Dear Mr. Savage:
Thanks to Facebook and, as you’ve acknowledged in July, Ansel Herz, I came across your self-described rant regarding Jill Stein and the Green Party, and I have to say that while I agree with you in a ton of ways, I’m calling bullshit on at least one thing you said.
Yes, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are not the same and they are not equally awful. Just like Al Gore and George W. Bush were not. And while people of color will, or would, suffer under a Trump administration, there are no guarantees that the pasty white people won’t suffer either.
In 2000, the first year I was able to vote in a presidential election, I was one of those pasty white idiots, who campaigned for Ralph Nader and who more or less said that Bush was so manifestly obviously terrible that he would bring the revolution if he got into the Oval Office. When Gore lost, I was proven wrong. The revolution came, but not soon enough or in the form that I had hoped for or was expecting.
It came when idiots like me were lucky enough to wake from their dogmatic slumber and start voting assholes like Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party. In other words, disaster and mismanagement had to have come first. As well as George W. Bush’s reelection and the death of pasty white kids.
The revolution was a Democratic one, and the year it started coming to fruition was 2006, when support for the Iraq War eroded about as steadily as the death toll for United States military personnel mounted, causing the Republicans to lose control of Congress for the first time since 1994.
Maybe I’m calling bullshit on a technicality. I mean, maybe I’m taking your term “pasty white” too literally. I understand that people of color risk losing more with a Trump presidency. Either way, I think it’s worth noting that this white prick got what he voted for when he voted for Nader in 2000: a 14-month, all-expense-paid trip to Iraq, which this whole country would have been better without. In other words, an Army National Guard soldier who had joined the military just so that he could pay for college, I got drafted to leave my then-dependent (now ex) wife and the safety of the United States to enter Iraq nine days following “mission accomplished,” i.e. on my twenty-third birthday.
Granted, I’m probably the exception versus the rule. I mean how many Green Party assholes are or were in the military? Jill Stein: no. Ajamu Baraka, a first time candidate for any elected office: yes. The rest? (You tell us, Green Party. I wouldn’t say that your website is, as Mr. Savage said, “a mess,” so much as that it just sucks. I mean, where are Stein and Baraka on your “comprehensive” database for 2016? Are they really running for president and vice president this year?)
Green Party or not—I think it’s worth noting how one segment of whites faired as a result of our last Republican presidency: Among all of the United States military personnel who died or got wounded in action in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, over 80 percent were white.
Pastily yours,
Jeremy Warneke