We’re Not in Hell, We’ve Just Succumbed to Stupid
By Archy Jamjun, for The Skewer’s February 2018 debate
Editor’s Note — these are opening and closing statements to the debate prompt:
President Trump has had a weird and rocky first year, is the subject of an ongoing federal investigation where the charges may include no less than treason, has inspired two of the largest political demonstrations in history, and as you might expect has the lowest net approval rating of any first-year president in the last sixty years. Yet despite his ongoing and compounding failures, Trump’s approval has actually held relatively steady. And his net approval has improved with white men. Why is this so?
—
I bought a lot of drugs on November 9th 2016. See I had taken the whole week off of work to celebrate what I thought would be the election of our first female president. Instead, at eleven pm on November 8th, I downed a half a bar of Xanax with a glass of red wine and prayed that the news would be different when I awoke. No such luck, and I don’t know about you but wow, I’m so proud of us as a country. This morning I woke to an ad that featured a man in a dress thanking Governor Rauner for letting him into the women’s bathroom. Over the weekend, when a friend of mine posted an open forum about Steppenwolf’s gender neutral bathrooms, it only took my artsy urban friends a few hours to dissolve into calling each other communists and sexists. Bitches and Bastards, if we can’t even agree on how to pee, the one idea that really gnaws at my heart is true: Americans are stupid as fuck and we deserve this shit.
It’s been about six months since I’ve watch the news on a regular basis. The tipping point came when I realized I spent a few minutes every day pondering why Donald Trump is our president. The time I spent thinking about this reminded me of the way I’d feel when I was young and someone broke my heart. My brain searched endlessly for reasons to insist this couldn’t be our reality. They will impeach him soon. The Mueller investigation will get him. Hillary Clinton will take over the armed forces and stage a coup. I was desperate. I was in denial…of a very big fact. Hillary Clinton ran a campaign based on the idea of a diverse America. Donald Trump ran on ideas that were…well, contrary to that. It was “Stronger Together” versus “Make American Great Again” and in the end, America chose.
Or did we? One of the hallmarks of intelligence is the ability to reflect. It feels like we, as a nation, are allergic to that. Donald Trump is president because of a fluke. Why does no one ever say this? No president has ever lost the popular vote by so large a measure and no president has ever enlisted the Kremlin to get him into the White House. He won five battleground states by less than 1%, a statistical anomaly worth investigating but it’s going to be many election cycles until what happened in 2016 becomes clear.
What it is very clear however, is that President Trump is a president without a mandate, and we are dumbasfuckistan for not treating him as such.
Sure the President has some very loyal supporters. They say really smart like things like, “If Jesus Christ came down to Earth and told me that Trump had colluded with Russia, I’d say hold on now Jesus,” and believe really smart ideas like Sandy Hook was fake and that God sent Trump here to stop abortions. I don’t like to call people stupid but I will and they are, dangerously so.
And I don’t mean to say that all Trump supporters are stupid. There were some that saw no hope in the democratic party and there are some who believe our society would be better off with a smaller federal government, but put them all together and you still don’t have 40% nonetheless 50%.
This leaves an obvious open door for those of us who disagree with Trump…if only we weren’t so stupid. The greatest stupidity in America today is our tribalism. Republicans who hated Trump still voted for Trump because they felt a loyalty to their party. Well, fuck those Republicans. You are represented by Megan McCain on The View, the only news show I can stomach now, and I’m tired of rich white people pretending they have the same agendas and values as poor white people just because they’re white. In other parts of our society, we are so aggressive about shedding labels.
Five years ago, I thought I was just a gay man. It turns I’m something that falls on a spectrum. I’m a gray space that wonders if I should create a pronoun for myself. The fact of the matter is, the amount of people who hate Donald Trump is too large a group to be contained in one party. We are socialists, we are green party people, we are centrists and libertarians, but we let the right and Russia divide us up into Berners, Steiners and Clintonites. Some of us even voted for someone who asked, “What is Aleppo?”
I won’t go into the frustrations of people shopping at Whole Foods when the choices were clearly Jewel-Osco or a McDonald’s dumpster, but if we fall for that shit again in 2018 and 2020, my heartbreak won’t even matter because Mike Pence will put me in a conversion camp.
Am I supposed to be surprised that Trump’s popularity among white people, particularly white men, is slightly rising? I am not new. White people are being given an image of the golden days, days that never really ended. A time when being white undoubtedly gave you two extra points in every game.
Do you know how many mediocre white men I’ve slept with because I have been unconsciously brain washed into thinking whiteness equals beauty?
Of course, Trump’s support with White people is increasing. His policies and rhetoric support white people, specifically rich white people and you’d think that would alienate his base until you remember that they think that they deserve to be rich too, and the reasons they’re not are Obamacare, Muslims, and Mexico. No one has the heart to tell them the truth, your towns are dying; coal is dying. You need to do what Americans have done throughout the generations, reinvent your towns or move. Well, actually Hillary said that but bygones right?
There’s a little Donald Trump in all of us. Part of all of us wants to help our own first, however that’s defined. And we all want to speak our mind, even if we’re not done thinking and listening yet. The longer Donald Trump stays in office, the more normal his behavior becomes and the sooner we forget what “functioning” was. I fear this bizarre climate is our new normal. Remember when the internet and phones seemed so crazy. Maybe you don’t but I’m old and I do. They slowly upended our world when they came out. First it was just a phone, then you could send messages, now you can literally tinder someone to fuck while grubhubbing pizza from your toilet. It wasn’t a fad; it is our new way life. Donald Trump isn’t a fad, or more specifically, the effects of reality TV aren’t a fad. You know how I know this? Because bitches on my social media went crazy when Oprah Winfrey made a stab at 2020, but bastards on my social media call me “not progressive enough” when I say I support Kamala Harris. That is stupid AF and if that’s the conversation we’re going to have…well, I’d rather blame life on chemtrails and fluoride water too.
Closing Statement
My opponent has argued that we are in a literal hell. That is literally not possible because there’s no such thing as hell. It exists as a metaphor from a book written by people kind of like The Chamber of Secrets in Harry Potter, and to anyone in this room who believes in a literal heaven or hell, I’m also sorry to have to tell you that Santa isn’t real either.
When I was a freshmen in college, I emailed my professor because I thought my English class required a background knowledge of Christianity and Jesus and as a Buddhist I had no idea about any of it. I was told I needed to do my own research to catch up, and that was fine because it was an English class about the people of England.
This is the United States of America. Raise your hand if you went to Church last Sunday. (no one in the audience raises their hand) That’s what I thought. Though people are very attached to the idea of religion and we certainly have our own fundamentalists and radicals, let’s be honest. We are not a religious country and to state that we are in a literal hell is cherry picking religion for your own absolution of responsibility.
I prefer to think of the state we are in as karma. We deserve this shit because we don’t know our own history. Today I learned that only eight percent of students in The South knew The Civil War was fought over slavery. Eight Percent! In the South! Too many people today think their rights we given to them, that we’ve earned them simply by existing, and once written they are safe. None of our rights are anything but temporarily safe. By these rights I mean civil rights, the right to vote, the right to bring forward a sexual harassment case, the right to choose, the right to marry both someone of the same sex and some one of a different race, even the right to divorce and own property. These rights weren’t given to us. They were hard fought for by people like Martin Luther King, Edith Windsor and everyday people who took to the streets and held their elected officials accountable.
So honestly, this is the government we get when we choose to always Netflix and chill instead of research and read.
This is what we get when we get our political positions from Mark Zuckerberg instead of listening to a candidate’s “boring” speeches. This is what we get when we are ignorant to the fact that there are rich, powerful people that want a dumb and powerless electorate addicted to distractions and our phones so they can manipulate us. It sounds nefarious but it’s true. Just look at the way education is being manipulated into something “elite”. And then remember being that the word “elite” used to mean something good, and it still actually does.
We are not people to everyone. Unfortunately to some, we are just pigeons and peons. I’m going to give us the benefit of the doubt because no one could have predicted the way social media was used as propaganda in 2016 but there are no excuses now.
If you want to get out of metaphoric “hell”, it’s quite simple because it’s not eternal, this March begins the Illinois primaries, this fall the midterm elections, look up the candidates and choose who most closely represents your ideals and has a chance to win. Then get out and vote.
