"Oh Lord, please don't
let me be misunderstood"
by David Benjamin
“As members of the winning team, Trump supporters have no urgent need to understand the other side.”
— Amanda Hess, The New York Times
PARIS
— Pundits — especially the sensitive, liberal ones — keep telling me
how important it is to understand the complexities, anxieties and pain
of the “angry” nihilists whose votes put Donald Trump in the Oval
Office, in his bathrobe at 4 a.m., with the nuclear button an inch away
from his twitchy little finger.
I’ve heard, ad nauseam,
from experts on the op-ed page, trolls on Facebook and drunks in bars
that I’m powerless to pierce the mystery that shrouds all those
pissed-off white guys who think they’re somehow special for just being
white, who barely passed high school (or didn’t), who can’t find a
fulltime job and if they did they couldn’t hold it, and they haven’t
read a book voluntarily since the onset of puberty.
Understand?
Why?
I have yet to meet a white nationalist who wants to understand me.
I’ve
never encountered a machine operator, a loading-dock hand, or a cashier
at Walgreen’s who wanted to plumb my psyche and peer into my soul.
In
all the months I worked at Addison Steel in Orlando, not one of the
welders, fitters, painters, truckers and rednecks there showed any
interest in the range and depth of my burgeoning intellect.
My
career at Beacon Auto Radiator flew by without an inkling of concern,
from my fellow autoworkers, about my spiritual well-being or emotional
needs. Nothing!
In my two summers at the cannery in Waunakee, I
fielded not one single probing question from my blue-collar peers about
my philosophy of life, my favorite poet, my preference between Miro and
Picasso. They just didn’t seem to care.
This pattern seems to run
pretty much the whole gamut of all the factories, car washes,
warehouses, kitchens and farms where I worked, hauled, crawled and
mopped to pay my way through, high school, college and alimony.
Is
it me? Do I seem unapproachable? Did my erstwhile co-workers secretly
ache to know, to understand me, but they were shy, tongue-tied,
intimidated by my steely gaze, my Freudian beard and my 69 inches of
stature? Or did they just not give a shit?
Perhaps they pity me.
In recent encounters with these horny-handed sons of toil about politics
or Trump, I always re-discover how naive and childlike I am, how
unschooled, compared to them, in the ways of the “real world.” I’m soft,
effeminate and cloistered, they explain. I have no grasp of reality.
I’ve never had to fight for anything, never had to get my hands dirty,
never looked into an empty pantry with two kids hungry and three days
’til payday.
I “don’t get it.”
Get what? What’s to get? And why is it so hard to get?
Over
the years, often to keep my job, I’ve had to “get” some pretty hard
stuff. I’ve had to to understand — and then explain to people even more
ignorant than me — issues in the law, for example, or physics,
education, polymer chemistry, beta blockers, electronics, assembly-line
technology, finance, sports, journalism, ethics, religion, Jerusalem in
the first century, food, travel, art, microwave radiation, pottery,
computerized tomography, exercise physiology, photography, cellular
telephony, just-in-time inventory control, Japanese gangsters,
literature, poetry, music, the law of diminishing marginal returns, and
the migration of ions through a semi-permeable membrane. I wrote a whole
book about sumo.
So… as a lifelong know-it-all, I find
particularly galling the charge that I cannot grasp the angst of a
restive throng who wear their grievance on their bumpers, on t-shirts
and on the front panel of their adjust-o-band baseball caps.
Besides, they’re wrong about me. I get it. I understand.
Most
of us understand. It’s not rocket science to appreciate and empathize
with the anguish of folks who’ve been denied, foreclosed, fired,
demoted, red-lined, evicted, stopped, frisked or otherwise screwed by
the system. After all, most of us — more than Trump’s true believers can
possibly understand — have also been screwed by one system or another.
You live long enough, you’re gonna get screwed.
Just
about everyone where I grew up in Tomah — neighbors, friends, family,
classmates — got screwed somewhere along the way. The grownups all
around me had worked hard, with their hands, on their knees, up ladders
and down holes every day. For all this, they barely got by, squeezed
every nickel, and never took a vacation longer than two weeks or farther
than the back yard.
Every man I knew in my childhood was a white
working class male, in a white working-class town in flyover,
trailer-park America. My grandfathers were a plumber and a machinist.
Neither had ever seen the inside of a high school. Dad was a bartender.
Mom was a high-school dropout single parent who sold washer-dryers,
waited on tables and cheated on the Welfare Department to keep food in
the fridge.
All the women and men whom I knew, admired, loved and
trusted — except my teachers — were undereducated. Most were
underemployed, at jobs that insulted their innate intelligence. They
sweated all their lives and ended it all with a pittance. All along,
they knew they’d been handed the shitty end. They knew that the wealth
earned by their work would mostly serve to enrich a handful of strangers
living in towers in faroff places who didn’t give a rat’s ass who these
people were and whether their jobs would give them cancer and kill them
before their time.
They understood that the system, as Bernie
and Trump revealed to no one’s surprise, is rigged. Always was. In the
mantra of my grandfather, Archie: “Them what has, gets.”
Despite
this fate, those forebears — my role models — fought it out. They kept
struggling, set aside a few dollars and a lot of hope for their kids,
and they survived. At times, they even thrived, because they chose not
to let the system break their spirit. They never looked for someone to
blame — at least not when they were sober. They never succumbed to
self-pity.
Then, at some point after Vietnam, that spirit
dissolved. America became a nation of victims. Battered by oil sheiks
and ayatollahs, by housing bubbles and the Great Recession, by 9/11 —
especially 9/11 — and egged on by demagogues waving the dark flag of
fear, fear and fear itself, we accepted our national defeat.
There’s
a familiar pathology to victimhood. Victims have few friends and many
enemies, most of whom they’ve never met. They’re isolated, like the
solitary lush at the end of the bar weeping into his Miller. Bring them
together and they form not a team, but a mob. They chant, roar, curse,
throw stuff and look for someone to beat up, lynch, stone, burn at the
stake.
Victims don’t ask questions, don’t seek answers, don’t
expect solutions. There are no solutions. They’ve given up. The best
they can hope for is catharsis.
Donald Trump is a giant bladder
swollen with catharsis. He articulates their self-pity, magnifies their
paranoia and validates their bellyache. He’s a face on a t-shirt, with
no answers longer than 140 characters. His followers will remain
victims. Their only consolation will be a pack of lies direct from the
White House. He’ll screw them and they’ll love him, as they blame others
for their plight and feel oh, so sorry for themselves.
They say we should try to understand this.
We already do.
To hell with understanding.
For
the sake of their children and our democracy, we have to rescue these
ignorant yahoos from their abyss and welcome them back to the America
they’ve forsaken.
The only way to do that is to beat them.
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
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1 comment:
Ouch. Sounds like this Paris trip isn't going as well as it could?
Beat them how?
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