Donald Trump is Satan. He has blinded us to his reality and only good men in MAGA can stop him.

America can only be saved if the Great Scam of Donald Trump can be stopped. He has persuaded mega millions of Americans, whose lives are excellent by any standards, to elect him or terrible, fantastic things will happen to them, to me, to us. Think of that! Everybody’s pretty much okay. America has faced dozens, even hundreds, of problems more difficult than these we are living with right now, and we have overcome all of them. Nothing is wrong! And yet he has persuaded millions that unimaginable horrors will befall them if they don’t choose him to stop these fantasies from happening. That message uttered by a human is the embodiment of Satan and we must now reach out to his acolytes, beseeching them to stop him.

I know who the MAGA guys are. Like them, I’m a white male. I grew up with them in a neighborhood that was transformed from all-white to all-black in what seemed like overnight as the injustice it flaunted was trampled by the justice that was long overdue. I went off to college one day in late August and when I came home for Thanksgiving, Mom and Dad lived in another part of town.

One block at a time, one day at a time, a house was sold by a white family who couldn’t pass up the great offer they got from a black family, and before the black family even moved in everybody else in the block wanted out because the price they could get was more than they could ignore, or because nobody white wanted to live in a block with blacks, or both. Looking back across all these decades I am befuddled that there weren’t effective efforts to assuage the emotional pain of all that. But all I can recall is billboards that screeched “Impeach Earl Warren!” He was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, recently appointed by the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Earl Warren was the man who oversaw the decisions that declared all that upheaval to be both right and proper.

My neighborhood, Louisville’s West End in the 1940s and 1950s, could be the poster place for the MAGA slogan of Make America Great Again whose adherents this week threaten the survival of America’s democracy and its rule of law. The boys I grew up with, specifically the 168 graduates of the all-boys and all-white 1954 Class of Flaget High School, now way fewer than half that number, meet annually to this day in a nostalgic reminiscence of how good we had it back then. What we attain as we meet is as much a healthy tribute to the good old days as it is a sad case of arrested development. Not long ago the money managers of the class announced a surplus of a few thousand dollars that was met by a proposal that the surplus be given to the Trump campaign. The proposal was defeated, but it was close.

I have persistently, annoyingly, made the case across these long years that we white Americans brought this on ourselves by engaging in the crime of slavery that was never called a crime and therefore was never adjudicated. Adjudication is a very good step in the rule of law. It settles the question and applies sentences and reparations if guilt is determined. (Yes, I know of the Appeals Process but this is a diatribe of another color and not a class in Judicial Procedure.) I steadily say to stone-deaf ears and hate-filled glares that now the only way to put it all behind us so we can build a better America is to admit our part in the guilt that endures because we ignore its reality. As I have made this case to members of the Flaget Class of 1954, who say they didn’t do anything wrong, I remind them of the Minstrel Show we proudly produced in our Senior year with the compliant support of our faculty. One of our classmates played Mr. Interlocutor in blackface.

Still, in recognition of the special characteristics of the neighborhood that enhanced and enabled the lives we lived back then, there is this mixed report to be made about life in the West End of The Ville back in the day.

Louisville’s West End was a checker board of streets of houses with sidewalks in front and alleys behind. It was easily walkable and safely bikeable from any one place to any other. It was bordered on the East and the South by railroad tracks and parkways that separated it from the many blocks where lived the people we called “the coloreds” when we weren’t using the notorious epithet that was routine sidewalk lingo. The Ohio River was our boundary to the West. A slightly poorer collection of whites lived to the North where the river came to a fall of enough navigational difficulty to bring early water-bound travelers to pause and gather themselves on the shore. At the Falls, the Ohio wrapped around the blunt and broad peninsula of a neighborhood that was named Portland for the purpose that its presence had for the residents and the enterprises that accommodated the travelers. (When I was brought home from the hospital in swaddling clothes it was to a house in Portland, but let’s not lose focus by talking about how cute I was.)

The neighborhoods known as the West End and Portland had their only significant corporate employment opportunities in the Roundhouses of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the L&N, and the Kentucky and Indiana Railroad, the K&I. Every other job was service based. But in its heyday of the post-war years, unemployment was a distant memory of the pre-war years of the Great Depression. We were securely and invariably middle-class. Our only escape to Indiana was the K&I Bridge, an unpaved contraption of interlocking steel girders with a train track laid between single file lanes where cars ran noisily in opposite directions. Fares were collected for its use at the Hoosier end. The West End of Louisville might as well have been a high-walled fort behind a wide moat for any chance that people of color could gain unwelcome admission.

Louisville had its second serious flood in eight years in 1945. The West End basements filled to the brim and sent us scurrying to the higher ground to the east on the richer side of downtown until the Ohio receded. A flood wall was hastily built, beginning with a massive earthen berm that protected us from the Ohio’s rises. On the downside of the berm at the river’s edge was a picturesque road going nowhere in particular that was perfect for secret necking at night in our parents’ cars.

It was paradise for a white kid. We had a vast public park, Shawnee, between our homes and the floodwall. It had a dozen well-kept baseball diamonds, plus tennis courts, and shelters with restrooms. Shawnee Park stretched a wide mile South to North to where a huge pay-as-you-go array of commercial pleasure palaces opened. There was a night club, Gypsy Village, where dinner was served as bands played and couples danced. Next to that was Fontaine Ferry, an amusement park with a roller-skating rink, shooting galleries, a big, scary roller coaster called the Comet, a Ferris Wheel, and all kinds of swooping and floating and spinning quarter-eating rides, plus seedy peep shows in a Penny Arcade. Fontaine Ferry — always “Fountain” Ferry, always — had a stage in the middle where magicians sawed their scantily-clad assistants in half, and a Hilarity Hall where polished slides carried the bold and daring down and around and down again from high perches. There were tall barrels that rolled as you entered them to get to the other side, but couldn’t, and walkways that spun and tilted when you least expected it with hidden holes in them that blew bursts of air up the skirts of unsuspecting girls. There was a big swimming pool at the other end with lifeguards, diving boards, and a shallow zone where a waterfall splashed on the little kids. And if all that wasn’t enough, there was an 18-hole, full-size public golf course right next to Fountain Ferry. Beat that.

We had two motion picture shows. That’s what I remember we called them: motion picture shows. We had saloons where you could place an illegal bet on a race at Churchill Downs and hear the ticker tape of the race as it was fed from the track. And beer joints where you could dance with your girl to songs you could order up for quarters on a juke box. Also two really nice restaurants with white tablecloths and drugstores with soda fountains and a couple of grocery stores where a kid could pick up his mom’s order and say, “Charge it”.

Though there were two public grade schools— elementary, they were called — and a public high school, Shawnee, with a huge athletic field, the neighborhood was heavily Catholic in both the ecclesiastical and educational senses. There were six Catholic churches, each with schools for grades one through eight staffed by nuns who lived right there. There were two Catholic high schools, Loretto for girls and Flaget for boys. I went to St. Columba through the Eighth Grade and Flaget, named for a bishop and pronounced with a soft g, through four years of high school. Flaget High School occupied a new three-floor building that was across Southwestern Parkway from Shawnee Park. Two dozen Xaverian Brothers lived in one end of the building and taught us in the other. We were the State Champions in both football and basketball and academic scholarships. The girls of Loretto were the prettiest and the girls of Shawnee were the easiest and we were the boys of all their dreams. Or at least they were of ours.

You would probably have to go back to the early months of 1861 on a cotton plantation just outside Savannah or Atlanta to find anything as nice for a white boy as the West End of Louisville just before the Reckoning arrived.

I write hoping I’ll be read but not counting on it for my happiness, which lightens the burden of giving a damn. I wrote a book too heavy to pick up about the man, Harry Hopkins, whom fate placed just down the hall in the White House when Franklin Roosevelt had dibs on who lived there. Writing it, I studied the odd life of Adolf Hitler from when he was born, how he grew up, and the bizarre pathways he walked until he declared war on America, which was an act of such unwisdom that it killed him.

When Donald Trump arose from lying about his business acumen on a weekly television show that made him dangerously electable I saw the Hitler in him but doubted it would work in America because we weren’t suffering the way Germany was when Hitler got traction. But Trump has pulled off a con of such skill that only Satan himself could have done it. He has persuaded millions of Americans that horrible things are going to happen to them if they don’t give him dictatorial powers to stop them from happening. Let me repeat that. In a country where things are pretty darn good by any standards, he has sold the idea that we should abandon our very form of government and our Constitutional principles and elect him as the boss of all bosses. Or terrible things will happen to us.

You MAGA guys, like the guys I knew, like the guy I was, know better. I know you do. You got conned in 2016 and went for Trump because the alternatives were spewing boring policy propositions that disturbed your slumber. You were wrong and you know you were and you ended up in a gun-toting, foot-stomping club that embarrasses you, but you can’t get out. I understand how difficult it is to admit a big mistake because I have made more of them than you have. But I guarantee that when you do admit it, when you confront your mistake if only to yourself, it is magnificently liberating. Heroic even. So do it. Don’t go for him. Don’t tell anybody. Just go in there and do it for your mother and your wife and your daughters and their daughters because what his movement intends for women will stifle their wisdom that is struggling to take its rightful place beside men as the leaders of the world that all of us deserve.

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Seeking The Hinge, by Terry Holland. Available on Substack at terryholland.substack.com at Archives 100.000