This may be the last post in my Bluesplaining career. I don’t have time to maintain this website with all my other websites and no one really stops by here much anyway. But in the event that someone some day reads this, I think it will be fun and revealing for them to understand what the Presidential election last week felt like to a cynical and pessimistic person. The writer of this article, “You Broke It, You Bought It” compares election night in a way to the Atlanta Falcons losing the Super Bowl in 2017. Didja see it coming?
How did it happen? It was inevitable.
I lived in Atlanta in 2017, as I do now, and was a gullible Atlanta Falcons fan, so I can relate to the comparison. I remember watching the Big Game KNOWING the Falcons were going to win, and then by a miracle straight from the biggest and most powerfully evil black hole in the Universe they lost. To the Patriots. To say it was a humiliating shock would be the understatement of the century. For five years I was angry with the Falcons because they refused to get rid of the terrible QB they had. Now that the Falcons have a Minnesota Viking as their quarterback, I like them a little bit better. But they still find ways to lose.
Back to the election of last week. The author I’m trying to quote wrote this:
I didn’t watch the returns. Instead I spent a pleasant evening watching true-crime documentaries on streaming platforms, slept well, then picked up my phone at 5:30 this morning to scroll the news. Doing so, I felt like an Atlanta Falcons fan who had turned off the Super Bowl in the third quarter with his team up 28-3, utterly convinced that his team would blow the lead somehow and unwilling to witness the horror of it, and then looked at the final score later to find that he’d been … completely vindicated.
It’s a strange feeling. On the one hand, you wonder if you’ll ever spend another day not wanting to vomit. On the other, you think: I’ve never been so right in my entire life.”
Not me. I was sure Kamala Harris was going to win, just like I knew the Atlanta Falcons would win the Super Bowl. Both lost. But the article makes an even better point than any of that stuff.
The point is, American voters suck. We are a nation of terrible, selfish, racist, sexist, non-serious people who want to be entertained all the time, in every scenario, because we think that’s the point of life, and we want to share all our dumb thoughts on social media, and elect stupid idiots to powerful jobs because it will be funny, and whine about the price of gas no matter what it is, and not care about climate change which will destroy all life on earth eventually if Putin and North Korea don’t do it first. Etc. We are a nation of horrible people, people who call you antisemitic if you say that Israel shouldn’t be slaughtering 120 kids every day in Gaza or stealing land from the West Bank or bombing Lebanon randomly for no apparent purpose, just for the hell of it. Americans love violence, and killing kids who are “not American” kids (but thankfully not fetuses) seems like a justifiable thing to do. And fuck you for saying otherwise. We are an awful, rotten people. We identify more with the fake Christian fascist man than the intelligent woman full of optimism.
So we got the president we deserve. We got the nut job and all his fellow sycophant nut jobs who will ruin this country and probably the world. This is the president who is perfect for the awful American people. And I agree with this, mostly.
My strongest political conviction in middle age is that Americans are contemptible. Not all of them (box checked!), and certainly not always or even often in their personal behavior. But if there’s any theme that ties the last 26 months of this newsletter together, it’s that We the People as a political community are amoral, unserious about governing ourselves, and undeserving of our constitutional bequest. There is no “Trump problem” and there never has been. There’s only a voter problem.”
And this.
Never in U.S. history has the public chosen leadership this malevolent this decisively. The moral clarity of their decision is crystalline, particularly knowing how Trump will regard his margin as a “mandate” to do his worst. We’ve learned something about America that we didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t believe, and it’ll forever color our individual judgments of who and what we are.
The most one can plausibly say to try to excuse Trump’s voters is that they chose him because they believe he’ll make the trains run on time, not because they’re yearning to see the enemy from withintreated like the vermin they are. But that’s no excuse at all: Fascism has always thrived on amorality, not immorality. Trump’s greatest enabler isn’t the man in the red hat, it’s the man who doesn’t care what he does to his enemies, or to the country, as long as the price of eggs comes down.
Which, by the way, it won’t.
Because of course presidents don’t sit in the White House and determine grocery prices. A little fact that Americans are too stupid and/or fucked up to know.
I honestly think that RFK Jr. has one good idea and that’s to remove fluoride from our water. It can cause memory problems (can it? I think so, but I’m not sure because I’ve been drinking fluoride my entire life) and other mental issues, so just think – after Trump wins and appoints RFK Jr. the Health Czar, and lets him “go wild” then RFK Jr. can eventually remove the thing in the water that is fogging up everyone’s brains and we’ll be a clear-headed, clear-thinking electorate for the first time in 60 years. But by then it will be much too late and every country on earth will have nukes all pointing at everyone else and all it will take is Trump mistaking the big RED “Diet Coke” button on his desk for the ORANGE button for “Launch the Nukes” and it’s the End of Everything. As the Voters wanted.
On Tuesday morning, I passed some time scrolling through news stories I’d bookmarked over the last few weeks, luxuriating in the insanity of the kakistocracy Trump voters are about to unleash. Abortions cause hurricanes; a “secretary of retribution”; rescinding the broadcast licenses of unfriendly news bureaus; anti-vax kookery inside the West Wing. There’s a lot of demagogic woo-woo know-nothing-ism at the top of the American right, and it’s going to break a lot of things. And the “normal” Republicans in Congress won’t try to stop it. On the contrary, they’ll say—and are already saying—that they owe it to Americans to give them every stupid, destructive thing they voted for.
Those Republicans are correct. Trump’s voters broke America and deserve to get what they’ve bought, economically, politically, and morally. I was right about the rottenness of the electorate and I’ll be right, in spades, about the rottenness of Trump’s abuses in a second term.”
Quotes are from The Dispatch.
Good luck everyone. It was nice knowing ya’ll. I will actually miss the Planet though, after Trump blows it up.
The big and powerfully evil black hole that dispenses bad miracles.
