Look, I know it's been a million years and it's not like folks have exactly been clamoring for the return of this dumb blog (or, really, any blog). But I have got to stop talking to myself in the car, even if mobile devices provide plausible deniability that someone else is actually listening to me rant. They do, right? Or is there a TikTok out there called "Crazy white lady speechifying to no one in her Passat?"
I've been listening to the Slate Slow Burn podcast about the Clinton impeachment. At one point, one of the players in the whole gross thing talked about how she supported it since Bill Clinton was disrespecting the same office that Ronald Reagan wouldn't even enter unless he was wearing a jacket.
That was how literary agent Lucianne Goldberg justifies telling Linda Tripp that she was making a good and moral choice to secretly tape her conversations with Monica Lewinsky. I mean, this is rationalization as an art form!
Also: Do you think Goldberg imagines respectful Reagan in his jacket, ignoring the tens of thousands of gay American men dying of AIDS under his watch? How about when he was fine tuning his toxic, racist "welfare queen" myth? Maybe as he was engineering the "trickle down" economic policies that are why we're all gonna have to work until we drop (basically so Jeff Bezos can have $182 billion instead of only $80 billion, like a common dock worker or something!)
The way that so many on the American right perform respectfulness while supporting policy that does deep, sustained damage to real American citizens. I hate it.
It is not all I hate.
In service to my plan to really lean into grumpy middle-aged lady, oh my god, I hate those two damn Aaron Sorkin clips from West Wing and The Newsroom that lefties have been sharing on Al Gore's internet since the day he bestowed it upon us. It's not just that the image of middle-aged men wagging their fingers and hollering at young women irritates me on a molecular level... although it really really does. And it's not my endless frustration with Sorkin's undying conviction that we can only be led from the desert by a good-talking white man. What gets me the most is the sheer number of people who seem to believe it. People who believe that when confronted with their hypocrisy and venality by passionate, honest, and, most importantly, real good-talking white men, the bad guys will be moved to change. They'll stand up like the religiloon Bartlett yelled at. They'll be chagrined like the girl that Jeff Daniels broadly insulted using incredibly sexist language... I'm sorry, I meant to say "the young woman to whom Jeff Daniels told the truth about America."
Y'all. If the ghost of Joseph Welch, bedecked in chains all Jacob Marley style, showed up at his bedside and said "at long last, have you no dignity," Mitch McConnell would sigh, say "it's adorable you think I give a hoot about dignity," tuck his head back into his shell and carry on with whatever evil fucking plan he has to wrest democracy away from American citizens and into the hands of his fellow soulless rapacious American money goblins.
Lookit, I am a big fan of good talking. I love a soaring speech. I'm a pacifist and a coward, but I think that "once more unto the breach" thing would have had me reaching for the nearest broadsword. A good speech inspires people to action, makes them feel less alone in the world, less crazy in their awareness of how scary things are. I come not to bury Sorkin, but to praise him (untrue - I am not a fan, but even he would allow me a wee rhetorical flourish). I love a good speech. But they will move not a single Trump fan and it is dangerously naive to think they will.
Lucianne Goldberg, and all those obscenely wealthy Republican power brokers are far too comfortable worshipping at the wholly fictional altar of Ronald Reagan and "respect" and "dignity" to be made uncomfortable. Republican senators have been inoculated against shame. The regular folks who have leaned into Trumpism cannot be pried away from the "fake news" defense. Good speechifying, as much as I love it, will not bring folks who've made a virtue of naked power grabbing into the liberal fold. They're a lost cause.
America is not. I don't believe that we are a lost cause. But we're gonna have to drag those motherfuckers along to progress as they dig in and resist at every turn. We're gonna have to prise their wallets out of a vise grip to make 'em pay their taxes. We cannot talk them into caring.
Also, FWIW, you're probably not actually going to bring a 20 year old into the fold by calling her "sorority girl" and talking about her "accidentally walking into a voting booth." God, I hate that clip.
Next time I come back I'll be less grumpy. Maybe.
