Why Hate Feels So Good - Social Justice And The Happy Jamboree Of Trump Loathing

Vicki Marks hated Donald Trump with a passion, and so did her friends, neighbors, and colleagues.  It was a friendly cabal of hate - nods on streetcorners, stories over the picket fence, knowing smiles, and bus rides to rallies.  

It felt good to hate, and never before in her lifelong progressivism had it felt so good.  This time around it was a soul-cleansing release.  After scouring the pots for so many years, rasping away at conservative backwardness and ignorance, now she could be as mad, foul-tempered, unrestrained like never before.  There was evil in the White House and nothing but exorcism would do. 

Each one of her venting moments with Margot down the street or Beatrice in the office or Henrietta at the gym was satisfying in a way simple political commitment was not.  There was a fire in her belly like never before.  Her life had new meaning, a clear and present purpose, a clear line of fire, an unquenchable desire. 

She was a glutton for news about Trump and flipped channels between CNN and MSNBC every morning over coffee, watched the news on the monitors at the gym, surfed the dark web for information about Trump's insider trading, collusion, corruption, and moral failure.  She fueled her hatred from the moment she woke up until the moment she went to bed.  Even her dreams were feverish with hatred. 

As counterintuitive as it may sound, hatred was happy time, an emotional orgasm for a crackly, older single woman who had been too picky to settle for second best, and a first best man had never come her way - not in the coffee houses of the East Village, not in her 9th Street non-profit, not on the barricades, and not in holding pens.  Politics is not simply a matter of preference or logical conclusion, it is the heart and soul of a person, and enhances or deforms as if it were a magic potion or vile poison. 

Vicki's hate was oxymoronic - it both rotted and corroded her insides and twisted and deformed every aspect of her outer self but gave her unlimited joy.  She might be as unappealing as a Wicked Sister, but she was bursting with joy every time she sallied forth with one of her untethered, bitter attacks on those who strayed from the progressive canon. 

The more bile that built up, the more venom that filled her viperous sacs, the more hate she felt, the happier she was.  Such hate was not a perverse obsession but the emotional force behind her sense of identity, self-esteem, and worth. 

Today was No Kings rally day on the National Mall, the biggest, most exuberant anti-Trump jamboree in the nation.  It would be featured on national television, covered widely in the press.  Thousands of women like herself would join hands and lock arms in solidarity and in mutual hatred for the incarnation of the devil. 

She couldn't wait, got up early, fed her cats who were surprised at getting fed before sunup, took her morning run under the streetlights, and waited on the stoop for the bus to come by. This was to be her day, a day like no other, a halcyon day. 

It felt so good to be with her sisters on this sparkling clear May day that she wanted to kiss them, hold them tight, go off with them and be happy forever.  They shouted, waved banners, chanted in a chorus of powerful women's voices, so much so that they almost forgot the object of their calumny, the beast in the White House.  The thousand voices ringing out from the Capitol to the Washington Monument was life-affirming, joyous, and spiritual. 

There was nothing like it.  Hate had become a raison d'etre, an expression of personhood, existential worth, and faith.  Vicki, tired but fulfilled after hours on the Mall and pub-crawling with her sisters up and down K Street, she went home. 

Few if any of these women could articulate exactly why they hated the President so much.  His policies and programs were classically conservative - closed borders, small government, private sector, strong military, traditional social values, patriotism, and individualism - and while he demonstrated a particular and unusual resolve in implementing them, he was well within Constitutional limits.  It was his opponents who resorted to fictitious claims, frivolous, unfounded lawsuits, left field impeachment attempts, and baseless information. 

Most of Vicki's friends when asked gave that 'Are you kidding?' look and railed on about racism, misogyny, homophobia, and mindless crony capitalism.  They refused to be pinned down because no pinning down was necessary.  The man's villainy was obvious, uncontested, there for all to see. 

Vicki's house seemed particularly empty this time around, perhaps because of the unbridled joy of such a large gathering, an epiphanic moment of solidarity and pure happiness; but there was a shadow of a doubt that fleetingly darkened her mood.  She was alone with her cats.  The plants needed watering. 

She shook off these morbid thoughts, rattled uncharacteristically around the kitchen, emptied the refrigerator and ate leftovers, put her head in her hands, and cried. 

'What am I doing?' she shouted, embarrassed, chagrined, and angry at herself for letting such pedestrian emotions overtake her.  She needed no man, no towheaded children, no backyard barbecues, not church dinners to make her happy.  She was as fulfilled as any woman could be. 

She looked at the calendar and saw every day filled with appointments, events, conferences, and seminars.  Every day was metro, boulot, dodo - yes, with more purpose and meaning than her neighbors who hopped on the N6 and spent laborious days at meaningless jobs; but somehow missing something, something she sensed was important but couldn't put her finger on. 

For the first time in months, she felt the bilious hatred for Donald Trump slip away.  She tried to conjure up images of him as a destroyer, a child killer, a Gestapo thug, a tyrant; but the old vaudevillian shtick was falling flat. Thank God tomorrow was the climate conference. 

Life went on like this, desultory, passionless, and increasingly morbidly without respite or recourse.  The die had been cast years ago and there was no wiggle room now.  A leopard cannot change its spots. Too many sunken costs, too much water under the dam. 

Furthermore, hate had become her personal zeitgeist.  It was as hardwired as any exogenous factor could be.  It was part of her persona.  How could it be dwindling away like this?  How could her very lifeblood be trickling from her veins?

'Is it too late?', she wondered, but could not finish the question.  Too late for what had never had to be asked; but too late for something other than this! A cat jumped on her lap but she threw it off into the corner, screeching and climbing up the curtains.  'So this is what it feels like', she thought; but there was still time to regain her footing, to rekindle the old fires, become a social justice warrior in the avant garde, the first phalanx. 

Yet, the next morning the funk had not disappeared and she had to face the day without that marvelously joyous hatred that greeted her as soon as she opened her eyes. 

'I couldn't have wasted my life', she said to herself, but that niggling doubt was there.  If after years of fighting the good fight for civil rights, gay rights, the climate, redistribution of wealth, diversity, and equity, conservatism was now the ethos of the land, the zeitgeist, the meme, what were her struggles worth?

Very little of course.  Epictetus had been right all along.  Take what comes, let it be, what goes around comes around.  La Dolce Vita is not so bad after all; but these a posteriori thoughts didn't do Vicki much good.  'You made your bed, solie in it' her mother used to say, and that was as pithy a nostrum as there ever was. 

Which didn't do Vicki any good whatsoever. 'I'm stuck'. she said; and like many old spinsters before her, fixed herself a lovely cup of tea. 

Trump In China, Haters Delight - Egg Foo Young, Chop Suey, And How Was I To Know? They All Look Alike

President Trump landed in Beijing yesterday (5.13.26) to fanfare, ceremony, and high expectations.  With him were thirty of America's top businessmen, the most influential leaders of the tech and information revolution in the country if not the world.  This was a delegation of import, weight, and influence, and it made clear that the President was bringing the captains of the new industry not only to advise him, but to show the Chinese that America was a world tech power and that concluding a favorable economic and political agreement would be in China’s interest.

 

As soon as the trip was announced, Trump haters raised a ruckus. Crony capitalism, they shouted, a Jewish cavalcade of stars, an adolescent-minded buffoon sent on a man's errand, a fool who thinks egg foo young is the jewel in the crown of Chinese cuisine, an idiot who said that he was unsure who to shake hands with 'since Chinese all look alike'. 

Maggie Flynn was well-armed for her anti-Trump screeds.  After saturating herself with every bit of damaging evidence that the trip was only in Trump's self-interest, and concluding that he was simply paving the way for post-Presidential deals for himself and his family, how could any reasonable person doubt his treachery?  

He had corralled the big men of Silicon Valley and strong-armed them to come on the China trip, threatening them with sanctions and federal investigation if they did not comply. With The Gang Of Thirty in tow, he set off on Air Force One. 

Of course he was in it to make money but for America. What else was there?  China held all the cards.  They held a whopping big piece of America's debt and could pull the plug at any time, thanks to the trillions in foreign currency and gold they held in reserve.  They, in a short space of time had become a world economic and military power, and thanks to Confucianism, their Mandarin empires, and a long history of racial and social unanimity they were strong, unified, and impregnable. 

As much as the American president at home was rolling back the worst of the divisive, corrosive, and damaging Leftist woke agenda, the country was still a side show of freakish identity politics - a clown show, the venality of Congress reeked with smarmy self interest, and the nation had lost its moral ethos.

Trump was going into the Chinese negotiations behind the eight ball and with not much of a leg to stand on.

Yet, who better to try than Trump, a man who made his living out of threat, intimidation, coercion, quid pro quo compromise, and favorable deals.  The best man to have in a card game where an opponent has all the cards - a card sharp, a bluffer, an intimidator - and Donald Trump, billionaire victor of the most brutal battlefield in the world, New York real estate, is just the man Americans should want at the table. 

 

And yet, but not surprisingly the Left wants him to fall on his face, to shame himself and the country, make ludicrous, outrageous statements far beyond the pale of diplomacy and making backroom deals with Chinese oligarchs.  

'Jews', said the haters.  There was no better sign of the international Jewish conspiracy than this stable of of Jews Trump was bringing along with him.  Icons of high tech? Yes, but in a conspiracy with Jewish bankers and financiers in collusion to establish a sub rasa power cabal of unimaginable proportions. The military alliance between the United States and Israel was no more than a cover for the expansion of world Zionism for the benefit of the Jews and the President of the United States. 

Maggie snarled at her husband who wished the President well.  'So do I', she said, but meant not a word of it.  The sooner the fool was exposed as the bigoted, capitalist tool that he was, the better.  She was as glued to the television as Nixon haters were in the days of Watergate, watching for, hoping for the stake that would be driven into the heart of the vampire of the Oval Office. 

She flipped channels and surfed the web.  CNN and MSNBC were not enough, BBC was too compromising. Commentary, The Nation, Politico, and the Daily Kos went straight to the point - the moral corruption of the President and his sycophantic family - but they too pulled their punches; so she went deep web and found arcane sites barely visible but untamed in their exposure of the President as man in the clutches of the international Jewish conspiracy, an autocrat in waiting, a bulldozing enemy of the people.  

The comments heard in Maggie’s neighborhood - a universally rock solid progressive enclave - were not surprisingly anti-Trump but this time their scorn and bilious hatred was completely unhinged.  'How will he know whose hand to shake', they laughed.  'All Chinese look alike'.  

His parade of high-tech entrepreneurs was nothing less than Robber Barons redux - a collusive billionaire cabal of men with no restraint, all marching together to engineer an AI takeover of industry, destroying the working man and his unions, creating financial instruments that beggared those of Enron, Jeffrey Skilling, and Bernie Madoff, deployed data centers in the heartland sucking energy and water, and helped engineer a two tiered American society - they, the billionaires, and everyone else. 

'Where's the egg foo young?', they chortled, 'and the chop suey?', imitating the President, a man who had not one sophisticated multicultural bone in his body and was bound to make a fool of himself in front of the world.  Yes, it would be embarrassing, but if it hastened the end of this bottom-feeding goon the better.

The Chinese politburo, reviewing the state of affairs in America had a good laugh over the No Kings rallies, the march of the transgenders on the National Mall, the hoopla over former slaves who were touted as the world's best and brightest hope, and the campus political frenzy which eroded any ethos of learning and academic excellence. 

Kowtowing to a race of racist pigs', Maggie’s neighbors said, referring to the Chinese Han hegemony.  'Tell it to the Uighurs', they said, unaware of the Muslim fundamentalism of the region which as everywhere else in the world threated civil order and social unity.  Trump wants to join the international cabal of dictators, Putin, Xi, and Trump, in an unholy alliance of soulless Machiavellian ambition, they added.   'Down with Trump', these otherwise recondite neighbors shouted.  

This China charade was the last straw, the neighbors agreed.  Destroying the federal bureaucracy in an attempt to distort and finally eliminate democratic, popular rule was one thing; sending SS Storm Troopers into American communities to round up and deport peaceful asylees was another, but this...this blatant, outrageous international collusion was more than they could take.  The guillotine was too good for this pretender, this usurper, this morally deformed creature. 

Maggie panted, breathless with the anger and hatred which had overcome her.  She stood there, open-mouthed, trembling, and lost in feverish apoplexy.  

She slowly made her way back home, but it - in all its quiet suburban charm - now seemed out of place.  Trump had defiled it, had corrupted it, had robbed it of any decency.  'What's a mother to do?' 

She rummaged through the medicine chest to see if any of her husband's hip replacement Oxycodone pills were left over, accidentally knocked the Tylenol and witch hazel into the sink, scrambled on the bottom shelf for that familiar brown plastic CVS container, and finally found them, a bit past their expiry date, but who was counting.  This day could not continue as it started. 

Trump didn't seem so bad after two Oxy, nothing did actually, so why not top it off with a stiff drink. 'I know it's a no-no', she said, 'but what the fuck', and with that she headed off into never-never land as happy as could be. 

The Success Of A Simple Man In Troubled Times - The Vacancy Of The Dull, Danglers On The Bell Curve

Doug Brandon was a simple man.  Born and raised in the shadow of the Tuscaroras to a simple family, he never lost his stolid approach to life.  'Hard work is all there is' said his father, echoing that philosophical vacancy that had characterized the Brandons for generations, a kind of unschooled nihilism which sheltered the family from the hardships of poverty and isolation.  They had been dealt a bad hand from a stacked deck, but took life as it came, the good with the bad, days sunny and stormy. 

As such Doug was never filled with unrealistic expectations or vain hopes. Someday he would leave Barkerville and make something of himself, but that something would be necessarily modest and down to earth. 

Doug was not the brightest boy in his class by any means, and he managed to make his way with some effort through the grades, ending with some distinction as the top mechanic at Lewiston juncture high school.  Dougie, as his parents knew him, was good at fixing things, especially small motors - outboards, lawn mowers, hedge trimmers - and he worked summers alongside Bill Baxter of Baxter Repair Service.

 

Baxter suggested two years at Lewiston Community College where the discipline of a technical education would stand him in good stead.  He could move from small motors to large ones, and perhaps one day he might find himself on an airline maintenance crew. 

He did as Baxter suggested - the college's fees were nominal and no strain on his family's modest budget - and he graduated with a technical diploma that was indeed his union card for employment, even in down times.  He applied for an apprenticeship with Southwest Airlines which serviced Lewiston, was accepted, and after a few years was a bona fide airline mechanic. 

The story, however, is not about Doug's career, but about the particular psychological configuration which got him through troubled times.  Being a dull, uninspiring man of limited intelligence and insight, he was able to weather the storms of a difficult economy, social dislocation, and the radical shifts in political ethos which were affecting the country. 

Now, the character of the Washington-based political opposition to the current president is well-known. In a canny but so far ineffective campaign to discredit him as a racist, homophobe, misogynist, and capitalist tool, the political left hammered away at him for over a decade.

Lawfare, impeachment, smear tactics, innuendo, and fear-mongering were all tried but failed.  However for very action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and because of the ad hominem assault on the President, the country itself became angry, divided, harshly and reflexively critical, and unquieted. 

Lewiston was small city, like many in the country not known for anything in particular, but still a reasonable place to live and work.  The county of which it was the seat was growing, and a number of major firms opened plants there.  Hankook Tires, for example, moved in thanks to a deal with Doug's community college which promised to train prospective workers if the company would hire them. 

All well and good, but Lewiston could not avoid the divisiveness, racial conflict, and social disturbance affecting the country at large. As a matter of fact, it became the locus of the most aggressive, often violent protests against the President's radical agenda.  The press took notice, and its concerted efforts to rid Washington of this menace to democracy, were well-publicized. 

Although the protests in Lewiston were seen from the outside as unified and a true political collective, they were anything but.  Black Lives Matter holdouts in one corner, angry white, deeply progressive women in another, and organized labor in a third.  These factions were constantly at each other's throats and each angrily assertive about their interests. 

The protests became routine, police barricades and crime scene tape common.  Arrests were made and talk was heard about the deployment of the National Guard.  Things went from bad to worse as a militant group firebombed a military depot causing little damage but giving the restive, angry Left the visibility it wanted. 

Doug had been approached on a number of occasions and asked to join this or that faction; but he politely demurred.  There was nothing in him - not in his character, personality, background, or life - that was suited for such a political activism.  To be brutally honest, although Doug could rivet and repair, he was as dumb as a stone.  Only thanks to his natural affinity for screws, bolts, wrenches, and hammers was he able to manage as well has he did.  Other than that he was as clueless as the day he was born. 

A co-worker at the airport, a union man angry at the administration's moves to make airport maintenance a right-to-work zone, tried to enlist Doug in his activism; but Doug, unsure what right-to-work was - the fact that he had a good job was all he knew - and constitutionally unable to parse the simplest articles of democracy, again refused.

 

When the protests threatened to shut down the airport, Doug's co-workers became more insistent on his support. Doug again thanked them but no thanks, and returned home to wait until the dust cleared so that he could go back to work. 

'What's up at the airport, hon?' his wife asked one afternoon. 

'Not much', Doug replied.  The sirens of police cavalcades down Egbert Avenue were heard day and night, but Doug slept well.  

Now, this was not from a practiced, educated stoicism or a survivalist reaction to violence.  Beyene Wolde-Gabriel, a co-worker from Ethiopia had survived the civil wars, the brutality of the dictator Mengistu, the pogroms, midnight hangings, and street mayhem by keeping his head down, a partisan of no cause but known as a quiet supporter by all.  

Such political courage and savvy was foreign territory to Doug who had trouble placing Ethiopia on the map, and as far as the territorial struggles with Eritrea and the Somali terrorists who had joined forces with both sides, he was one hundred percent ignorant.  In fact, if his co-worker had taken the time to explain the situation, his words would have gone in one ear and out the other, passing through the complete vacancy of Doug's mind. 

 

That vacancy, as little as Doug could appreciate or even acknowledge it, was what kept him afloat in troubled times.  Conrad in his novel Victory wrote about Heyst, a refugee from civilization, preferring a life of incessant wandering, devoid of attachments and commitment to entanglement.  Graham Greene in The Comedians and The Quiet American wrote about the same calculated indifference in his main characters, a kind of existential stoicism. 

All these characters are drawn into concerted action, to engagement, and to entanglement with good and bad ends; but Doug had none of their calculated indifference.  He was too ordinary, too vacant for any such ideas.  He stayed outside the fray because life propelled him that way.  He didn't so much resist his co-workers' pleas for engagement, but simply demurred.  Not the path of least resistance, nor the easy way out, but a simple complaisance, the congenital aspect of his dullness. 

There is a bell curve for everything, and intelligence is no different.  Lack of intelligence, grouped at one asymptote has many expressions.  From the persistent dysfunction of the ghetto where generation after generation intermarries within a confined, uninspired gene pool, to class dullards, clueless adolescents, one-issue politicians, minor criminals...the list is endless.  Most of these sub-par individuals cause harm, lesser or greater; but those like Dougie whose lack of brains is expressed only as vacancy, cause nothing, and in so not-doing, survive the worst of times. 

The novel Being There by Jerzy Kosinski is a satire on American politics where a simple man of limited intelligence is taken as a genius.  Chance the gardener, used to talking about the lifecycle of plants, bushes, and trees in the simplest, organic terms is thought to be speaking in brilliant metaphor, and rises up in the political world thanks to the credulousness and intellectual myopia of his handlers. 

No one ever found or recognized the advantages of vacancy in Dougie Brandon.  He just carried on, head down not out of political savvy but habit, hands always busy, emotions always on an even keel. 

Yes, Doug was as dumb as they come, and not one salient, interesting, or provocative thought ever entered his head, but such dumbness is often overlooked, rarely singled out as a positive aspect of diversity. 

The Dougies of the world are everywhere, and most lead lives of remarkable dullness - impossible to be around because of their mental immobility, they are thudding bores.  Worse even than Del Griffiths, says the Neil Page character in the movie Planes, Trains & Automobiles about his boring co-passenger. 

'I could sit through hours, days, and weeks of insurance seminars with a smile on my face. "How do you do it?" my fellow conferees ask. "Because I spent a week with Del Griffiths"'. 

Dougies are suburbanites, office workers, bank tellers even professionals - occupation is no disaggregating filter.  The hopelessly dull are everywhere unaware of their own boundless vacancy.  At least for Dougie it was a survival mechanism.  For all the rest just an empty stare.