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.