Wednesday morning, the day after the election, was an inchoate, frantic hysteria of disbelief, shock, and loss. How could this have happened? It wasn't supposed to happen. Right and good was on our side and evil and hate on the other; and that fool, that imposter, that...
At an upscale Northwest Washington sports club - wood paneling, marble floors, brass fittings, proper trim - every single one of the men and women burbled and garbled with rage. They simply couldn't find the words to characterize the man and choked on adjectives and verb forms caught in their throats. Their grief was Biblical, horrendous, inexpressibly anguished. 'How? How? How?, grieving members shouted, looking for comfort, a hug, a smile of understanding, a nod of grief-stricken solidarity.
The scene at a university was no different, and in a class on King Lear the students, all emeritus, feted, read, and acknowledged for a lifetime of academic and professional commitment to liberal causes, felt one with the old king on the heath, left alone to wander and die, rejected by family and friends, a bit of flotsam, an insignificant nothing, alone, ravaged and disconsolate. Two elderly men in the class cried, and as they wiped their tears, the women next to them held them in their arms.
These 'progressives' - a term finally laid to rest in the dust bin thanks to the outing of its pretention and irrelevance - had not simply subscribed to a liberal canon, they had incorporated it as an integral part of their identity, their persona, their being. They were God's chosen - well, some permutation thereof for few of these secularists would admit to anything beyond a reachable, engineered Utopia - and now were universal rejects, unceremoniously tossed aside for this...this...
Again, like their counterparts at the sports club, the group stuttered and stammered, searching for the right word, the right expression of calumny, bitterness, and hatred for the man; but like them felt only a rising of the gorge, and a tight, choking sensation of everything horrible and nasty in their throats.
When the agony subsided to anguish, they looked around for someone to absorb their rage. 'The idiots who voted for him!' were the agents of the devil. The unwashed, unschooled bass boat, gun rack, goat buggering, toothless crackers were the problem. Bible-thumping cretins, credulous, gullible, drooling retards. Half the country - the country they thought was on the road to a more verdant, peaceful, loving place - lived in bald ignorance, cajoled and stroked into a bloody passion of insurrectionist treachery by that....that....
Again, words failed, but there was no need for articulation or logic. The room was filled with miasmic hatred of Donald Trump. Everyone felt it and breathed it deeply into their wounded souls.
The professor, a rock-ribbed Republican stalwart, a Trump supporter since the President's first appearance almost ten years ago, kept his own counsel, wondered at the grief and disconsolation. His man, Donald Trump, might be an outsized, inflated braggadocio, a Borscht Belt tummler, a vaudevillian, carny barker, lion-taming, high-wire, ring master, but he was nothing at all like the deformed caricature drawn by the Left. Underneath the raw humor, the ridiculing, the balloon-bursting joy, was a man of sense.
A reasonable immigration policy, energy independence, a rollback of statism and government intrusion into market decisions, lower taxes, decreased spending, and an end to the arrogant wokeness of the Left were all sensible, doable, and about time.
Yet the students in the classroom and the members of the sports club were immured in personal worlds of naive belief, fueled and inflamed by the cant and incendiary propositions of their liberal keepers. The professor could only think of a tribal, voodoo ceremony with naked, beaded, painted shamans and the possessed celebrants howling and dancing around a fire.
The atmosphere was so self-centered that no one noticed that the professor was keeping his distance and his own counsel, which could only mean complicity with the Devil, part of his coterie of evil.
'If it's any consolation', the professor said, 'Goneril and Regan get their comeuppance', referring to the death of the treacherous Lear sisters; 'but they are sure to be back somewhere or other', a note of his familiar moral diffidence reflected again and again by Shakespeare but unheeded by his class which only wanted to believe in the inherent nature of evil, incarnated now in Donald Trump.
Outside the university and the sports club, the scene was no different. Students at Harvard were so disconsolate, wounded, and hurt that their professors deferred tests and quizzes, allowing them time to process and regroup their feelings. Long faces were everywhere, strangers gave each other nods of commiseration. A bad day, they said. A terrible day. A horrible day.
Now, seventy-three million Americans felt nothing of the sort. In small towns, on farms, on factory lines, in vineyards and cornfields, in shops and diners, in nail salons and pharmacies, there was sheer delight. The cant, the hectoring, the intimidation and balderdash of the Left would now stop. They had been recognized by their man and they returned the favor. He didn't just squeak in, he blew in with a massive victory, and now the White House, the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court would be conservative for a long, long while. The penitential wait was over. It was their time.
Meanwhile in the corridors of Capitol Hill, Pennsylvania Avenue, and K Street, politicians, pundits, and aides, mouths agape, sucking air, paralyzed with shock and incredulity, whispered 'What now?', and in the interim reverted to form. 'Spawn of the devil, insurrectionist, fascist, misogynist, homophobic pig...' yelled even more loudly than before, but no one was listening outside of their coastal enclaves. Hollywood went ape-shit, and badly trounced Democrats everywhere shouted to the high hills.
The Minister of the Methodist Church of Christ, go-to place of worship and progressive Sunday camaraderie, asked his congregants to 'pray for America' while the Reverend Jackson Blyleven Peters of the First Baptist Church of Aberdeen, Mississippi. shouted Hallelujah to his cheering faithful.
'Wha' happened', said a lawyer tossing down another shot of Wild Turkey at the bar of the Old Ebbitt Grill, two blocks from the White House and watering hole of Biden/Harris people. 'Didn' see it coming'; and there it was in a nutshell. The fools never saw it coming, overreached, overestimated and shat on the voters who could have made a difference. 'We'll get 'em next time', the lawyer said as he stumbled his way out to Pennsylvania Avenue. 'Next time.'
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.