30

That It Should Come To This

This election has had me on edge, and I know I’m not alone in that. In a normal election year I suffer anxiety because I know that I am about to be insulted at some level, and that level usually begins the first time the Republicans trot out my sexuality as a rallying cry and bargaining chip. I never cease to be amazed at the ignorant vehemence that springs forth when the subject arises, and I never cease to be deeply insulted by the fact that this is even allowed to be a topic of discussion in political discourse. I know who I am. I know that I am who I am to the core of my being, that I cannot change who I am, that I do not desire to change who I am, that I am completely and naturally me. Most importantly, I know that I do not hurt people by being who I am. I know this so deeply that any debate feels irrelevant. Yet every four years, and often in between, an individual politician or a religious zealot or a political party holds up my sexual identity as a sign of the apocalypse. My legitimacy is questioned as part of a political platform, I become something that must be legislated for or against, I am demoralized. I am dehumanized. And it is very tiring. Every Presidential election is like going back to First Grade when the bullies called me fairy, or Seventh Grade when fairy became faggot, and the pain went deeper.

I know also that the country will endure a nail-biting duel egged on by strident talking heads. Here come the contenders, a two-headed monster trying to eat itself: one body, two minds, no room for an original thought, and accompanied by a ghoulish parade of surrogates engaged in a knife fight. When the dust settles, we’ll return to business as usual: a Congressional stalemate, social losses or gains, unnecessary suffering somewhere on the economic spectrum, possibly a terrible war, probably a terrible scandal, and the victor will find countless ways to disappoint those who supported his or her campaign. This is the American status quo for which so many of us suffer bruises every four years.

But this election year is not normal. It is anything but, and I have to admit that more than anxiety, I’ve felt terror. The Trump campaign started off like any other Republican campaign, choosing to denigrate me by promising to repeal Marriage Equality, and of course I was disheartened and alarmed to hear it. But unlike other campaigns, this campaign did not let me feel special in my persecution. This campaign chose to denigrate anybody and everybody who wasn’t white, male, and heterosexual. This campaign offered legitimacy to the irrational hatred (but legitimate fears) of a white American working class that has been systematically silenced and pushed further and further from the table. The Trump campaign turns out to be the campaign most feared in modern times, a campaign that sends out dog whistles to the American underbelly: this campaign is about white supremacy dressed up to look like white victimization, and it has something noxious for everyone.

The Trump campaign exploited a perfect storm of fear and resentment that had been fomented by years of Republican strategists feeding inflammatory rhetoric to the dispossessed, whipping into a fervent rage not only the white working class but an enormous segment of the white middle class as well. Decades of political strategy laid the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump, and an unprecedented propaganda machine (a machine so flagrant that I was taught as a child it could only exist in the USSR) amplified the inflammatory rhetoric and spoon-fed it to the masses until they were drunk on fervor and doused with the most massive dissemination of misinformation in US history, all of which primed them to lash out at scapegoats they believed were stealing their way of life.

Donald Trump, with his outsized personality and pathologies, an eternal man-child trapped in the maze of narcissism, provided the lit match that sent everything up in flames: “Knock the crap out of them…I will pay for the legal fees…I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell ya…In the old days, they’d be carried out on a stretcher…Lock her up…I’ll keep you in suspense.” This man is unstable. This man is ill-informed. This man is lecherous. This man is selfish and irrational and petulant and, most dangerous of all, vindictive. Yet roughly fifty million people look at Trump and say, “He represents me. Let him be the leader of the Free World.” I have tried and tried to understand how that can be. I’ve studied analysis that delves into the psyche of the Trump supporter, and to a large extent I understand the economic concerns, I understand the anger at a government that salvaged the bankers over consumers, I understand the instinct for revolt. Even the cultural concerns that I find offensive have a strange albeit dubious logic when you take into account the insidious way various minorities have been set-up as the decline of American civilization.

But what I struggle to understand is how I can look at Donald Trump and see what I see, an obvious huckster, a flimflam man who in the end will be unable to deliver on his grand promises (when was the last time that trickle-down economics and tax cuts for corporations and the rich helped our working and middle classes?), and how fifty million other Americans are not only blind to that, but can turn a willful blind eye to his basic lack of human decency. I have to conclude that these voters are willing to hand over the nuclear codes to a barbarian precisely because they themselves have become barbaric, and sadly this is where the rubber meets the road.

The great American boondoggle that was the Reagan Revolution created more than the reviled 1%. It also created an enormous class of dispossessed citizens so misled, confused and enraged that they seem like some retrograde subspecies with contempt for diplomacy and complete disregard for the social fabric, enthusiastically sliding backwards on the evolutionary scale because they think it will land them in the 1950s again. These voters are desperate, and in their desperation they’ve become as selfish, self-centered, and wrong as the man they have chosen to lead them. And while I am beginning to understand how they got there, how craftily they were lured into their own madness, I do not know how to coexist with them because I am afraid of them. They seem capable of anything.

Watching the Trump campaign shit itself and implode has greatly quelled the terror I was feeling. Knowing that the likely first female President of the United States will win by beating the ultimate example of everything that is wrong with men offers some satisfaction. But it will be a small reward for what Mr. Trump and the Republican Party have put the country through. Hatred and violence haven’t just been incited, they’ve been normalized, practically lionized, and for the first time in my life I have to think about my safety on the night of the election. Where am I most likely not to get hassled, roughed up, punched or shot at when the results come in?

Sadly, I’ll have to give that some thought, and I bet you will, too.

This article was originally published on medium.com.

john-balmaJohn Balma is an actor/writer living in Los Angeles (best known for playing Barney Varmn on Parks and Recreation).

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