By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)
Living where we do in Virginia, we are surrounded by Trumpists. Trump won about 85% of the land area of Virginia. Biden won three counties west of Richmond: ours wasn’t one of them. Across Virginia and the country the lines seem more firmly drawn than ever: overall, Democrats win with higher income, more educated voters; Republicans win with less-educated, lower-income voters, the main exceptions being elite rich white people and disadvantaged urban black voters. [See the Newsweek article, “Trump Counties Make Up Just 29 Percent of U.S. Economic Output, 2020 Election Study Shows.”]
Here’s a number that scares the hell out of me: almost 73 million American voters think Trump has been a great president and deserves another term. Well, in my opinion, a country with 73 million delusional idiots is no place to raise a child. Yes, Joe Biden received 79 million votes, but if 73 million votes for Trump isn’t a great big bright red flag, what on earth does it take to get your attention: how many more peaceful protesters need to be run over by cars or shot by radical-right lunatics before you get the message?
No, I haven’t taken a photograph of that sign – or of any other signs in yards around here. Like my black neighbors, I drive out of my way to avoid certain local neighborhoods, because I don’t want to expose my son to possible gunfire, and I don’t want him to see idiots waving signs while carrying guns and become alarmed – or (much worse) think it looks like fun. Have you seen a recent photo of Steve Bannon?
The “ballots or bullets” mantra is (most ironically) co-opted/corrupted from a famous speech by Malcolm X. It was at the heart of how Malcolm believed black people in America should shape their future (vote first, but be ready to pick up arms to defend yourselves if necessary).
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| Photo taken by a contact of mine in DC [He could have taken photos of white nationalists screaming, “This is my fucking street,” as they blocked his usual route for walking home from Capitol Hill, except that, as he says, “I didn’t want to risk having my arms broken.”] |
Did any of your neighbors have a Biden sign in their yard? We didn’t see a Biden sign within three miles of our house. In a Republican-leaning small town immediately west of us, the Republicans rented a huge building on the busiest street corner in town and plastered it with garish signage and had it staffed 24/7.
| People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts |
As I got older, I reached a point of zero tolerance with bullshit-oriented people. My son is starting young with that attitude, so he won’t waste as many years as I did. Because of this, unfortunately, he will have fewer friends, but they will be of higher quality. At least I hope so. That’s the way it has worked out for me.
My son resents at times that he has a dad who calls him out every time he says anything that has any smell of bullshit on it. And, to his maternal grandmother’s chagrin, I enforce a strict code of “facts matter” that applies even in her conservative, facts-don’t-matter, realm. He – and his grandmother – well understand that we are not raising him in a world of religious conditioning, because facts matter. Religion is called “faith-based” for a reason, and he knows that if he wants to adopt any sort of informed religious viewpoint after he turns 18, he is free to do so, but as long as he lives at home, facts rule.
When he hears someone say something on a video, or even on NPR, and he asks, “Is that true?” I say, “Let’s look it up.” And we will spend however long it takes researching until we can agree on the viability of the facts. It was a point of pride when, a few weeks ago, one of my Trumpist neighbors said to my son, “What do you think about President Trump?” and, without a bit of hesitation, he replied, “So far, he is the biggest liar we have researched.” The neighbor pushed it and asked, “You think the President would lie?” and my son said, “I know he lies, just about all the time. We look it up.”
When I was visiting Africa, I spent some time interviewing several people who had committed atrocities during the Rwanda genocide, and I saw piles of skulls and bones that later became part of the genocide museum. Being around those murderers, and hearing how they were driven into a frenzy by listening to radio broadcasts by total strangers – driven to kill in the most awful fashion people they had been friends with for years – put me on an edge I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to get away from. Being around “true-believing” church-goers has a similar effect on me. There is something terrifying about people who can go so all-in on things – like a favorite drink or drug, a sports team or…religion – because there is always someone out there [like TV evangelists or Donald Trump] trying to figure out a way to use such people’s overwrought beliefs to manipulate them, too often with bad intent.
I’ve never studied auras or any other New Age mystical stuff, but I often seem to be able to sense what unsettling behavior people are capable of just by looking at them, just as I can look at a grizzly coming at me at 35 mph and predict where I can will it to stop instead of attacking. (If you have read many of my stories you know I don’t have that gift with moose.)
Maybe I’m overreacting, but, with only infrequent upward spikes, I’ve watched this country devolve since the coming of Reagan: so I’ve basically watched a self-destructive spiral for 40 years. Why would I want my son to watch the same for 60, 70, 80 or more years? In the past 40 years, we’ve gone from Reagan to H. Bush to W. Bush to Trump: I’m not seeing a reason for optimism. Yes, we had Clinton and Obama interspersed, but they hardly got to their own positive agendas because they were so busy cleaning up the negative impacts of their predecessors.
I was ready to move to Africa after the 2000 elections, when I realized I was living amongst 50 million people ignorant enough to think Dubya Bush would be a competent president. If I hadn’t been newly settled in with my wife when Bush was re-elected, I would have left then. It turned out I was correct in my assessment of Bush: I present 9/11 and the “Great Recession” of 2008 as Examples A and B. The people who voted for him were wrong, but instead of learning their lesson they voted for Trump.
If Trump had been re-elected, I would definitely have had to get my son out of this country in order that he might have a fair chance at a successful life. It is almost impossible to build a great life if you are outnumbered by people who strive to be ignorant, uninformed idiots.
| Copyright © 2020 by Paul Clark |
Paul, Nobel Laureate in Economics Paul Krugman echoes your views....“Why the 2020 Election Makes It Hard to Be Optimistic About the Future,” NY Times, Nov. 16. Excerpt:
ReplyDeleteIf we can’t face up to a pandemic, how can we avoid apocalypse?
The 2020 election is over. And the big winners were the coronavirus and, quite possibly, catastrophic climate change....
...Trump paid less of a penalty than expected for his deadly failure to deal with Covid-19, and few down-ballot Republicans seem to have paid any penalty at all. As a headline in The Washington Post put it, “With pandemic raging, Republicans say election results validate their approach.”
And their approach, in case you missed it, has been denial and a refusal to take even the most basic, low-cost precautions — like requiring that people wear masks in public....
Awful as the pandemic outlook is, however, what worries me more is what our failed response says about prospects for dealing with a much bigger issue, one that poses an existential threat to civilization: climate change.
As many people have noted, climate change is an inherently difficult problem to tackle — not economically, but politically.
Right-wingers always claim that taking climate seriously would doom the economy, but the truth is that at this point the economics of climate action look remarkably benign. Spectacular progress in renewable energy technology makes it fairly easy to see how the economy can wean itself from fossil fuels. A recent analysis by the International Monetary Fund suggests that a “green infrastructure push” would, if anything, lead to faster economic growth over the next few decades.
But climate action remains very difficult politically given (a) the power of special interests and (b) the indirect link between costs and benefits.
Consider, for example, the problem posed by methane leaks from fracking wells. Better enforcement to limit these leaks would have huge benefits — but the benefits would be widely distributed across time and space. How do you get people in Texas to accept even a small rise in costs now when the payoff includes, say, a reduced probability of destructive storms a decade from now and half the world away?
...So getting people to act responsibly on the coronavirus should be much easier than getting action on climate change. Yet what we see instead is widespread refusal to acknowledge the risks, accusations that cheap, common-sense rules like wearing masks constitute “tyranny,” and violent threats against public officials.
So what do you think will happen when the Biden administration tries to make climate a priority?
This is, by the way, possibly the biggest reason to hope that Democrats win those Georgia runoffs....
Obviously we need to keep trying to head off a climate apocalypse — and no, that’s not hyperbole. But even though the 2020 election wasn’t about climate, it was to some degree about the pandemic — and the results make it hard to be optimistic about the future.
Al Franken, writing in the [“Good luck, President-elect Biden. You’ll need it,” Nov. 10], seems to concur:
ReplyDeleteThe careful observer will notice that Joe Biden’s approach to leadership is very different from Donald Trump’s. While Trump has sought to exploit divisions along racial, religious and philosophical lines — stoking grievances, suspicion and sometimes violence — Biden keeps telling us he wants to bring Americans together. Good!
Also, good luck!
If you’re reading this, chances are very good that on election night you were shocked and depressed at how close the race was. If you’re among those who believe that the election has been stolen from the real winner, then you are almost certainly not reading this. That’s because Americans are divided into two completely different information universes. And that’s a problem.
In 1995, I wrote a book that called Rush Limbaugh “a Big Fat Idiot.” While the book was satiric, its intent was entirely serious. Limbaugh had been first to exploit a little-noticed repeal of the Fairness Doctrine by the Federal Communications Commission. Adopted in 1949, the rule required broadcasters to present controversial issues in a fair and balanced manner. The doctrine’s repeal in 1987 cleared the way for disreputable broadcasters to present manifestly dishonest and unbalanced content, and Rush, it turned out, had a real talent for just that kind of thing.
Before long, Limbaugh had attracted an audience of 20 million a day by spewing wildly racist, xenophobic and sexist bile and wildly untrue twaddle about everything from climate to tobacco to the number of murders committed by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Like Father Coughlin, who regaled his millions of loyal radio listeners with anti-Semitic and isolationist propaganda in the lead-up to World War II, Limbaugh became a huge political force. After the 1994 midterms, when House Republicans were swept into the majority for the first time in 40 years, the new speaker, Newt Gingrich, named Rush an honorary member of the class of 1995.
It’s no coincidence that this year, Trump honored Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which had been previously awarded to the likes of Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Apollo 13 astronauts. Without Limbaugh, there would be no President Trump.
A true master of radio, Limbaugh had a short-lived TV show. But its producer, Roger Ailes, would go on to be the impresario of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, whose slogan, ironically, would echo the language of the Fairness Doctrine. In fact, when Fox sued me in 2003 to stop the publication of “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them — A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” the judge told Fox’s lawyers that their slogan, like their case, was “wholly without merit.”
...But while denizens of the more sober, rational universe can sample Fox and see for themselves what that right-wing universe looks like, the internet and social media platforms have created a more opaque world for far more extreme and untethered worldviews to fester and grow.
...Going into election day, Democrats, independents and Republican Lincoln Project types were convinced by polls that Biden was poised to win a mandate to restore some normalcy and competence to our governance. To draw on the expertise and professionalism of those who have dedicated their lives to public service. To include more citizens from all walks of life to address systemic racism and economic inequality. And to look to science to conquer the coronavirus.
Last Tuesday, Joe Biden received more votes for president than any candidate in our nation’s history. Then again, Donald Trump received the second most. In his speech Saturday night, the president-elect reached out to Trump supporters, imploring all Americans to “put away the harsh rhetoric” and to end “this grim era of demonization.”
What, do you suppose, are the chances of that?
...writing in the LA Times...
DeleteHow stupid must Al Franken and those who pushed him to resign over sexual misconduct "allegations" feel in light of Donald Trump receiving 73-million votes for a second term as president, after bragging about sexual misconduct? If Franken had bragged about his conquests and produced videos as proof, maybe he would be president.
ReplyDeleteWith 73 million votes don't expect the Republicans to change the way they do business. Unless, and it is a long shot at best, that we take both Senate seats in Ga. not much will change.
DeleteI live in a cove in Desoto Co. Mississippi. I have a wonderful black family that lives beside me and a mixed married couple two houses down. They are all young and great friends. Saturday when Biden was called the winner we toasted in my driveway with shots of brandy. They are the only non-Trumpers in the cove. Trump took this county by 96%. The only white democrats I know are my daughter and son-in-law plus his family who moved here last summer. We have, over the years, been able to keep yard signs out of the cove. We don't put them up and we discourage others from doing it. It is like shooting the middle finger at your neighbors. How ever you vote, we all still live here and at any time may need help. A pissed off neighbor is unlikely to answer the door. It worked fine until a real Trumper moved in three houses down from me, first thing he did before all his stuff was moved in was put up a sign. A week later another sign went up across from him and one more down the street---all I can say is I hope his house doesn't catch fire.
ReplyDeleteEd, that's an intriguingly ambiguous "his house" in the final sentence. You may of course have meant to refer to the house either of the black family or of the mixed-marriage couple. But, then, it could be the "real Trumper's" house you refer to, and your modest comment here among Moristotelians could be hint that you might just know somebody with arson on his mind....
DeleteEd, your line "How ever you vote, we all still live here and at any time may need help" intrigues me. In a crisis, do you really believe you could count on your Trumpist neighbors, even if they don't know you don't agree with them, and therefore aren't one of them?
ReplyDeleteThe pro vs anti-Trump numbers, and the racial divide, seem about the same there as where I live in Southwest Virginia. My wife and I - and our too often too outspoken six-year-old son - are the only white anti-Trump people for blocks around. We are on very friendly terms with many of our black neighbors; we only have one white neighbor that we share more than a brief wave or a terse "hey" with. Not our fault, btw, it just seems all of our conservative white neighbors are always looking for something - anything - to start a hassle about. We just got tired of every attempt at conversation with them devolving into listening to them gripe about the other neighbors. The couple that is the worst of the lot don't seem to like anyone around here - black or white - and yet they are the ones with the barking dogs and loud vehicles, and who always seem to be running a lawnmower or some other very loud power equipment at first or last light.
When I used to see these most troublesome of our neighbors struggling with a project, I would walk over to lend a hand. They have never done the same - except to say that I'm stupid for tackling more than I'm capable of handling and that I should hire a pro - and then walk away shaking their heads.
When I think about your situation, and mine, I have to wonder if we would be just as well off putting up billboards vividly advertising our politics, as we would trying to smooth over neighbor relations by not showing our hand. I hesitate to generalize, but I have come to think there is a certain type of person who tends to be radical right enough to support Trump, and I think that type of person also tends to be so inconsiderate and self-centered they aren't going to be bothered to do anything that doesn't directly benefit them.
Paul I learned a long time ago that I can't control how other people act, but I do have control over how I act. while I say the guy that put up the signs can go to hell---I would more than likely help in a bad situation.
DeleteAs a “foreigner” in the USA I heaved a huge sigh of relieve reading this blog! Since 2016 I have been very perplexed as to why Americans voted for Trump as the years rolled on and he continued to say publicly incredible “stuff” and the rest of the world sat opened mouthed at his crassness and evil stance to everyone and everything except money and his family (although I suspect even his family apart from Ivanka aren’t high up there either!) one could only wonder just how stupid and money driven was this so called “great” country!
ReplyDeleteThen I looked inward at my country of birth and realised that there will always be a cohort of “stupid” people who due to their “stupid” parents will only ever vote for one particular political party, regardless of who is the head!
The USA is a victim of this generational voting, they align themselves with one party- usually the one who is for the “working” man- and no matter how badly they do in power will still vote for them the next time. They see this party as the one who “understands” their situation and will help them better themselves but nothing could be further from the truth.
What that party sees are “suckers and losers” that they can con and manipulate.
Trump is a first class conman and has used his “power” to convince the 73million that he and he alone can save them and because they need to believe that they are not 9nly worth saving but that they deserve to be saved and be better than the “others” whilst n truth they’re just regular and not ever going to be anyth8ng other than regular.
The point is there is nothing wrong with being regular but the USA has created a sub level of “everyone can be great” and that’s a falsehood!
There is nothing wrong in coming second or third or even last if you tried your best and worked hard but that doesn’t exist here.
You either are first and a winner or you’re a loser so it’s n wonder that there is now a generation who think their right and that if they say something then it’s the right answer and anyone who disagrees with that is wrong and needs to be corrected or worse!
The reason this blogger sees things differently is that he’s been outside the USA and realises there’s a whole world out there and different approaches so can make an informed choice and opinion as he’s seen it first hand,
This situation is akin to Hitler who politically convinced his disgruntled followers that they deserved to be the superior race and if they followed him that’s what the world would also see and rest as they say is history!
73million is a huge number and I can only cling to the hope that the majority of them will settle down and see the situation for what it really is - a competition where there is 9nly one legal winner - Biden- and this time they were on the losing side- history will be an interesting read on this election and what came before and what unfolds from now on!
Our cove is more or was more older people. There is a young white couple who moved in two house down from me, He is in the Army National Guard. We made a point of meeting him as he moved in and one of the things we explained to him was that we tried to keep politics out of the cove. I'm sure he is a Trump supporter but he has come over a had beers with us and has a beautiful little girl about two and a half. We talk about any thing but politics. My neighbor, Randy, who died this last summer was on a oxygen machine. He was a Vietnam Vet and when we met outside we talked about being in the Army. A couple summers ago we had a storm and electricity went out. It got hot in the house fast so we went outside. While setting there I decided to check on Randy. When I got in his house he was on a small tank of emergency oxygen. I hollered at Janie to go get Bobby my black friend next door. Between the two of us we got a generator going and his air supply back running and in the mean time our other neighbor called Entergy and told them we had older people on oxygen machines. We became number one on the list to be turned back on. Randy was a Trumper but he was also my friend, You can be friends with people even if you don't understand them--just not real close friends. Now the guy that broke the rules and put up signs, no one even waves at him any more.
ReplyDelete