What follows is a rant. It is more than that - it's a polemic, and it's a jeremiad. It is long. It's personal, and it's political, and it's social. It's not positive fluffy-bunny stuff. I will not hold back. You are warned.
A few of those reading this may know me. If you do, you know my reputation for being positive, and remaining calm under nearly all circumstances. That's who I am, and I'm proud of that identity. Many people value my words and presence because I make them feel better about life, about everything.
This piece of expression you are about to read will not do that. It will likely make you feel worse about everything. If I don't manage to say something here that will offend you, I'll be surprised. Truth often does that. You are warned.
Before we formally begin, two pieces of background that are essential for understanding what's to come.
Item one: I have despised the human being who is currently the president-elect (hereafter referred to as "the Pig") of my country ever since I've known of his existence. I have despised him personally (even though I have never met him) because his documented words and actions towards other people reveal him to be a narcissistic, manipulative, bullying, lying, cheating, sexist, racist pig of a man, and inept at everything except grifting; a perfect example of the worst of human nature and the worst traits of American culture. He represents in one sick package nearly everything we need to overcome if the human race is to make any progress; or, perhaps, even survive.
Item two: The five stages of the grieving process are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Grief almost always is triggered from actual loss, not anticipated loss. Not every person experiences every stage, and not always in that order, but that's the most typical progression.
Another element to the grieving process is surprise. In many cases we have a chance to anticipate a loss, and emotionally prepare for it. When it's sudden the element of surprise makes it more intense. While I had the chance to anticipate this catastrophe, I didn't; because I had some mystical unshakable faith that the American people would see through this con man, this liar and cheat, this sexual predator; and reject him. It shouldn't have been close. The only thing I was prepared for, emotionally, was the national shame of the Pig having been nominated for the presidency, and that he received far too high a share of the vote. His winning I did not seriously consider.
So it was on the night of November 8th, 2016 - a date that will live in infamy - my mood was cautiously optimistic.
I supported Clinton once the primaries were over because she was the only thing left standing between the Pig and the national shame and disgrace of his being elected "leader of the Free World." I'm aware that some consider her worse than the Pig, and for some that they are both equally awful, but I am certain you're wrong about that. There is no comparison. I would vote for Richard Fucking Nixon again before I would countenance the Pig. If the very worst of all the plausible charges against Clinton were true there's still no comparison. It's a flawed person, an alleged corrupt politician, against a thoroughly despicable human being, an authoritarian narcissistic racist sexist Pig who is also without doubt at least equally corrupt. There is no equivalence. If you think I'm wrong about this you should stop reading now; for no reason, logic or sense is likely to enlighten you.
On that fateful night, I was confident that the nation would reject the Pig. I suspected the polls were wrong, and that the Pig would be beaten by considerably more than the current polling gap. I needed to believe that. I could not imagine waking up on the morning after in a land full of people that could live with the idea of the Pig as our president; with his bragging, insecure, boasting, heartless, self-promoting, lying, grabbing personality well known to anyone with eyes and ears and the will to see and hear.
When it became obvious that the Pig was doing better than the polling and not worse the situation became unbearable. I cut myself off from all news. I was in a state of extreme agitation. Not, mind you, because I thought he could actually win but because it was going to be too close. I couldn't sleep but paced endlessly around the house for hour after dark hour. Torn between wanting to know and to not know. I chose not to and eventually feel asleep around first light, expecting to wake to the turmoil and misery of the fanatical Pig supporters who were crying cheat and foul.
As I became slowly conscious late on that morning my only feeling was one of heart numbing dread. As I lay there motionless everything around me seemed abnormally still and silent, as if the earth had stopped turning under some groaning shock that could not be comprehended. As if some titanic plague had swept across the world overnight and left all my neighbors, all my friends, my family, and everyone just rotting corpses in the place where they once breathed. As if all the birds had dropped dead from the trees. As if the sun, now brightly shining, would soon set and never rise again.
I could not engage with anything outside myself. I did not go near anything that was connected to the Internet for hours. I existed in a surreal bubble of denial. The first stage of grief.
All afternoon my phone chimed that I was getting messages and updates. I ignored them, until, worried about friends and family, I cautiously took up the phone and pressed the button to activate it. The screen stopped being blank. I have an Android that is eager to let me know what it thinks I need to know - the titles of the messages I have recently received. I doesn't wait for me to ask, it shows them on the opening screen before I even swipe to get to the page of apps.
And there, on that screen, in white letters over a black background, was written a quoted headline, to wit the following words: "Hillary Clinton has conceded the presidential race to..."
I am not such a fool as to stay in denial when confronted with facts. The message was from the Boston Globe, which had kindly sent it to me because I'd read one of their op ed pieces months before and hadn't figured out how to stop them emailing me their headlines.
I don't remember sitting there stunned, in my kitchen, but I probably did for at least a few seconds. The denial phase was over.
I do clearly remember the overwhelming, demonic rage that seized me. I dropped the phone and began storming about screaming and knocking things over, hitting and kicking walls, bruising myself, breaking things. The demon inside me didn't care. I wanted to destroy my life and everything in it. For you see, I rarely get angry, and I don't know how to handle it when I do. I direct my destructive rage at myself, because every other target is either not morally acceptable or not satisfying enough to destroy.
I expected this to end, but it didn't. For so many painful days and sleepless nights, one after another, over and over I cycled between exhausted despair and renewed fury.
As I sat, days later, amid the broken wreckage of my possessions I began to desperately seek the reason for this sustained dark tide of rage, which has no equivalent in my life up to this point. I'm quite sure than the anger I'm still going through now has exceeded, in quantity and intensity, the sum total of all the anger I've ever known in my whole life before this.
The answer is that I'm in the second stage of the grieving process. But grief for the loss of what, exactly? Is it just that my ball team lost the election? Of course not, I root for no team -- I root for truth, for some shade of justice, for true freedom of expression. I am grieving real, tangible loss. Losses that happened the second that the Pig became the Winner.
The moment I read that text, I knew that I had lost my country. I cannot and will not associate myself with a society that would choose that horror as its leader. The America I am physically located in is not the place I thought it was. I no longer consider myself a citizen of this land that once thought itself great, with some justification. Now that's just a sick joke, but one you can't even smile at through your tears.
The moment I read that text, I knew I had lost my faith in humanity. Against all the evidence of history, I had clung to a belief that somehow, most of us were at the core decent and honorable people. And now I see that was delusional. No decent and honorable electorate could select the Pig as the leader of anything. There are still good people here, but they have no power now. They gave it away. Some willingly, some not. Of that, much more will shortly be said.
The moment I read that text, I knew that I had lost all hope for progress towards anything except darkness. Because I know too much. I've paid too much attention to how nations and cultures jump the shark and head towards the abyss. I know the difference between a recoverable interlude of insanity, and one that marks a permanent turning point. This is one. Why do I say that?
I will tell you.
Whatever quivering hope there is for the survival of democracy in America has always rested on a set of fragile, thin myths. The most important of which is that at least the majority of the American people are good, caring, and basically decent folk who will reject the kind of leader that has no respect for the idea of either democracy or common decency.
That myth has been exposed and destroyed - replaced by the sure knowledge, available to every aspiring despot and demagogue from here until the end of recorded time, that the electoral majority of the American people are quite willing and able, even eager, to set aside common decency just so long as they perceive there's something in it for them. Money, power, safety, security, air of grievances - whatever, it doesn't matter.
I should have known better. But perhaps I and maybe you have been clinging desperately to a belief that the American people were somehow truly exceptional. That we were better than that. Better than the mobs that throughout the long sorry history of this cursed race have have slaughtered anyone they believe too different from themselves. But ask the faces in the photographs of the crowds of men, women, and children gathered around the burnt hanged body of a young black man who committed the sin of brushing up against a white woman as he passed her in the street. Behold the trenches full of dead Asian men, woman, children and babies gunned down in cold blood by scared exhausted American troops in the village of My Lai. Ask the still very living soldiers who tortured with smiles on their faces at Abu Girab in Iraq and proudly photographed themselves doing it. Pick through the body parts left from a wedding ceremony in Afghanistan that happened by mistake to get in the cross-hairs of a drone. Ask them all how exceptional we are. Then say: Hello, Mr. Pig President. Let's make a deal. I'll do your bidding, but what to I get out of it? What's in it for me?
So the last seal is opened. The signs point downward, ever downward. The idea of democratic progress towards truth, justice, and freedom in this culture has been gut-shot, and I am quite certain it will never recover. You know, don't you, that contrary to the cleaned-up death scenes on TV and in movies living beings who have been shot don't instantly keel over dead. The life force is too strong. They run and kick and struggle until usually the shock overcomes them. They may survive quite a while. But the outcome is always eventually fatal.
That is where we are now. The forces of naked, ruthless, unashamed Authoritarianism have at last broken in and gained the seat of power. The mighty nation that defeated Nazi Germany, and militarist Japan, and the huge Communist empires has given itself away to a two-bit huckster, a cheap phony, a bully and liar and cheat - a man whose record stands clear as a sexist, a racist, a despicable human being who only cares for himself and no one or nothing else. And not just to that pig, but to the pack of jackals who are attached to him, like their leader each only caring for themselves and whatever fetid ideology they aspire to. Cold-eyed people who know how to use power in order to set themselves up so they never have to surrender it again.
The Pig himself may fail. He almost certainly will, for he is now in the position of the dog that caught the car. He has no idea what to do now, except to continue to lie and juke and jive and dissemble in the hope that no one will notice in all the noise that he's lost at sea with not a clue how to proceed. It's how he's lived his entire life: a fake. But power can't stand a vacuum, especially not the vacuum that lies inside the head of the Pig, who has not a jot of self-awareness because, as he once confessed to an interviewer, "he might not like what he finds."
No, the power suddenly acquired by the Pig will be used by others, shadowy figures. And masses will protest, and wave signs, and put their name to Internet petitions, and call their congressman. And feel like they are doing something. Much like the terminal cancer patient that turns to the homeopathic scams out of desperate, futile hope.
The time when you, protesters, could have done something effective is past. So many of you aloofly stood aside in your righteous armor of purity as the enemy took the beaches, and now you want to fight him in the streets. Too, too many of you did little or nothing, maybe you even helped by bashing his only opponent relentlessly, and now having surrendered all the high ground of actual power you want to defeat your mortal foe with gestures. Good luck with that. The men who shoot you from the shadows know real power and how to use it. You, however, are lost in your delusions; one of which is that there are enough decent people left in this country to persuade.
And you, conservatives and Christians who voted for the Pig, maybe reluctantly, maybe enthusiastically. You fell for it. You believed the words coming out of his mouth. You sold your soul for a Supreme Court pick, foolishly thinking that the Pig somehow actually gives a furry dead rat's ass about your principles or your scripture. You've been taken. Had. The Pig only cares about himself, and the only words out of his mouth that can be believed are "I want..." followed by some noun. But you have your hope. You think: maybe this is all wrong. Maybe the Pig really isn't what he seems to be. I say: how blind can you be? How deaf? Have you not seen, have you not heard? Do you not listen to your own leaders who have denounced him as a "malignant clown" and worse while there was still hope of stopping him and his wretched movement of scared, ignorant haters?
You cling to your hope: maybe not the Pig, but the men around him will give me what I voted for. Safety and security for my family, my culture, my bank account, my religion. How many times does the pattern have to repeat before you realize that shit stinks? How many thin-skinned narcissists do you have to know before you realize they surround themselves by sycophants who divide their time between kissing the ass of the Leader and stomping those on the ladder below them? How many times do you have to be betrayed before you finally realize you're being played?
And you, the smug know-it-all cynics preaching your conspiracies and delusions so that everyone will know how smart you are. You say: the candidates are just actors in a play hired by the all-powerful Illuminati. Nothing is real. Don't bother to vote, just watch the show. Show your superiority too. Stand aloof. There's no hope anyway. Don't bother.
This one was a favorite of yours: the Pig was hired by the Clinton-Pigs to assure they would win even though they are unpopular. Suddenly that one is out of fashion, I wonder why? Could it be that your smug know-it-all conspiracy junk is just bullshit? But not harmless bullshit. Far from it. Do you know that the number of non-voters exceeded the number of voters in most states, even now, even in the face of such a clear and present danger as the specter of Pigism looming over history like an avenging karmic vulture? It's not me, I didn't keep them from voting you say. But you tried. You tried. Maybe you succeeded just enough. Just enough for the Pig to top the one state he needed. But you'll never understand that. You're too God damn smart.
And you, further out, that believe that all I dread has already happened. Who think they know that the democratic principles of rule by the will of the people and peaceful transfer of power are already dead so nothing has changed with the ascendancy of the Pig. He's just another actor on stage in the farce, right? Wrong. You wouldn't know reality if it knocked you down and chewed your ass off, which it is shortly about to do. You're about to find out the difference between your delusional fictional world and the real one.
You all did this. You own the Pig and the world he inhabits, you coalition of the deluded. Safe in your dreams and impressions. Thinking it's all going to be okay just so long as it all burns down, because surely from the ashes will rise the world you need and long for. But no one who knows history thinks that. Because it never happens that way.
This has been a long torrent of words, and I don't want to end this with there being any doubt about my point.
The fragile myth of some kind of special decency in America is irretrievably broken now because for the first time in our history a man has succeeded in winning the ultimate power without even needing to make the slightest effort to pretend that he is a decent human being. Instead he has made a Faustian deal: I will indulge your darkest fears and hatreds, and you will love me for it, just so long as I give you the power through my strength to crush your enemies. Fearsome dictators have risen on such promises throughout history. But to the eternal shame of the formerly great United Stated of America, we don't even require the real thing. Collectively, we're happy with a cheap lying imitation, just so long as it says what we to hear. Welcome to Pig World, ladies and gentlemen, where no horror needs to be left unsaid, no bullying threat is over the top, no ridiculous promise will be disqualifying so long as the lie corresponds with the delusions of the willfully ignorant.
Nothing can ever go back to the way it was.
I wish I could end this with a ray of hope. It's with infinite sadness than I can't. I write this through tears.
So the final seal is opened. Farewell, America.
I once believed in your dreams.
I did not leave you, you left me.