Who Are These People?

I must have some wretched vestige of human hope and empathy still inside me, struggling to stay alive in its molten bath of booze, spleen and bitter rationality, because I look at the “protesters” – I’m not sure about those quotes, they are protesting – in D.C. this weekend, on the eve of the final delivery of the Electoral College ballots, finally summoning That Asshole to the national-office exit hatch... and I try to understand them.

I try, like everyone, try to conjure scenarios of “bereavement” or theories of “conspiracy thinking” that might explain their impassioned behavior. What are they thinking? Who are these people? (The news photos, discreetly buried on page 28 in the Times this Sunday, showcase at least a thousand, maybe several, flag-waving, moonshiner-bearded, beer-belly hayseeds “marching” around the capitol.)

This little soft-headed human inside me, I wish he would shrivel and vanish already. He is a drain on the system – we should all be catastrophically sick and tired of these pro-Assholers, and also sick of trying to “understand” them. Fuck these dim-wits. How much media space has been Hoovered up these past four years with scholars, pundits, academics and everyone else mustering complex and fascinating theories as to why these raging miscreants are in fact as pig-ignorant as they seem to be? What could it be? Every time they say it’s economic woes or a “sense of being neglected” – I’m gonna cry – we then read first-person pro-Asshole testimony from affluent middle-classers energetically engaged. Their testimony is, always, vaguely bigoted and entirely ignorant of the last four years’ of news. I see really expensive pro-Asshole trucks in my town outfitted with thousands of dollars worth of gear (and signage), driven by ‘Mericans with thousands of dollars of tattoos, and I’m thinking, no theory we’ve come up with yet has touched this mushroom patch at all.

Then of course the media voices are arguing back and forth about whether there should be any ex-President prosecution going on, which they say is a bad idea because “they” will get upset. So, the uninformed mood of a massive herd of Barbary apes is going to decide whether or not we have a rule of law at all? It’ll be even more ”divisive,” they say – which sounds kinda like deciding to ignore dinosaur bones because we don’t want to compel the Creationists to give up their fairy tales.

I don’t have an answer to these people – and I don’t want us to waste more time and energy looking for one. Most other developed nations in the world have figured out a way of A) educating most of their population adequately, and B) sidelining the portion of their citizenry that are incorrigible fucknuts. We haven’t, and until we do, with a vengeance, we’ll be the Fucknut Nation, marinated in spittle, finger on the trigger, ready to fuck things up without even an evil Cheney-style plan that won’t work.

Or maybe it’s this simple: for the last 70 or so years, the mad doctors have run the asylum – and, however evil and deplorable it was, at least the asylum ran. Now, it’s the inmates’ turn.