think only now I kind of understand what you women have been subject to for ever."

I am not a white male, of course.  But, given the historical baggage of this country, my Indian background made me different from the black male, the Chinese male, the Japanese male, the Native American male.  All these other males have suffered under the white men.  And back in the old country, I had no previous personal experience of having been oppressed; my people were the oppressors!

Which is why I told the three women around me that only now I am beginning to truly understand their struggles.  "It's ok; we welcome you as an honorary woman," chimed in the oldest at the table.  Oppressed or not, we laughed.

Today is the beginning of the shortest month of the year, which is also Black History Month.  In a post last May, when thinking about the man who eventually stole the election, I wrote. "I shudder thinking that it could be President Donald Trump addressing the nation in 2019, marking the tragic anniversary!"  The tragic anniversary that I referred to is this: Four hundred years since the first Africans were sold as slaves in Virginia.

My nightmare came true; he is now the president.  And, consistent with his personality, he did not focus on Black History, but on himself:

President Trump used the occasion of a meeting with African-American supporters to launch into another attack on the news media Wednesday.

And then he went on to do the pretending:

“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Rev. King, so many other things,” Trump said. “Frederick Doug — Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

What's the fakery there. you ask?

This is the sort of thing you say about someone when you know you’re supposed to say something positive about them but you don’t know what it is.

 You know, you bullshit your way through!

That’s all Trump knows. That’s all he cares to know. Ask him about Martin Luther King Jr., and he’ll default to a familiar reference point: the dumb statue controversy. Ask him about Frederick Douglass and he’ll say “amazing job” — the same praise he’s bestowed on beauty queens and Sean Hannity. Ask him about John Lewis and he’ll call the civil rights hero an “all talk, no action” failure because the only thing Trump cares about is the fact that Lewis criticized him. And he does this because he has no curiosity, and no ability to break free from his relentless self-focus, and no inclination to crack the spine of a book.

If I try to find humor in the craziness that is all around me--and I am not even funny--well, Twitter went berserk, with a hashtag that says it all: #TrumpOnBlackHistory.  Like this one:

"Harriet Tubman. With that underground railroad. I would have run it ABOVE-ground. It would've been amazing." #TrumpOnBlackHistory

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) February 1, 2017

Sometimes laugh is all we can do.  That too is a part of our history!