Your Bullshit Is No Longer Law
A vote not to say "yes" to Trump, but rather to say "no" to your bullshit
You got too high on the hog. You got used to the idea that you could cry-bully your world-views into existence (or at least orchestrate sufficient psychodrama to satisfy your need to think things are a certain way). You started to create word-puzzles and change the meaning of words just so people who didn’t care about your bullshit could fall into your word traps. You twisted the historical record, trumped up long-forgotten charges, and told us that the 101 Dalmatians lady was actually good-but-misunderstood.
In short, you went too far with your bullshit. And so they voted “No.”
It wasn’t because of “racism.” It wasn’t sexism or transphobia or any of the other boogeymen you’ve constructed and convinced the people who still watch Parks’n’Rec to fear. It was you. Your arrogance. Your smug superiority. Your yard sign that said “Kamala, Obviously.” Obviously? Seems like that wasn’t too obvious to the majority of people.
What was obvious was that you were trying to pull a fast one. And even the dullards started to notice. Even the ones who still watch Two Broke Girls followed by King of Queens - even they started to realize you were selling a bill of goods. It took a lot to do that; those people live in the echo-chamber you created, essentially a never-ending clockwork-orange-matchsticks-holding-open-your-eyes-so-you-can-watch-MSNBC sort of echo chamber. The people who have little cognitive defenses, that actually believe that 97% of families are two gay dads and a racially ambiguous daughter. Even these dolts caught on.
Do you know what it took to do that? How badly you fucked up? How arrogant you have to be to think you could keep dancing in end-zone after end-zone and nobody would notice? You were supposed to act like you were there before, but no - you just had to keep dancing. They threw flags, flagrant foul, personal foul, unsportsmanlike conduct - you just didn’t care though. We saw it though. You started to actually believe that your shit bouquet smelled like roses. That people actually like obnoxious people and that people are actually attracted to people who are not attractive and that families actually work when they are completely broken. And along the way, as people made the “mistake” of saying your shit bouquet smelled like shit, you called them dumb. What did it matter? An idiot here, an idiot there - they’d never catch on. They’d never have the brains to compare notes and start a movement. But you somehow did it. You called too many people dumb, so many that no one was left except the dumb people and you. If they weren’t you, then who were they?
It wasn’t hard to say No to her. Nobody likes her, nobody could like her, nobody would ever catch themselves dead liking someone as vapid and despicable as her. But even so, credit where credit is due - you got a decent amount of people to vote for Kamala. That’s something and you should congratulate yourself for it. It’s like getting someone to vote for Sierra Mist as the best soft drink of all time. Everyone knows they don’t love Sierra Mist. I mean some people can tolerate it, but it can’t possibly be anyone’s “favorite” - especially when it lived in the world where Sprite and 7-Up existed. But you did it, and you got close, but then out came your bullshit again. You just had to start doing the thing where you called everyone stupid but you. People can tell when you’re laughing at them, you know? It’s one of the worst feelings. They didn’t like it.
They didn’t like it and so they voted No. You don’t get to make laws anymore based on an interesting editorial you read. You don’t get to unanimously declare whole groups of people the good guys and another bad guys because that makes you feel better. You don’t get to change millennia of thinking, gradually sprouted over many iterations of human trial-and-error, only for you to suddenly reverse course and declare yourself the smartest people in history. In HISTORY! You thought that! Or if you didn’t think that, at least you thought the other people were the dumbest in history. People don’t like that when you think they’re dumb. They can tell when you think they’re dumb, you know that? They can tell by the way you talk to them. They don’t like it.
They didn’t like it, so they voted No. Some of them voted no to Kamala and Some of them voted Yes for Trump, some of them voted Maybe for Trump, some of them voted Why Not? (more than you think), but most of them voted NO in big capital letters to YOU. They said NO to YOU and YOUR BULLSHIT. Because - even if they are too “dumb” to know what you’re up to - they still know you’re up to something.
So now everything you do that smells like bullshit is going to be punished. Even your good ideas will get punished. Your best efforts to think and write and fight for truth - no matter how good or nice or right that it is - it will be stomped out of existence. Because you made people that paranoid that you were selling them another shit sandwich, and worse, you thought they were dumb enough to eat it. No more - no one even taste tests your sandwiches anymore. They throw them on the ground and stomp on them and spit on them and they make sure you see it. Why? Because that’s what you get for thinking you’re better and smarter than them. Turns out there are other measures of human power than “smarts,” and they’re going to show you one of them. It’s called “not giving a fuck.”
And you don’t get to play your little games and set your little schemes and rhetorical traps about bodies and spaces and processing and trauma and presence and validity and “problematic” and “yikes” or “that’s NOT okay” or overstating harm or saying “representation is so important” - and you did always say it like that, didn’t you; “representation is SO important.” They hated how you said that, you all said it in a way that proved that you thought you were so smart and good. No more. You don’t get to say that sentence anymore. You got stomped. So now no one at all is going to even listen when you’re talking about your bullshit “studies” all the time, or sharing your little memes about mediocre white men, or buying prayer candles with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or any of the other snide bullshit that made you feel like the most humane, amazing, loving, INFORMED, MORAL, and BRILLIANT PERSON IN HISTORY! Nope, not anymore. You got SMOKED. You got OBLITERATED.
So now you get to see what that feels like. When someone doesn’t give you the time of day, when they judge you off the worst parts of you, when they interpret your argument in the most galling way possible, when they don’t care about your “reasons” and they don’t take any time to “understand where you’re coming from” and they don’t listen to your “conspiracy theories about the election.” You get to take a nice plate of that and cry. And as you cry over that plate, maybe consider that using cruelty, spite, public shaming, and emotional extortion might not be such a good idea after all. Because you’re not always the one who wins, and when you do lose, you’re not going to want to be stuck with a plate of all that bullshit you cooked up.
Because now you have to sit there and eat it. Try again next time. But don’t scarf it down! You’ll get indigestion. Eat it slow. Chew it. Savor it. Because it tastes good, right? I meant that’s what you told them.
The stupid people.