Oh, of course, they aren't talking about me, or so they will claim. Well, maybe they are talking about me, because I voted for Clinton without adoring her, which indicates that below my left-wing surface I'm really a Putin-loving cock holster.
What they don't get is that when they call Trump a cock holster, or post cartoons depicting Mike Pence on his knees gobbling down the Donald's manhood, they are revealing how much they despise me and every other faggot. (And by corollary, every woman.) We're the polluted bogeymen who unsettle their dreams, and no matter how much they support gay marriage they keep waking up in a cold sweat, clutching their scrotums to make sure they haven't undergone sex-reassignment surgery in the night.
A liberal Democratic Clinton supporter I know posted a video clip on Facebook the other night which he said expressed his hope that Jared Kushner will soon be in prison being violated by brutal hairy felons. I called him on it, and he accused me of trying to blind everybody with my intellect, but he wasn't cowed and would stand by his principles. He claimed that he couldn't see what I stand for; which I understand to mean that one only 'stands for' a political party, specifically its anointed and corporate-funded leadership, with fervent and unshakeable loyalty. So, opposing rape requires an advanced intellect, and fantasizing online about prison rape -- for someone else -- shows one's courageous devotion to principle? But maybe his fantasies about Kushner's ravaged rosebud are driven by economic anxiety. Whatever: it's good to know what I'm dealing with.
What I'm dealing with is an all-American, bipartisan anti-intellectualism. I'm quite used to being accused of a smarty-pants know-it-all by far right-wingers, less so by near right-wingers of the Democratic center. But the Dems are howling for the heads of pointy-headed intellectuals more and more these days. What worries me is that this guy, who seems to have trouble keeping a job (economic anxiety?), sometimes works as a substitute teacher. Sometimes he posts his contempt for his charges on Facebook. His students, good or bad, shouldn't have to defend themselves against such attacks.
Jon Schwarz had linked to "this incredibly prescient" 2012 Onion video a few days earlier on Twitter, but he presumably saw it as a harbinger of the right-wing rage that made Donald Trump the Republican presidential candidate in 2016.
And it is that, though any reasonably attentive observer would know that demented right-wing rage has always been with us. It wasn't new when Father Coughlin, a Rush Limbaugh in a clerical collar, had millions of radio listeners from the 1930s onward. Jon knows it himself, since in October he recommended a documentary about a 1939 pro-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. Hell, the Pilgrim Fathers brought this kind of rage with them from the Old World in 1620, though it already existed here among Native Americans from time immemorial.
But the same mindset can be found among nominally liberal Democrats, and never more than in the Age of Trump. This shrieking white-hot sphere of pure rage, we're informed, howled "'Guns ... Not my America', and then it just repeated "faggots' at a deafening pitch for hours and hours." When it became clear that Trump had won the Presidency in the electoral college, the shrieking white-hot sphere began winning adherents among mainstream Democrats: they began to say that Trump was not their president and his America was not their America. They fantasized about Resistance, even armed Resistance. The first human sacrifices were offered up. And liberals began repeating "faggot" at a deafening pitch for hours and days and months.
I know, I should be compassionate. I'm finding it very hard to be so, because Democratic loyalists would like me to believe that only they can stop Trump and block his dastardly designs. It doesn't look to me like they have any idea how to do so, let alone repair the damage he's already done and will continue to do. So this isn't really about them, it's about me and the other people who are Trump's and Paul Ryan's real targets as they dismantle the systems of social and economic justice that were built at such human cost in the past century.
