Chappie Wants to Know Why Didn't He Get Sprinkles on HIS?

I have mercifully left off posting during the main months of the run-up election cycle. Among the trillions of words sputtered out in inchoate rage and blithering, ignorant stupidity since the beginning of the year are none if any of mine. Not that I wasn't tempted...the apparent general permission to babble like an idiot or bark like a dog that so many seem to have availed themselves of this year was hard to pass up. I'm only human! Yes, you're very welcome. But every good thing must end....  That being said, I will keep this short...

Chappie has grasped the fact that the essence of the Republican Spirit is not actually a desire for more of their favorite expressed drug--Liberty, but the fear that someone will get (without apparent labor or effort) something that "Joe Bimbo" has or wants or has worked for for a long time, for example a white, tricked out Lexus LS just like the one in the Bimbo's driveway. What's George Jefferson doing with MY car? It's like jonesing for the Joneses, the agonizing anguish that someone will get something that he doesn't "deserve." Think of it as reverse covetousness. The Bimbos, Joe and Jill, worry about this constantly and apply this concern to almost everyone they see whom they don't know and who has anything that the Bimbos themselves regard as desirable. If the possessors of said stuff are alien to the Bimbos' keen eyes (they speak a foreign language or possess a deliciously tawny complexion), the Bimbos' suffering goes into overdrive and they start picking at each other. Sometimes this leads to make-up sex, but not often. And this agonizing fear drives them mad over time. Of course, whenever Joe and Jill receive something that they didn't obviously deserve, they tend to be quiet about it OR if a not very bright version of the Bimbos, to celebrate it in obliviousness to the irony of the situation. And so it goes.

For the record and in the interests of discussing the relative merits and demerits of Right and Left, Chappie will hereafter refer to symbolic Republicans as Joe and Jill Bimbo and Democrats as Don and Diane Key (DonKey? Get it?). I hope this seems like an equitable distribution of silly names.

 Equus africanus asinus                                 © Isidor Stankov/Shutterstock.com

Anyway, as I was about to say when I rudely interrupted myself, this outraged Republican angst is understandable. Furthermore, the something that Diane Key gets that she doesn't deserve is likely to be something the outraged Jill Bimbo doesn't have but has always secretly wanted and been working towards. The deeper mystery of the Bimbo personality/weltanschauung is its intensely zero-sum nature, the sense that someone else's having or getting or winning entails the Bimbos not having or giving up or losing. In a free and productive economic system like ours (the very thing that attracts most immigrants) this is a failure of imagination and a sad thing.

When the Republican type (claiming allegiance to notions of personal responsibility and moral superiority) perceives some other achieving something that the Republican adjudges this other undeserving or unworthy of, emotions run high and the other's business becomes the Republican's concern. We can see the same dynamic operating in Republican opposition to other people having the right to marry whom they like, to other people having the right to control access and outcomes involving their bodies, in other people having the opportunity to vote, in other people having a right to valid, free public education, with other people having the right to temporary public assistance to feed their children. Seemingly the only  liberty issues Republicans have that are actually about imagined restrictions on their own possessions, are the obsession with guns and taxes.  The link just above is to a poignant scene on YouTube I came upon the other day. I freely point out that I possess no inside knowledge about the political affiliation of "Kimmy," the woman staring in the video linked above whose arguments and behavior I will be describing and commenting on, but I claim the Right of Stereotype here, anyway. Conversely, I admit that these Republican virtues I am apparently castigating are shared to some degree by all humans. It's just that the cup runneth over with most of those who self-identify as Republicans.  Everyone on both sides of the political divide seems to regard herself as superior to the other in any number of ways, so I guess everybody can't be either right or wrong, can he?

The cellphone recorded video linked above is of a woman (Kimmy!) verbally assaulting a man in a checkout line with his child, ostensibly because the man was using food stamps (her hard-earned money.) This video came to my attention when it was fully described at a respected liberal website, Raw Story without much editorializing. For the record there have not been any food stamps involved for many years, nor any of the corruption associated with that form of transaction. Participants have a debit card. Perhaps prejudice requires a false description of reality as it's first principle, Kimmy?

 

Upon being verbally encroached upon (in the presence of his small child) for carrying out a completely legal and valid financial transaction, the man (who looks like a "Skeeter" to me) explains to his attacker that he is a working father working "50-60 hours a week" to support his family. He is under no conceivable requirement to explain himself to this obnoxious woman (whom I'm calling "Kimmy" in honor of the heroic Kentucky office holder, thrice-divorced champion of vanilla marriage, Kim Davis, whom Kimmy painfully resembles in all her blousey authoritarianess) and the store should have taken steps to remove and ban her immediately, but Skeeter, bless his heart,  makes an attempt to explain himself--a fact no doubt driven in part by his own embarrassment at using the SNAP program. Poor people are actually not smug about their poverty! Ignoring his trapped response (he has a small child in his care) and perverting it's sense, Kimmy snarls that SHE supports his family. 

Now, we know nothing about these two real people besides what the poor quality video reveals. For the sake of argument, Chappie chooses to believe the best of both parties: Kimmy is a hard-working taxpayer who is not, according to her, a "bleeding heart liberal" and Skeeter is a struggling parent finding it impossible to make ends meet without availing himself and his family of "food stamps." Perhaps the most impressive thing about Skeeter is what he does not do: he doesn't make any cruel, sexist references to Kimmy's doughy appearance or invite her to worship certain regions of his anatomy, as Chappie almost certainly would have done. Go Skeeter!

 

 

Food stamps, so-called, are actually "plastic"--the chief function of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP which cost the US taxpayer "$74.1 billion in fiscal year 2014 and supplied roughly 46.5 million Americans with an average of $125.35 for each person per month in food assistance." This wasn't all the money they spent on food, just a supplement. 76% of SNAP benefits go towards households with children. It's fair to suppose that this assistance kept these people from going hungry in The Greatest Country in the World. If Kimmy knew the facts, she might have just a hint of a smile on her face. Her Republican House of Representatives cut the SNAP program by $8.7 billion in the 2014 Farm bill (they had tried for $39 billion but were blocked by Obama's veto threat) at the same time that they increased subsidies for corporate farming by a $6 billion increase in subsidized crop insurance.

To the extent that Kimmy pays any Federal income tax, she may be supporting the man's food stamps with her taxes (not her money--by definition, your taxes due are NEVER your money but what is due the government for providing you with the environment in which to live safely from the moment you "earn" anything.)  Chappie thinks it is healthy, realistic to realize that your taxes are never your money. Imagine how you think about your mortgage and the earnings that go to support it--your earnings are "spent" the moment you earn them, no?

Anyway, $74 billion is a lot of money. If we accept the widely documented fact that SNAP is a very effective program in alleviating hunger in America, then we should ask ourselves what $74 billion dollars represents to us? Well, we spent $60 billion on our pets last year. Every penny worth it, I'm sure. It's not clear to Chappie whether this figure includes funds spent to euthanize nearly 3 million dogs and cats whom nobody wanted? According to Market-watch (as Chappie did a quick check for facts) five years ago, "Americans spent a whopping $33.3 billion on cosmetics and other beauty products in 2010, up 6% from 2009, according to the Commerce Department." We also spent nearly $13 billion in 2014 on aesthetic plastic surgery (92% by women) and that overwhelmingly for breast augmentation.  Don't get mad...I'm just sayin'...

Lest you think these amounts constitute discretionary spending that no one really needs to spend, check out the price of our prisons, places where the inmates get, in additional to mental and other forms of torture, room, board and medical care 24/7/365: $80 billion. Or then there's the cost of automobile accidents: $871 billion. These numbers make me dizzy. Then there's the cost of the Pink Tax, the many percents that women in America and elsewhere spend extra for the same products that men buy. A California study estimates that it costs women an extra $1400 per year. If we consider that a third of our population are "women" (the other two thirds being "men" and "children") we come out with a figure around 150 BILLION extra that women pay every year for being women. That means you, too, Kimmy. So get off Skeeter's case, OK? Compliment him on his kid.

Chappie supposes that "Kimmy" is not a hypocrite since she is clearly too factually challenged to know that what she is claiming to know about Skeeter is basically not true and certainly would give the lie to her claim of being a Christian (as I'm sure she does and is...whatever that means.) Skeeter and I are similarly on a fishing expedition to assume that someone with a dreadfully perverted and ironic sense of entitlement and a rabid a social persona is a Republican when she is probably just an anguished meme escaped from cyberspace into our reality.

Attention Shoppers!  

Special on Hello Kitty TUTUS in Aisle 21-A!!!!

  

Chappie is Poopin' His Pants at the Thought of What's Comin'

 

  Chappie (no, that's not Chappie!) may look to you like a cute robot who has seen better days, but he's really just an aging white male American. Read this and weep, but only if sitting or lying down. Finally someone (Thomas Edsall in the NY Times) has written a 2016 electoral analysis that scares the hell out of me.  I feel like Dr. Bruce Banner staring at his image in a future-revealing mirror. Yikes! Green? Edsall's implied conclusion says that this election is (now that Trump is actually in the final and only a trip to the voting booth away) about white people and our secret (even to ourselves in many cases) feelings and attitudes about non-white people and the fact that WE can vote however WE FEEL in SECRET.  Hunh?

Because we block the admission of it from our own consciousnesses, people seldom if ever admit that they harbor racist convictions or feelings. Only 10% of whites consider themselves to be racist, but 38% of whites consider blacks to be racist. Apparently the fact that blacks would seem to have some cause to feel so doesn't penetrate this irony-free group's logic center. Nor does the obvious operation of psychological projection at work in the white mind. This dichotomy gives some idea of the mountain of distortion we all have to surmount. We monsters never see ourselves as such. 

Typhoid Mary was similarly clueless.

Edsall's argument, supported by evidence you must read, suggests that Trump is much closer to being elected than most of us imagine because he really is a one issue candidate whose issue is disguised by all the insults, bad taste and babble: Trump is the candidate of white resentment and white resentment of non-whites and the atavistic warp and weave of the contemporary world is much greater than (white) people with college degrees and liberal credentials realize. Since I write as a college educated white man, I leave it to other-defined people to figure out to what extent you may be kidding yourselves about what is coming. We will all face the same shit storm if it arrives.

So, racists almost never accept that they are racists. Perhaps Dylan Roof does? But racists are also generally sexists as well, since both are based on a conviction of human and gender inequality. I have given up on the apparently educated women who can't decide if they are "feminists" or not? Don't worry, 95% of the world's men know what you are and are just waiting to put you back in your place--and you thought it was only the women and girls of Kabul who needed to worry? 

I argue that there are two kinds of racists. I distinguish between racists who are "happy" with what they are and wouldn't change a thing (David Duke) and racists who sense that there is something "off" about their positions and are amenable to change given time and persuasion. Their hearts are still racist but their heads are further evolved and encourage them to get on the right side of history--or just the right side. George Wallace, the Alabama segregationist governor, was one such. He changed even his heart. So was Abraham Lincoln. Many of this sort actually voted for Barrack Obama once or even twice (given that he is an exceptional individual whose gifts and personal qualities were obvious to all when he first ran for office.) Even the other kind of racists like "their" colored friends.

The Democratic voters who may vote for Trump are many of the same ones who are now voting for Bernie. WHAT?  You don't see it?  If you are a working class male Democrat with job and other insecurity, Bernie with his talk of jobs and corrupt elites will appeal to you far more than the elite- connected Hillary. If Bernie became the Democratic candidate, you might actually have voted for Bernie--A SOCIALIST.

Of course, all of this silliness derives from the fact that perhaps a plurality of voters think of their campaign choice as a shopping expedition, a product choice (Let's give android a chance for a change, eh?)--actually believe the promises the candidates make or that the candidates (however sincere) have a snowball's chance of delivering on ANY of their pie-in-the-sky promises. Build a wall to the sky, Donald? Deport 11 million people, you pompadoured asshole? A "political revolution" Bernie? Free college education? This endlessly repeated "revolution" phrase alone should disqualify you from serious consideration. Want to know what a revolution (call it a civil war and look at who owns most of the guns, you NRA bashers!) gets you? Look around and find one that you'd like to emulate. Such talk is jejune nonsense, well-meaning and irresponsible as well-meaning people's passions so often are. The Road to Hell, Burnie.  Don't forget old Voltaire who knew everything about oligarchs and bullshit dreamers:  Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

The better is the enemy of the good. 

Seriously. 

But without Bernie and his charming, elderly male warmth, you, Shopper, are faced with someone you can't abide--how then can you vote for HER? Don't forget, if you ever knew it, that the rise of the National Front in France corresponded with the virtual disappearance of the Communist Party as a factor in French politics. The former Communists in a significant degree went to the racist, nationalistic, anti-Semitic National Front after 1970. Is that too much information?

The situation is a bit different with sexism since sexist ideology is hardly as stigmatized as the racist variety and is actually fostered in many cultures and cultural groups and religions, etc. Wow, it's a sexist world! The list of cultures that are not sexist and homophobic is by far a short list. Even inter-cultural groups share this: look at the music scene.

In short, Trump's chances are bolstered even further by the implicit, rock-solid sexist vote in this election. All the young women who reject the doughty Hillary for the adorable über sprite Bernie and react snippily that they are free to vote for the candidate of their choice regardless of gender--are, in my humble feminist male opinion, daft cunts who won't have any choice when it comes to their bodies (after Trump and his advisers reorganize the SCOTUS along racist, atavist male dominant lines) and won't have to worry about ever having another vaguely progressive serious woman candidate to vote for in their lifetimes. 

Of course, Trump may choose Sarah Palin as his VP and support her to succeed him after he's finished with us. Think that's ridiculous? Really? Who are you to measure the ridiculous? Insults and contumely are and will be your lot in life, GIRLS, until you get a clue and TAKE power and stop voting for Daddy or Gramps (Note that I didn't use the N-word, just the C-word and nothing will happen to me unless an asteroid swings off course--a risk I'll run.) Hillary, for all her negatives (whatever that means) is your one and only choice. Sadly, you may live long enough (six months?) to see that I am SADLY correct. 

Make me a liar, Bitches.

The feeling of equanimity I experience having a man like Barack Obama living and working in the White House will be gone in less than a year. I will probably never experience such a feeling again. I am surrounded by many nice people who seem to imagine that because a number of important battles have been narrowly won, that the tide of history has turned and a just world for all people is assured. (We're on the right side of history!) Well, let Trump be elected and WHITE atavism hold sway for a time, and you won't even be able to remember this Age of Barry.

This potential election of a white atavist man over a modern white woman offers the chance for a double whammy in reasserting the last hurrah of White Male Supremacy over bird, beast and bush. It could prove to be a perfect storm of racist, atavistic stupidity putting "the lesser breeds without the law" and the goddamned feminazis BOTH back in their proper places! I'm really scaring myself here. One thing I am absolutely certain of: should Trump be elected, America will wake up on November 9th feeling immediate buyer's remorse. Too late, Motherfuckers! Many who would be embarrassed to admit voting for Trump, will have thought they were registering a protest vote--that Trump could never win--THIS is how clueless we voters can be.

 

Edsall makes one point abundantly clear: the next and final test Trump faces will happen in the privacy of the voting booth where every voter can do whatever he or she wishes and NEVER have to answer for it, much less admit it to anyone, even in time to herself.* The country's fate could depend on millions of disappointed, confused and foolishly bitter white people NOT voting with their emotions...   Does anyone want to take that bet?

This moment feels like the 1980 and 2000 elections would have to me, if I had had sense enough to realize that white resentment could elect boobs like our 40th and 43rd presidents. I didn't. We did. How about our 45th?

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* My late parents, staunch Democrats and anti-racists, were also Eisenhower Democrats who supported Nixon in 1960. I was "politically active" as an 11 year old Protestant in a Catholic school tasked with being Chairman of the Republican Party in the mock election. Nixon got 4 votes, Kennedy 83, and I scored points with the nuns for being their patsy (this was partial revenge for my having been the #1 student in Catechism class for two years running despite being one of only two Protestants in the school. Sandra, the other Protestant, was usually #2. I developed a disdain for roman Catholic intellectuals that lasted until I met the work of Gary Wills and others years on. I still regard Jesuit training as duplicitous and deficient.) No matter, I supported Nixon all the way. Anyone remember his running mate? Henry Cabot Lodge. His campaign slogan? "Give 'em and inch and they'll take a mile!" (spoken of Red China's failed efforts to capture two doughty little coastal islands, Quemoy/Kinmen and Matsu, controlled by Taiwan.) My mother was critical of JFK and felt competitive with Jackie--this is my clear, uninterrupted memory. I don't remember Mom speaking well of JFK until he was dead, yet for at least the last 30 years of her life, my scrupulously honest mother insisted sincerely that she had voted for Kennedy. The idea that she had voted for Nixon (whom she had come to detest by '68) was utterly alien to her idea of herself. Looked at another way, how could I have been the only reactionary little swine in the family? Our neighbors, the liberal Crispells were great fans of JFK and since I adored the Crispell girls (to the extent an 11 year old boy could adore girls), the question arises how I could have been an adherent of Tricky Dick, someone they thought little of? Children obviously adopt the politics of their parents until they reach the age of rebellion, which was not eleven in those days.