Grotesque Comes from Grotto
Meaning Cave
Where We Come From
or
the Cave in Which We Dwell
My opposition to how political correctness has mismanaged the defense of the rights it has purported to be an advocate for is not in line with Donald Trump’s “Know-nothing” populism. Re-examine the Know-nothing Party of the mid-nineteenth century and Trump does not appear as if he fell from the sky, or rose up from the depths. In fact, The Know-Nothing Party’s platform is very similar to Donald Trump’s; the party was founded in 1845 and lasted until about 1860 and was ripe with Anti-Catholic sentiments and bigotry, as well as the view that the country was being overrun by Irish and Bavarian-German immigrant hordes. Daniel Day Lewis’s Nativist character in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York is a continuation of this virulent reactionary politics. Am I saying that Bill the Butcher is anything like Trump–perhaps in the paradigms of his rhetoric. Is Trump like Bill the Butcher in Bill’s most heinously violent impulses? I do not imagine so. But Trump’s grotesque populism and whatever popularity he has garnered are both frightening enough without imagining them as a mandate in the Oval Office.
The Falling Leaf Review 