#BTColumn – Ask me no questions

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today. 

by Michael Rudder

Ask me no questions (and) I’ll tell you no lies – version one. Ask me no questions and hear no lies – version 2. Ask me no questions, tell me no lies, put down the molasses and it will catch no flies – version 3.

There are various phrases, sentences, linguistic nuances, lyrics from ballads or calypsos or from folklore which follow the four words, ‘Ask me no questions.’ I am, however, posing a question to the American electorate not seemingly asked by pollsters or the media in that country.

‘Did you vote for Donald Trump in the last presidential election because of who would be a heartbeat away from the presidency if for any reason Joe Biden could not continue?’ In other words, did you vote for Trump because Biden’s Vice-Presidential pick was, in your mind, either Afro American, Afro Southeast-Asian American or Black?

Notice how Ms. Kamala Harris is usually described – never as just an American.

Of course, if a Caucasian is standing in an election or holds elective office they are never described as say, a German-Australian-American; with such people ancestry needs not be remarked upon; yet with the Obamas or Harrises ancestry has to be noted.

Some media and the Republicans in the House and Senate are also opposing a native American Deb Haaland for a Biden Cabinet post.

This is a person who traces her ancestry back twenty-five generations. They say she holds radical views. I wonder if one of those views might be the assertion that her people have been in America many decades before any of their ancestors ever set foot in that land.

America is and always has been a divided country which had apparently been glued together using the dog-eat-dog race to the American Dream as an equaliser.

I posit that what Trump did, using his slogan, ‘Make America great again,’ was to awaken one side to the sub-text of that slogan, ‘Make America like him again.’

Thus voting for Trump/Pence instead of the Biden/Harris ticket was, probably to them, a no-brainer, but ‘Ask me no Questions.’