By: Ben
Johnson
I don’t like to talk about politics. I have
my reasons for this. In order of importance, they are: 1. it’s pointless, 2.
it’s boring, 3. it only ever makes me upset.
Not that I don’t have political opinions. I
get them all the time. I try to tune them out. They are generated by an inner
unstable maniac with a frothing saliva-cornered mouth who suffers from a bad
case of delusional martyrdom. My poor unappreciated brain clerk often has to
tell him to shut up and stop scaring off the paying customers or else we’ll
call the cops.
He, this screeching schizo from whom I get my
information, is usually safely committed to professional oversight in an
obscure holding pen in my prefrontal cortex, a zone he shares along with other
“what if this mattered” daydreams such as Win-The-Lottery-Money-Plans and
Alternative-Universe-Wherein-I-Am-A-Professional-Athlete. But occasionally he
busts loose and manages to pull a lever or two in the motor center. And that’s
when I open my stupid mouth and say something strange and alien to me about
“what the government SHOULD do” as if A. I actually knew, and B. whatever
weirdo idea I’m currently spewing is somehow of dire necessity.
Earlier this week the crazy son of a bitch
hacked my Twitter account and started talking about cultural divisions between
“liberal” and “conservative” low-income Americans who are responding in very
different ways to the common problem of being totally
and completely fucked up the ass. To my surprise when I regained
consciousness and surveyed the damage, the person on the other end of this
errant Twitter conversation, somebody I have never met in any capacity in my
life, appeared to actually like what I was saying. I was astonished by this.
And so here I am, goaded by flattery into yielding the floor to a known
paranoiac.
He has this to say:
Who are these poor
deluded fuckers running around claiming Ted Cruz as a folk
hero? They must be stupid or something, right? Ted Cruz just shut down the
government, interrupting (some) services to
returning war veterans direly in need of them. He’s no hero. He’s not even
an anti-hero. He’s a beady-eyed lizard man, a rider of the apocalypse, a
neo-McCarthyite careerist Canadian-born scumsucker, a puppet of the shadowy
corporations which control the scope and tenor of our public policy debate, and
he is hell bent on our final, ultimate destruction. Why would anybody,
especially any poor person in Texas who voted for him in direct conflict with
their own interests regarding health care, like this guy?
Okay, let’s say that you want to be as
charitable as possible regarding Cruz’s policy positions and say they hold
validity as representing a constituency, and therefore allow that he may be acting
upon a popular mandate, woefully misinformed though it may be. Suppose that his
fight against Obamacare was all the more poignant because of its impossibility.
Say that his lack of concern for alienating
his Republican peers in the Senate actually resonates with people who find
those peers to be reprehensible do-nothing milquetoasts. Postulate therefore
that in a world laden with these hypotheticals, Cruz is in fact a crusader,
sort of a mix between Mr. Smith Goes To
Washington and Cool Hand Luke,
except with a much firmer grasp of modern
political fundraising.
In this case, yeah, maybe Ted Cruz is a sort
of hero if you squint. Maybe if you are of a mindset which can ignore the
context of the debt ceiling and 800,000 furloughed workers, since your life is
shit right now and nobody cares about you and you’re fed up. Maybe if you woke
up this morning furious at the existence of Obamacare for some marrow deep reason
you are incapable of articulating. Maybe if you’ve spent your entire life enduring
some combination of doing your best and nevertheless getting systematically
boned, and now some experts are telling you the new thing and calling it
Obamacare, and you feel like you’ve seen that movie. Maybe Ted Cruz is a hero
because here’s a guy who, despite the transparency of his shtick, is at least
going in there and actively fucking things up in a way that seems leadershippy.
Maybe Ted Cruz seems like a favorable option because Obama’s only remaining
message to you is “you’ll be fine,” and it’s a self-evident lie because you are
not fine and you’ve never been fine. Maybe then, Ted Cruz is a kind of hero.
It’s not insane or idiotic. Not necessarily.
Maybe also the people who would say that
you’re wrong about Ted Cruz being a hero are the people who have told you that
you’re wrong about everything for your entire life. They’re the kids who had
their hands raised with every answer in school. They’re the ones in suits using
Standard American English to “regret to inform you…” They are typing into
keyboards at the bank that is foreclosing on your house because the Union work
dried up because the development cycle crashed along with everything else in
’08, and apparently the world does not need electricians anymore and apparently
that is both your fault and your problem. Too bad, stupid. These liberals say
they’re sympathetic to your plight on an abstract, intellectualized political
level, but when it comes to saving your house, their hands are tied.
And God help you if you say the wrong thing
about a woman or a black person or anything, really. They will correct you. In
public. At the drop of a hat. They don’t care how rude that is. Fuck those
guys.
You know what the REAL PROBLEM is with
American liberalism? It’s that American Liberals all act like everything would
be fine if we could just finally address the REAL PROBLEM. It’s a search for
truth in books and from “reputable sources” when the truth is just there all
the time, slapping them in the face, and they’re calling it “wrong” because it
doesn’t fit. It’s your acquaintance from three jobs ago with the constant Facebook
reposts from Upworthy of whatever Elizabeth
Warren just farted out, the guy who didn’t help you move because his back was
really sore that week but nonetheless feels no qualms about telling you how wrong
you are in front of your nephew and everybody.
These poor conservatives, as they keep
reminding us, are real Americans. Most of the stuff they say sounds racist,
like “we are real Americans and you are not,” but it could just as easily be
construed as “we are here too, and we
may be misinformed, and our policy priorities might clash with yours, but we
are here and we are real Americans and somebody, anybody, needs to pay
attention to us, so much so that we don’t even care if it’s Ted Cruz. We’re
that sick of getting the shit end of the stick.” That spirit is to be
encouraged, regardless of what weird, mangled, rotted form it’s actually coming
out as. We’re all
getting the shit end of the stick.
In the Gary
Younge piece I linked to earlier, there’s a telling passage which quotes polling
research on those who found some plausibility in “Truther” and “Acorn”
conspiracy questions. According to Younge, “Where breakdowns of these
falsehoods exist those with less education are more likely to believe them.”
And here’s where American Liberals start
jabbering about the quality of American political discourse. You can’t have an
actual conversation about policy in this country without encountering some
crazed dimwit, and this is by design, and No Child Left Behind is creating a
nation of idiots who are easily manipulated, and boo hoo hoo nobody will play
with us, infinity.
Except: if you’re a liberal who believes that
the less advantaged among us deserve to be shepherded by a caring system into
the arena of public discussion, why would you have a problem with crazed
dimwits? Crazed dimwits should be the ideal liberal base demographic. They’re
both crazed and dimwits. Those are two distinct disadvantages which would
require double the shepherding. That crazed dimwits are not immediately
embraced, sight unseen, by the American liberal culture indicates that,
paradoxically given the espousal of tolerance as a core value to that culture,
maybe some crazed dimwits are the wrong kind of crazed dimwits.
American liberalism offers conditional love.
If you are a crazed dimwit, that’s fine, but you can’t be one of those who spew
the wrong talking points. If so, you’re wrong. We don’t do “wrong.” We’re
liberals. We dig until we find the REAL PROBLEM, which we can totally find because
we’re so smart, and we don’t have time to waste trying to deal with the wrong
kind of crazed dimwit. It takes too much of our time to correct and brainwash
these people until they’re restored to sanity before we can expect them to join
the rest of us at the grown ups table. They’re not our crazed dimwits, the ones
who send us email petitions demanding an immediate end to dolphin slaughter in
the Philippines. Those guys are great. All we have to do is make a “so
concerned” face and they’ll go away. We have no problem with our own chosen
crazed dimwits. Just don’t be the wrong kind, is all we ask.
This hypocrisy resonates with the poor
conservative. They see Obama saying “Yes We Can” and then they wake up the next
day and find themselves in an “I Still Can’t” world. And when they try and
speak up about it, they get the “shut up, stupid” treatment. So they hate
Obama. Somebody says he’s a secret Muslim. Okay, fine, he’s a secret Muslim.
Sounds fun. When you say it, liberals, the phony bastards, get upset. Even more
fun. Why not? Might as well get our kicks.
Here’s where the “less education” aspect
kicks in. If you believe, as I believe, that a person is basically smart, then
you have to look askance at anything that tells you who is “less educated” than
who. There are a lot of ways to be educated, and a lot of ways to learn, and
everybody learns constantly whether they know it or not. The “less educated”
have learned, somewhere along the line, that school is not for them. That is a
defining, self-selecting characteristic of the group with the title “less
educated.” And with that knowledge comes a deeper knowledge that they are
“less” than another group of people. This is inherently upsetting.
But that’s not where the story ends on these
people. They’re still people. They still have thoughts and dreams. They still
respond to information, and form opinions. Their viewpoints are still valid.
The rest of us are somehow allowed to cast them off onto a scrapheap because of
“less educated,” which means less able to articulate their ideas in the correct
pre-agreed format imposed by whoever has decided is best. Instead of trying to
see what kernels of validity might exist in those viewpoints, we choose to
marginalize this group by saying “secret Muslim” = WRONG = try again next time,
idiot.
The “calling people wrong when they are wrong
about something” kneejerk is a disservice to how we talk about politics in this
country. Let’s say that instead of saying “Obama is a secret Muslim,” these
“less educated” poor conservatives were somehow capable of limiting themselves
to a more measured, balanced, and reasonably well articulated root idea. Let’s
say their message was simply, “We don’t trust Obama, so much so that we are
willing to believe some pretty crazy shit about him, which out of restraint we
will choose not to share at this time.” Instead of asking “why don’t you trust
Obama” and then hearing the response “because he’s a secret Muslim” and then
going ha ha ha and forgetting that such an outlandishly gullible, clearly
superfluous person exists, let’s investigate for ourselves, if we’re so smart,
the idea of what about Obama is not to be trusted.
That’s when you think about the IRS thing and
the NSA thing and to some extent Benghazi, and all of this other stuff that
you’d probably be more upset about if it weren’t for the fact that whoever’s
telling you about it always sounds like either a poorly educated inarticulate
lunatic or a bald-faced shill for corporate/conservative interests. Just a
cursory glance at some of the “Obama isn’t perfect” boogeymen lurking in even
the most staunch liberal’s closet tell us that the root idea of
untrustworthiness is structurally sound. Of course Obama is not to be trusted.
He’s the President and a career politician. He’s from Chicago, of all places
for a politician to be from while asking for anybody’s trust.
Amended viewpoint: the question isn’t whether
or not you trust Obama, it’s whether he will fuck you over as bad as the other
guy. And you can never really KNOW the answer to that because the world is more
complicated than Obama versus Other Guy, but we liberals believe that Obama is
closer to trustworthy than Ted Cruz or Mitt Romney or especially that toxic
bullfrog Karl Rove. But this is officially a discussion worth having.
Now all of a sudden this is starting to sound
like dialogue. Which is crazy. How did we get to dialogue from “Hooray for Ted
Cruz” and “Obama is a secret Muslim?” We started with listening, that’s how.
And that is how these people, these poor conservatives who feel disenfranchised
and ignored and are, naturally, upset about it, will be led. If anybody listens
to them and fights for them, they will follow that person. They will not care
if it’s Ted Fucking Cruz And His Dog And Pony Show Sponsored By Humana, Inc. He’s
said he’s their guy, he’s out there doing things, okay, score one for Ted Cruz.
In other words, liberals, if you wish that
Ted Cruz wasn’t a thing, you’ve got to replace the Ted Cruzes with the Ted
Youzes. And use your damned ears. God put them on your head for a reason.
Okay, so that’s the ranting and raving crazed
idiot wildman who does my political opinions. I don’t know how much you agree
with what he’s saying. Hopefully you think he’s entertaining. We all knew this
was a risk we were running when we came in here. It’s like the sign says. “Open
mic.” You gotta do something to keep your coffeeshop afloat, and if you have a
better idea, I’d love to hear it.
In the meantime, please click here and scroll down for
some of our more usual fare, such as “Lesbian discusses human testicles,” “some
fucking sports thing,” and “bittersweet reflections on the human toll of being
alive.”
Thanks.
