Explication de tweet II: Different Dreams for Different Kings

Little did I know when I dusted off an old college try that it would come in handy so soon. Even more surprising is that I'm not using it to figure out Donald Trump.

No, wait. Yes, I am. Steve King, the Iowa representative, is actually Donald Trump's brain. The "Donald Trump" who "sits" in the "Oval Office" and "tweets" about "wire tapping" is an automaton controlled by the brain of Steve King.

How do I know this? Because Obama.

No, really, you think that's a joke? Well, just wait 'til we apply the second edition of [cue Andy Griffith theme music] "EXPLICATION DE TWEET!"

[Wait, wait, turn off the Andy Griffith theme music; I meant Twilight Zone.]

So anyway, here's the text to be explicated:

"Wilders" would be more fun if it referred to many Thornton Wilders, but it is necessarily singular because of the verb "understands. " The reference is to Geert Wilders, the Dutch Islam-hater who wants to build a dike between the Netherlands and Turkey.

"Culture" and "demographics" point forward to "our, " which is found twice: "our destiny" and "our civilization." Here King asserts some kinship with Wilders, although it is not clear what it should be.

• They don't share a religion, except in a vague, unobservant sense: raised Methodist, King converted to his wife's Catholic faith 17 years after marrying her; Wilders is a lapsed-Catholic agnostic.
• There don't appear to be any genealogical connections: King is of German, Irish, and Welsh stock; Wilders's father is Dutch, but his mother, interestingly, has colonial Dutch-Indonesian roots.
• Both have "white" skin tone, but so do many Muslims. Surely the bond isn't something as crude, atavistic, and conceptually cuckoo as racism.

So what are "our destiny" and "our civilization"? The key here is "restore." It is obvious that there was a civilization with a destiny that is no more; this is a problem. There has been some kind of decline shared by both King and Wilders that they mean to arrest.

This opens up the meaning of "destiny," which illuminates an entire gallery of civilizational memes. The destiny in question is obviously Manifest Destiny in the case of the US and Once-Upon-An-Empire in the case of the Dutch, both of which invoke memories of the severest kinds of cultural and demographic control (slavery and apartheid).

Why anything should need to be "restored" in the case of the US is mysterious, given that it is the strongest economic power in the world with a looming military presence in almost every global region. But here we will do well to remember that one of the notions in our gallery of civilizational memes is "The White Man's Burden," and the US has just emerged from having a Non-White Man as its President. It seems that this is the something that constitutes a need for restoration.

So there it is after all: something as crude and atavistic and conceptually cuckoo as racism.

But more chilling is the restoration mechanism King has in mind. It won't happen the way imperialism happened, through naked exploitation of subject populations. Things have changed. Empires can't happen the way they used to.

Also, more importantly, fertility rates are way down in the West, something that "Wilders understands," as does King: the iron law of the birth rate, which is that the wealthier the society, the lower the birth rate. Add to that the twin genies of birth control and feminism, and it is clear to all except the most naive simpleton that these trends--and the accompanying decline in birth rate--cannot be reversed. The West will need "other people's babies" if it is to maintain its economic prosperity.

Unless.

Unless the "our" of King and Wilders restore their civilization to its inhumane roots by pursuing a strategy of killing other people's babies. That is the goal, and "Wilders understands." If "other people" are having too many babies, but "our" people are not--and furthermore are not going to and cannot be made to--there is no solution other than to be sure that other people's babies do not grow into adults.

There is no return to the way things were: no high fertility rates in the West, but no imperial exploitation either. No. The only thing that will work is an updated version of Herod's "slaughter of the innocents": King knows, and "Wilders understands," that this return to civilizational hegemony doesn't require military violence, but can be accomplished by any combination of chemical or biological agents. The world has never seen anything close to the kind of ethnic cleansing that King has in mind.

And why not, in the minds of these civilizational warriors? If demographics is destiny, but the tide of fertility is running against you, it is time for the might-makes-right, bottom-line thinking, and bottom-feeding morality of the kind that the modern, military-commercial West excels at. Christianity and the ideals of democracy are irrelevancies to be used as window-dressing and propaganda. Martin Luther King wasn't the only King with a dream. Steve King's dream is something that combines Nazi eugenics and the plague.

And "Wilders understands."

So maybe this is Firelight Zone instead of Twilight Zone [cue Brunnhilde's immolation scene from Wagner's Götterdämmerung]. Whatever the zone, it is what King is conveying to his automaton Trump by way of the microwave oven in the Trump Tower.

How do I know this?

Thanks, Obama.