Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Gravy

In the Star Tribune, a guy who is taking things very well:
Somewhere around 1:30 a.m. the morning after the election — an insurgency of white, rural Americans lacking college degrees having taken its revenge upon itself and the rest of us by granting power to a self-styled strongman with a long record of race-baiting, tax-dodging, creditor-stiffing, self-dealing, model-chasing, lie-disseminating and the hosting of rallies where journalists were confined to pens and subjected to taunts and promises of death printed on T-shirts (please, commenters, do tell us again about the Hillary Clinton e-mails) — I staged the only act of protest left in my immediate control.

I sent an e-mail to an in-law, telling him that his genial hockey buddy and Trump supporter friend Johnny was no longer welcome on Thanksgiving.

I’m not a hater. Johnny’s a good guy. He means well and has done nice things for me. I’ve known him 20 years. But I can’t feed him any more of my potatoes. 
It's a shame -- I understand the bile gravy he serves with his potatoes is quite tasty. We'll come back to that. There's more:
I made it to 3:30 the next afternoon before embarking on my next round of social housecleaning. By text, I put the question to a different relative, a note that read, let’s see, oh yes, here it is: “Please tell me you guys didn’t vote for that monster.”

Before the election, I had developed a vague inkling that this relative and her significant other — generous, warm, and good parents the both of them — might possibly have been considering a vote for the strongman. When six hours passed and she hadn’t replied, my forebodings only grew stronger — we trade texts about our kids in a heartbeat. At some point I sent over a curt follow-up: “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ”

“Don’t get hostile,” she shot back. “I didn’t vote.”
And then you read on, and you start to wonder if it's a put-on:
On the third and final night of this reckoning by text, it was time to engage with a young cousin by marriage:

“Did you vote for Trump?”

I had been primed for confrontation with the young man, whose head is harder for me to impale on a spike because I have known him since he was a child. But he’s 30 now. And more to the point, when he arrived in my home last year for Thanksgiving and began pelting me with Sean Hannity talking points on the subject of police shootings of unarmed motorists, a thought suddenly occurred to me: Why was I making this guy such delicious gravy?
It's all gravy, fella. Then we get to the point:
Trump did us all a favor by showing exactly what would happen if an opportunist and political parasite with a compliant host party normalized the American subtext of racism, then brought it to a vote. Some of us see that as a vote to be subjected to a million small acts of social correction, not engagement.

So you don’t have to make the Trump supporters dinner, or remain their friends on Facebook, or keep sending them holiday cards. In fact, it’s probably better that you don’t, not if you don’t want to normalize the election of a man who seems poised to penalize his critics, run a hotel business with the national Treasury, bunker down under the counsel of blood relatives as all tyrants do, and foment anger within his base. Some of us have pushed away family over far less. And once you’ve taken a stand, they might have to think about what matters more to them — their fondness for the strongman, or you.
The choice might be easier than he imagines.

15 comments:

Gino said...

Its almost like the left is having a contest among themselves, ain't it?

Mr. D said...

Yep. The nature of the contest is up for debate on this one.

3john2 said...

Perhaps the writer could gather what is left of the family together and all watch "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"

jerrye92002 said...

Any sane person would avoid this dinner, anyway. People like that cannot be trusted with carving knives or other sharp objects.

Bike Bubba said...

It is as if the left is entirely clueless about how awful Hilliary Clinton was as a candidate, and is as a human being. I had the choice between a guy who sexually harassed women (he bragged about it in his autobiography for goodness' sake) and a woman who covered up for a serial rapist. A choice between a businessman with shady ethics and a politician with shady ethics. A choice between a man who said reckless things and a woman who stored classified information on an unsecured server.

So a bit of humility and self-awareness on the part of the left would be really, really welcome here.

jerrye92002 said...

"humility and self-awareness" from /leftists/? What do you want them to do, deny their entire worldview and existence? That is predicated entirely on their moral and intellectual superiority. Take that from them and who are they?

Mr. D said...

Gotta go with Jerry on this one, BB. Humility and self-awareness aren’t especially common traits among the self-congratulatory.

Gino said...

Coal miners out of work, factory jobs moving to Mexico... Only one candidate promised to reverse these trends. Bingo. PA, WV,OH et al responded. Why is it so hard to see that?

Mr. D said...

Why is it so hard to see that?

It's not, if you choose to look.

Bike Bubba said...

Gotta go with Jerry on this one, BB. Humility and self-awareness aren’t especially common traits among the self-congratulatory.

I tend to as well, but I am trying to be nice about the matter. Character fault of mine, I guess. :^)

3john2 said...

Reminds me of PJ O'Rourke's line: 'Earnestness is stupidity that's gone to college."

jerrye92002 said...

Not sure you can be nice to liberals or mad dogs. Death threats to Republican Presidential Electors doesn't sound like an olive branch to me. Like Limbaugh says, they cannot be accommodated; they must be defeated.

Bike Bubba said...

Agreed on those electors. Let's just say that I am going to be nice to assume that it may be possible to be liberal and yet be in contact with reality, while still endorsing prosecution for those making death threats. It's about civilization, no?

jerrye92002 said...

BB, isn't that "discrimination"? Saying you will make nice with liberals who respect reality, and not with those who don't? Are you some kind of bigot? /-:

Oh, and I wonder when the prosecutions will begin?

Bike Bubba said...

Walter Williams says my discrimination is OK. So does Thomas Sowell.