A New American Century Of… You

What is the disease of the current American body politic? In Washingwood, we think we’ve got it figured out. After all, we helped create it. Like a shady pharmaceutical company that creates the illness they then seek to “treat and cure,” Washingwood and its component parts, Hollywood and Washington D.C., have created a particular paradigm mixing message and bloviating about policy… all directed toward and for you.

A bit of history: Identity politics for good and ill has been around for more than three decades. Interest groups, religious, secular, gay, straight, gun-nutty, anti-gun-nutty… pick your poison. The informed or semi-informed voter identified with the group and thus the candidate who sought that voter’s support identified with the particular group.

You can shitcan all that now. It’s meaningless. What 2016 is teaching us, has taught us, is that this election is not about identifying with a particular group and voting as that group mandates, rather it is about identifying with the one interest group you’ll never leave and didn’t ask to join. You. The self.

We’ve been focus-grouped and polled to death this election cycle, and if we’re to take anything away from these groups and this polling it’s that JFK’s call to national duty was just so much chin-music. It’s all about you. The self. You, the complicated, contradictory, angry, angrily contradictory, angrily inspired, defensive, “fact” -bloated political consumer. Our two major party candidates for the Presidency? They don’t want you to identify with a set of policy positions, convention platforms, and such. Who cares? Who has the time, right? No, they want you to identify with the real you infused with heart, mind, and soul of the candidate. A strange take on the Catholic Mass. You… listen to their verbal blather. You… get a shiver up your spine when that candidate stumbles upon something ill-defined yet something that resonates with you. And you… infuse them into… you.

This explains why establishment Republicans have a gigantic stick up their collective ass when it comes to Trump. His policies (I use that word in the broadest possible sense… perhaps even ironically) smell more like an old southern anti-integration, trade war Democrat rather than the button up, button down Republican that looks like Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney. He mirrors none of the above mentioned, and he doesn’t have to… as long as he slips quietly into the darkest recesses of your soul and hangs around until November. More on Trump later.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is what we’d call in the old days of political agitating...a Republican. An interventionist, a free-trader, a de-regulator, etc., but again it doesn’t matter.

Why? In this new age of registering your actions and emotions every five seconds on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Whogivsafuk (I made that last one up), politicians connected the dots… at least in their own minds. With the help of the Hollywood machine and the D.C. power structure, these dots connected into an epiphany: It matters not, the politician thinks, what I stand for. No, what matters is what you think I stand for and how much of that you’re willing to insert into your own body. It’s political coitus.

Hillary Clinton has legitimate trust issues; sadly the voter on average can’t specifically explain what it is they don’t trust about her. The average voter does not understand the nuances of a private server, classified material, all of it. She’s had these issues for years, and my guess is that she will continue to have them for years. It matters not.

Hillary Clinton has trust issues because you have trust issues. The only viable voting bloc that seems well-informed is millennials and even they cannot fully and coherently understand why they don’t like her and why they prefer Bernie Sanders. It’s pretty easy to figure out.

Trump holds up a mirror. You look into it. Turns out Trump is you! You are Donald Trump!

Hillary Clinton to a generation of people my age and younger represents their first marriage or relationship. You got married far too young, you fucked up, you were stupid, and it ended in an amicable, slightly bitter non-contested divorce a year later. You went on with your life. Hillary didn’t. She hung around, ostensibly well-meaning, dispensing advice, even vetting your future lovers. She got on your nerves, but you couldn’t quite tell why. It was something in… you. Something ambiguous, a feeling, something you could not give voice to. However, the bottom line was you had to tell her to back off, that life goes on, etc., you did that in an email and never heard back. She never went away. Finally in 2016… you’ve had it. This is why millennials do not find her candidacy and likely election inspiring or historic. To this group, they find her candidacy and likely election about as inspiring as learning their Mom was just elected President of the local P.T.A. Well, if it keeps her off my ass for a few hours, let her go for it.

This also explains an issue that’s a bit touchier. The (Bill)Clinton administration was responsible for one of the most heinous crime bills in history, one which overwhelmingly and intentionally targeted and impacted the African-American male population. Couple that with the Welfare Reform bill and her vote on Iraq, and one would think the African-American community would reject, pro forma, Hillary Clinton. Not so. Why? Because she is you, and you are her. You shared the same struggles, you dreamt the same dream, you reached high to break the same ceilings. That’s all pure bullshit, of course. But as long as you kneel and receive the host from the Priestess Clinton, you and Hillary have become one. So it is you that is running for President. Not her. You. And she knows this… and what she doesn’t know after all these years, the Jon Podestas, the David Brocks, the Robby Mooks, the Humas, and the Cheryls, all the cogs in the Clinton machine are happy to take their polling and focus groups and shove it up her ass so she really… I don’t know… feels it.

The Clintons, jointly and separately, incarcerated a loved one? The Clintons, through a series of trade deals (that read more like a felonious sexual assault) destroyed your job, your town, wiped out your savings? It doesn’t matter. You did that. Because you are her. And she is more than happy to be you.

Donald Trump and his supporters fit perfectly into this model. Trump is the remark you make to a friend in a bar: hushed, paranoid someone else will hear, a remark that is racist, sexist, xenophobic… just wrong. You don’t really feel that way, that way you felt when you made the remark, but it’s been a long day. You’re fucking tired. You hate your boss, you loathe your job, your sex life is stale, you’re out of choices and you make that remark. The friend you’re speaking to… is Donald Trump. And he whispers back: “I understand. You were great once.” (That translates into “there was a time when you had no responsibility and could walk the walk and talk the talk you no longer can.” ) Trump holds up a mirror. You look into the mirror, and as his image changes … it turns out that Donald Trump is you! You are Donald Trump. You’re one.

I believe that underneath the protests and the verbiage, those who oppose Donald Trump aren’t really scared of Donald Trump. They’re (rightfully) scared of his supporters. I cannot emphasize enough how many times friends have told me about other friends who are supporting Trump. “I can’t believe [fill in name] is supporting Trump!” Well, I can believe it. Because I believe these friends of friends, were they to undergo psychoanalysis, would reveal that life simply didn’t turn out the way they thought it would. For them. For you. And they are extremely pissed off. However they’re not pissed off at the government, because most cannot explicate what a Donald Trump policy is, what policy would remedy what problem (aside from a wall and a ban). They’re pissed off at themselves. Trump has spent the better part of a public life, be it television shows or phony universities, telling us what we already think we know: we’re losers, but… we have another chance at redemption. Absorb Donald The Redeemer into the self and away you go! The bad things go away and you’re on a space shuttle to personal, financial, sexual outer orbit.

There’s an irony in all this: they are us and we are them. Yet we don’t like, let alone love, ourselves. So who’s left to love? Us? Them? No one? Well, we’ll be in the White House soon. And… things… will be better.

I promise.

Image:Getty Images / John Sommers II / Stringer / Justin Sullivan