Coltrane style
Free association is a process utilized by psychoanalysts that involves stimulating the free flow of a patient’s thoughts. The patient is asked to say the first thing that comes to mind after hearing “trigger words.” It is also a wonderful exercise to engage in for any creative person. The very best poets, such as George Edward Tait, do it all the time. The best “battle rapper” poets, such as B Dot and Loaded Lux, will sometimes, right off the top, string together single words like “the staccato of machine gun fire” during a battle—trigger words—free associated metaphors or, as Tehut 9 says, “meta-fives,” in “sheets of sound,” Coltrane style. Just thinking of the first word or thought that comes to mind after other words and thoughts allows the artist and the analyst to go deep, most say, into the unconscious mind. I engage in it frequently all by myself. When I heard the name of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, I thought of Trumps first wife Ivana. The next thought I had was “extra K.” Someone inserted a K into the name of Donald’s first wife’s name Ivana and came up with the name Ivanka. I then thought, Ku Klux Klan. Klan members have a thing for the letter K. They call their chapter a Klavern, they call their recruiter a Kleagle and they call a convention a Klonvokation. According to the book “The Invisible Empire” by William Loren Katz, they even weave Ks into their greetings. One person says, “A.Y.A.K.,” which stands for “Are you a Klansman? “and the other responds, “A.K.I.A.,” meaning “A Klansman I am.” Klan made me think of David Duke.
Too many klues in this White House
See, apparently the three Ks in Ku Klux Klan weren’t enough for David Duke. In 1974, he founded an organization called The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan or the KKKK. Even that extra K had not made a sufficient impression on Donald Trump to recognize who Duke was. So, when asked to denounce Duke’s pre-election support, Trump said he didn’t know anything about Duke. Strange—strange fruit. Strange fruit is a term coined by Abel Meeropol and popularized by the singer Billie Holiday, referring to the bodies of the victims of lynchings by groups such as the Klan—bodies hanging from trees. It is strange indeed that the Republican candidate for president wouldn’t know anything about Duke, the infamous former Republican Louisiana State Representative and U.S. presidential candidate, who has, among other things, dressed in a Nazi uniform and been convicted of fraud. Trump never heard of him. Trump carried on this charade, perhaps pronounced karade, to the extent that he still would not publicly condemn Duke after the Charlottesville, Va., incident, in which 19 people were injured and one person was killed when a terrorist supporting an alt-right neo-Nazi Klan rally drove a Dodge Charger into a crowd of people opposed to that rally. Was this violence what Trump had signaled when he had earlier encouraged law officers to let suspects bump their heads on cars?
It’s not slavery its treason, stupid
The Klan was rallying against the removal of Confederate statues. Amazingly, Trump missed the whole point of what the removal of Confederate statues should mean to the president of the United States. The point is not that the Confederacy favored slavery, as he inferred by asking whose statue would be next, “George Washington?” Trump was half right. George was a slave owner, and in fact the entire United States of America at some point supported slavery. Slavery is why I oppose those statues, but the POTUS is supposed to oppose them because Confederates committed treason against the United States of America. Charade and treason made me think of another charade in which Trump and his father Fred, son of Friedrich, had engaged. They used to deny their German ancestry and say they were Swedish. For decades, they carried on this charade.
From Trump Castle to Frankenstein Castle
They didn’t want to be publicly associated with Nazis or Germany, so they just pretended they were from Sweden, somewhere else. Pretending—Trump pretends his father was not a Klansman and that they did not bar Blacks from their housing. He knew enough about Nazis to deny his German ancestry. He knew enough about the Klan to deny his father was ever a member of it. But he didn’t know enough to denounce David Duke, who was both a Klansman and a uniformed Nazi. By the way, Duke lived in Russia for five years. While there, Duke says, his book “Jewish Supremacism” was a best seller. Hey, look at that: Duke, Klan, Russia, Stalin, Non-Aggression Pact, Putin, Germany, Nazi, Hitler, Trump—wow! Free association exposes Trump’s brain like a scalpel. According to Freud, humor has that same capacity.
Comedian/psychoanalyst Dr. Dick Gregory exposed Trump’s lack of a soul. He likened Trump to two monsters, a werewolf and a corpse with a brain stimulated to life by Dr. Frankenstein, a mad scientist who created his monster in Germany. In my earlier book, “The Unauthorized Psychoanalysis of Rudolph Giuliani,” I explained that Adolph and Rudolph are the Germanic words that mean Noble Wolf and Famous Wolf, respectively. According to Gregory, Donald Trump “is dumber than Frankenstein and Wolf Man.” But if Gregory’s remark is a vivisection of Trump, it is a biopsy for America. He follows up by saying that Trump’s election “doesn’t say anything about [Trump]; it says something about [America].” Gregory also takes his scalpel to America for not yet getting rid of Trump, saying, “If I went to apply for a job collecting garbage, they would ask me to bring in my last year’s tax return. You have a president—he don’t have to bring his in and y’all tolerate it.”
Dr. Snoop Dogg, the First and Second Amendments
Preferring a gun to Gregory’s scalpel for his brain operations, Dr. Snoop Dogg, in his music video “BadBadNotGood,” shoots a clown resembling Trump. Snoop gives the clown the name “Ronald Klump,” which is quite Klan kongruent. But before you chalk that K off as an accident, examine Snoop’s remarks before the election, when he said of Trump’s intended run for the White House, “It wouldn’t be the first time [Trump] pushed a Black family out of their home.” (Why will we criticize the young man when he walks women on a leash, and then stay silent when he begins to direct his rage in a healthier direction.) Jimmy Kimmel noted after Charlottesville, “We went into the weekend worrying about Kim Jong-un starting a war; we came out of it wondering if our president is cutting eye holes out of his bed sheets.” A lot of us are not wondering anymore. We are pretty clear that, at least metaphorically, he is. Hey, here we go again. Sheets, sheets of sound, Koltrane style.
Next week, Part VI of Chapter 1, “The Unauthorized Psychoanalysis of Donald Trump.”