Propagation

My camellia grower brother's certainty that I would change my vote: by listening
with him to Limbaugh's broadcast bombast. Curious, I loaned my ears.

My brother didn't realize the women who are clones of right-wing
populism missed the sweep of what Limbaugh called the feminazis.

In such a woman's corner, mobs of dust balls gather on the same
high pile of slogans* that echoed in my brother's mind.

One of thirteen percent, Republicans who followed Rush devotedly,
my brother did not see amidst the satire how he fell into

the anti-intellectual trap, the self-professed failings of a high school
educated lowbrow. My brother was mesmerized, quite certain

he was quoting a reality, that liberals want to rob the rich to feed
the lowest of the lowly: homeless, shiftless, druggies, drunks.

"And when the money's gone, then what?" My brother carried such
certainty into his camellia groves, so why not believe he would

graft Rush onto me, create a new variety of Mary, maybe named Mush,
a brainless, mindless bloom that nodded quietly with every rush of hot air?

~     ~     ~

*The word "slogans" in the third stanza is specific to my study of fascism. Trump uses slogans the same way fascists in general have used them, all versions of we/they thinking and not analyzed by followers (to analyze them is to reveal sexism, racism, anti-Semitism).

For example, this quote from The Atlantic, "The Power of the Small Lie" -- "...'Keep America Great' demonstrating how he uses minor untruths to confuse the public and destabilize facts."

See also  Jason Stanley's "How Fascism Works"--"Fascist politics is about identifying enemies, appealing to the in-group... smashing truth and replacing it with power;"

"Wilhelm Reich's "The Mass Psychology of Fascism"--"we have to understand why millions of people have been, and continue to be, drawn to Right-wing movements;"

Jean-Paul Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate" -- [afraid of their own consciousness... cowards who do not want to admit their cowardice, murderers who repress and censure their tendency to murder... who dare to kill only in effigy or protected by the anonymity of the mob...] Re: women, Reich describes the way fascism lauds the authoritarian family where the woman's place is at home, as a mother. He also writes, "a woman who is conscious of her sexuality would never willingly heed the reactionary slogans, which have her enslavement in mind."