I Used to Like Bernie Sanders, but I can’t Vote for a White Privilege Captain Haddock

I was so excited when Bernie Sanders first announced he was running for president. I am not a political person: I consider politics a low pursuit and generally hold myself aloof to it, but now that everyone is talking about the election, I feel the need to be part of the conversation, and I’ve always considered myself a liberal because I’m not sexist or racist (my opinions on women, racial minorities and foreigners are formed by logic, not ignorance and bigotry), so I thought Bernie would be my guy. How wrong I was. My passionate support for Senator Sanders during the first week after he launched his campaign was quickly dashed by the slings and arrows of my old nemeses: racism and the dudebros. (Yes, a white person’s nemesis can be racism. It’s 2016, deal with it.)

We have to ask ourselves, what is it about Bernie that attracts these racist, sexist dudebro supporters? I have compared Sanders to many fictional characters in the past: Darth Vader, Megatron, Cobra Commander, the biblical Satan (yeah, he’s fictional- deal with it Christian dudebros), Gargamel and Bob of Bob’s Country Bunker from ‘Blues Brothers,’ but when I see him making a speech, launching into deranged rants, I’m reminded of no one so much as Captain Archibald Haddock from the Belgian comic ‘Tintin.’ Like Sanders, Haddock is a grizzled old man, driven half insane by alcoholism and bitterness at his life of cowardice and failure, and fond of idiosyncratic turns-of-phrase. Sanders’s favored epithets: “bankers,” “Wall Street,” and “the one percent” are almost as bizarre and nonsensical as Captain Haddock’s infamous invocations of “bashi-bazouk!” and “blistering barnacles!” Obviously, Bernie Sanders is a politician and must know that bankers and Wall Street are what keep our economy working and give people jobs, but his odd, Haddock-like verbal tic of shouting about them when he’s upset about minorities voting or women having political power or whatever is making some of his degenerate Brownshirt supporters actually believe these vital institutions are bad. Wake up, Bernie: your whimsical minced oaths are not cute, they are hurting innocent businessmen.

It’s obvious to see why dudebros are attracted to a Captain Haddock-like hero: the Captain is an angry, drunk, vulgar troll who lives on a friend’s couch because he lost his old economy sea-captaining job and refuses to learn to code, disrespects women (primarily Bianca Castafiore, the hero of the Tintin series), and many of his adventures involve antagonizing ethnic minorities. Furthermore, his dark hair, round face, bulbous nose, and family history of seafaring suggest an ethnic origin in the Anglo-Saxons of England’s West Country: among the least-woke sub-races of the infamously racist British Isles. The implication that Haddock’s ancestors participated in the slave trade seems obvious.

So go ahead, Bernie Sanders, become Captain Haddock as a way of appealing to your baying, frothing horde of klansman supporters if you want, but you’ll be losing the votes of people like me who are in the business community (I’m currently awaiting VC funding for Callipr, my phrenology app) or members of indigenous minority groups (my mother’s maiden name is van Wieren, so I am half Frisian, the indigenous people of the Netherlands). Your message of socialism and Belgian comics may play well in frat houses and racist militia meetings, but I don’t see it catching on here in diverse, working-class Park Slope.

Bernie, we could have had something special, but I just can’t vote for an abusive slave-trader like Captain Haddock.