Well, it looks like the Deplorables have won. And all of us non-deplorables are even more confused than we were before: How could anyone in his right mind vote for that Orange Turd?
After the initial, day-long shock began to wear off, I had an epiphany: It’s all about the rage. Admit it, you feel rage, too, just like your Deplorable counterparts. Your rage may not be about high grocery prices, because you’re probably well off enough not to be substantively bothered. It may not be about illegal immigration, because you likely live in a higher-demo neighborhood, and you can force yourself to deal with that issue on an intellectual level rather than an emotional one. And it may not be about involvement in foreign conflicts, because, sad that it is, it’s just on TV and you really have no skin in the game.
But, you still have rage. Maybe it’s the threatening absurdity of TikTok replacing trained journalism as most peoples’ primary source of “news.” Or, it may drive you crazy when you go to fill a prescription and run up against the totally inscrutable pharmaceutical pricing system we have in this county. Or, as you get older, you feel the quiet but insidious looming of mental or physical decline-reinforced with every commercial break. And then there’s just the toxicity and vulgarity and violence which has become the ever-increasing, ever-intrusive drumbeat of American culture. Everyone says “Fuck,” even on TV. Nobody wears a tie (even our darling, Shapiro), just a sloppily undone dress shirt. Oh, and then there’s the overriding fear that the institutions of government have been infiltrated, at every level, with agents of those very institutions’ demise. Don’t forget about people in power fiddling while the Rome of climate change steadily burns? Come on, admit it, you’re every bit as pissed as the great unwashed.
Which brings me to my thought. It’s not Trump. We’ve all long realized that he’s just a symbol of everything that we hate. It’s not even the MAGA hordes. You interact with MAGA folk every day and know that, aside from their political opinions, the vast majority are good people who’d stop to fix your flat, or help you up if you’ve fallen. It’s the culture in which we’re currently swimming, and one which we, the “elite,” have probably done way more to create that those we despise. We are all, Deplorable or not, subject to the same rage; we are just viewing it through different lenses.
Your rage would not have been calmed, save for a moment, had Kamala triumphed. And the rage of the other half will not be tempered by more years of Trumpian chaos. Things are so badly out of whack in our culture, with so much shattered structural support–from broken homes, to a broken educational system, to a broken middle class, to broken norms of courtesy and decorum and, mostly, to rampant selfish individualism–that even Trump and his evil minions can’t affect much incremental damage. We are living in an out-of-control wildfire, and we’ve long-ago run out of water. There’s so much smoke in our eyes that we don’t even know why we’re so damn hot.
As for me, I’m going to start calling everyone “Citizen,” in the hopes that the idea of one people might spread. Hopefully other similarities with the French Revolution won’t come into play as we Citizens, collectively, try to identify and remedy what’s truly our shared malaise.
©2024, David B Bucher
SoEast 