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For a long time I refused to ‘other’ MAGA people. I used every tool in my admittedly small toolbox to attempt to understand and when I could not, to attempt to just tolerate. I don’t want to bury the lede here: This did not happen. I failed completely and I am a poorer and bitchier person for it and frankly, I don’t care.
I feel like putting a banner over every entrance to California that says: “Yes, you’re right. We’re all oversensitive snowflakes with gluten allergies BUT its 72 degrees here just about always and we’re all stoned 24/7”. Boo-the-fuck-ya.
I realize of course how stupid, infantile and idiotic this sounds but when my husband calls Trump supporters knuckle-dragging mouth breathers, I no longer tell him that is puerile and reductionist. I laugh.
I think its because I’m angry. I’m angry that all the progress that other Americans fought and died for is being peeled back by people whose end game I can no longer fathom.
Republicans used to be for lower taxes and less invasive government and while I rarely agreed with them, I understood them. Abortion was not a Republican issue because it was a religious issue and Republicans didn’t used to be Christian White Nationalists. Remember that? Sure, they were stodgy and obsessively anti-communist and their conventions never had the cool media stars but they were somewhat rational.
When I was in my twenties, a real WASP Republican lawyer asked me out on a date. I wasn’t the nasty, narrow minded woman then that I apparently am now. We went to a Young Republican Party at a massive house in Pasadena, which looked, both demographically and décor-wise exactly how I expected – Old money with young bright white faces living off it. There was an open bar and everyone was drinking cocktails and there was no beer, wine, water, coffee – only booze and a few mixers. Eventually a servant dressed like a servant came around with some small silver platters with stuff like rumaki and hot clam dip on crackers on it. At first I found the conversation baffling and for that reason, fascinating. All my friends were actors or some other form of artist but these guys all talked about Blue Chip mid-stocks, the folly of affirmative action and how our failure in Vietnam was that ‘we fought with one hand behind our back’.
They were low-key sexist and less low-key racist and I disagreed with every single one of their ideas BUT they weren’t vicious, they weren’t overtly crazy, they had passable manners until they got too tanked and none of them thought that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex-slave qua cannibal ring out of the back of a pizza parlor in New Jersey.
Still, after a few more thousand rounds I found the whole affair distasteful, what were we supposed to be celebrating? The fact that, due to factors beyond our control, everyone there had landed on ‘heads”?
I was too drunk by then to wonder how Skippy, who was way drunker, had managed to drive me home. I was just about to throw up when he fell over me sloppily and crudely attempt to finger me in the front seat of his Porsche as I fiddled with the car door and realized that we were totally done there.
Nowadays, the best I can manage is a vague recognition that we are all one big similar batch of DNA. It ain’t much, but I’m trying.