Another town hall meeting inside a purple state

13% of the total population is purple.

Of this 13%, 11% are literate, that is, able to read.

It was this 11% that propelled the book known as The Color Purple (or was it The Color of Purple, or The Color of People, I can't remember as it was some time ago?) to the top of the best-seller list. People of color made the purple book a best-seller, not as best-seller as The Grapes of Wrath, but a publishing blockbuster nonetheless.

I am not a purple person, I am orange, whitish orange at that, a reader of whitish-orange fiction. I tend not to read best-sellers as there are so few in my preferred genre. I, that is my type, comprise 70% of the total population, of which the literacy rate is 52% and sinking quickly in poll numbers, given the tremendous rise of the media electronic and its new found devotion for televisied town halls.

We're outdoing ourselves with town halls. They're now held on television platforms our president calls fake news. People of purple and white-orangish orientation--as well as Pacific Islanders and illeagal immigrants--call in on on their fake phones and ask fake questions of fake anchor people, who are actually sometimes fake. Live footage of fake news events show famous purple athletes take a knee for social justice, while white-orange law enforcement authors and officers put their knee on the throats of less famous purple people. The people, progressives, the same people who don't see other people as people of color but who fought for Prohibition in 1920, march on City Hall. The Mayor's there to speak out in support of justice and civil rights, stressing that all citizens should enjoy the same equal opportunities of torture, and that what happened shouldn't have happened: he's photogenic, a purple-white Jew, and young with a long career of town halls to look forward to if he doesn't mess up.

Many of us watching the town hall actually thought we might see something new, learn from this terrible tragedy, since it's clear we've reached the time when no real leadership is possible and the only way forward is for us to lead ourselves. But instead it's the same old purple/white/orange triangulation--people marching with handmade signs, fires, a little looting, and a few more people milling around hoping to do some good by being on the scene.

Then the president says something inappropriate, something on behalf of the president. He seems to be under the impression that his ego contains multitudes. More than half of us can't believe we've heard the president say what he's said, but we think there's some weird calculus involved--he's speaking up for the majority, using the words of a white-orange half-man whose biography is chock full of hyperbole.