A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones. – George Eliot
You probably heard about the school shooting.
Which one you ask?
The one where the shooter’s parents ran for their own safety and went into hiding like somebody was trying to gun them down.
Mom wrote a letter to the President-elect five years ago.
p~ Posted on November 11, 2016· 1 Comment `
Dear Mr. Trump….
Dear President Elect, Mr. Trump.
Feels funny to even be writing your name like that, but you made history on Tuesday. I’m not going to lie. I was scared shitless to circle your name on my ballot. I have been back and forth on whether to vote for you, or not vote at all. I struggled to make myself find a way to trust Hillary as a President. I could not.
You see, I am an American Woman. I value the equality of the LGBT community, in fact, I hold that in really high regards. I am a feminist. I value womens rights and want to be alive when I see the first woman become President. But as an American Woman, with a 10 year old child I could not have that first woman be Hillary.
Up until the first debate, I was really trying to find a reason to vote for her. Pro-choice, yes, I am a believer in pro-choice, that a woman should have control over her body. That is something right? That was really the only thing that I could find to try to grasp onto as a reason to not vote for you.
The first debate, Mr. Trump you came out like a bucking Bronco, you fell flat. You pretty much sucked at debating. If it’s one thing those Clinton’s have, is the ability to speak in public. But I am also a woman, I have a very strong intuition and I personally have always learned to go with my gut feeling (thanks mom). Hillary started speaking, I listened, I looked at her eyes, her permanent, unchanging smile, her ability to show no emotion and it was then, my heart sank, my mind became clear and I knew, absolutely knew that her intentions were not true. Her promises are false. Her voice has an evil cold. Everything she has done, whether it was proven true or not to the public, I knew in the deepest of my gut that I could not let this woman have control over my son’s future.
Mr. Trump, I actually love that you are a bad public speaker because that showed sincerity, and humility. You changed your mind, and you said “so what”. You made the famous “grab them in the pussy” comment, did it offend me? No. I say things all the time that people take the wrong way, do I mean them, not always. Do I agree that you should of shown your tax returns? No. I don’t care what you do or maybe don’t pay in taxes, I think those are personal and if the Gov’t can lock someone up over $10,000 of unpaid taxes and you slipped on by, then that shows the corruption.
I like that you have failed. I love it even more that those failures taught lessons and made you one of the most successful Business Men in my history. I love that you are not from the political spotlight, maybe you are the hope that can really uncover the politicians for what I believe they really are. I have high hopes you will shut down Big Pharma, make health care affordable for me and my MIDDLE CLASS family again. I hope you uncover the cure for cancer, because there is one, we all know it, but you are the one to prove it. I’m not scared of your big personality and quick temper. There is a whole house of representatives that still have to approve if you decide to get pissed at China and blow them up.
The Wall. The famous Wall. See Mr. Trump, I support that wall. I am not racist. In fact my grandfather came straight off the boat in Italy. Fought, struggled and had to prove his way to be an American Citizen. He went through the great depression, he then started a successful coil company here in MI where he employed other hard working Americans and paid them a good wage. I want every non-American that wants to live in this great country to have to go through the same process. I don’t even know where we went wrong with that, but if you want to be here, work here, live here damnit, fucking earn it and prove it.
As a female and a Realtor, thank you for allowing my right to bear arms. Allowing me to be protected if I show a home to someone with bad intentions. Thank you for respecting that Amendment.
Thank you for wanting to put our Veterans first. Why we send so much money overseas when we have so much help we need to provide here is beyond me.
You see, Mr. Trump, I can go on and on, in fact I used to think Democrat. I don’t believe in God and I’m quite opposite of your typical “republican”. But now I am 38 years old. I have a family. My husband and I both work full time jobs. I have watched our insurance premiums double. I cannot afford to buy into this Obamacare. For my family its over $600 a month with deductibles. We bust our ass Mr. Trump. I pay taxes, my husband pays his child support, I donate to charities.. We are good fucking Americans that cannot get ahead. And what makes me sick, is people that come over here from other countries and get free everything.
You see Mr. Trump, I need you to stop common core. My son struggles daily, and my teachers tell me they hate teaching it but the HAVE to. Their pay depends on these stupid fucking test scores. I have to pay for a Tutor, why? Because I can’t figure out 4th grade math. I used to be good at math. I can’t afford a Tutor, in fact I sacrifice car insurance to make sure my son gets a good education and hopefully succeeds in life. My parents teach at a school where their kids come from illegal immigrant parents. Most of their parents are locked up. They don’t care about learning and threaten to kill my mom for caring about their grades. Do you realize Mr. Trump that they get free tutors, free tablets from our Government so they can succeed. Why cant my son get those things, do we as hard working Americans not deserve that too?
My husband suffered a stroke and a broken back and we were with just my income. Do you know how hard it is to support a family on only $40,000 a year? I couldn’t qualify for State Aid. I made to much.
Mr. Trump, this is why I voted for you. I see the change that we so desperately need. I see jobs coming back, people having to work for their handouts, money going to who really deserve it. Big Pharma taken down, Monsanto stop poisoning us. Jobs given back to our American workers. I believe YOU are the President who will make these things happen. I have NEVER had this much belief in one person, and you are it.
If this blog even makes it to your eyes…thank you. From the bottom of my heart.
Yours Truly,
A hard working Middle Class Law Abiding Citizen who is sick of getting fucked in the ass and would rather be grabbed by the pussy.
Josh Hawley and the Republican Obsession With Manliness
By Liza Featherstone for The New York Times. Dec. 4, 2021.
Ms. Featherstone is a journalist who writes frequently about the politics of gender. She has a 15-year-old son.
Senator Josh Hawley is worried about men. In a recent speech at the National Conservatism Conference, he blamed the left for their mental health problems, joblessness, obsession with video games and hours spent watching pornography. “The crisis of American men,” he said, “is a crisis for the American republic.”
The liberal reaction was flippant. A CNN analysis mocked the speech, contrasting the “decline of masculinity” with real issues like the pandemic and inflation. The ReidOut Blog on MSNBC’s website declared, “Josh Hawley’s crusade against video games and porn is hilariously empty.” But the contempt and mockery his speech received was, at least in part, misplaced.
Mr. Hawley is not alone in sensing that masculinity is a popular cause; around the world, male politicians are tapping into social anxieties about its apparent decline, for their own ideological ends. The Chinese government, for instance, has declared a “masculinity crisis,” and it is responding by cracking down on gaming during school days and by investing in gym teachers and school sports.
There can be a homophobic and fascistic component to such calls: China has also barred “sissy” men from appearing on TV; in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has said that masks are “for fairies”; and Mr. Hawley, in his speech, fueled anti-transgender prejudice by alluding to a bogus “war on women’s sports.” Nothing justifies this hateful nonsense. But Mr. Hawley, for all his winking bigotry, is tapping into something real — a widespread, politically potent anxiety about young men that is already helping the right.
American politicians have long fanned popular flames of masculine panic to advance their own agendas, and Mr. Hawley is a scholar of this tradition. In 2008, two years after graduating from Yale Law School, he wrote a smart, compelling book about a historical figure who also worried about masculinity. In “Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness,”published by Yale University Press, Mr. Hawley described how Roosevelt sought to imbue men with the fortitude the country needed to drive big national projects like war and territorial expansion.
Foregrounding the iconic virility of the cowboy and the soldier, he set out to inspire civic virtue in a citizenry that, he believed, had lost traditional manly virtues when people moved from farms to cities. Conquest would allow American men to shed the temptations of the “slothful life” and become a “more manful race.” Mr. Hawley seeks to carry on this tradition.
He is right about some things. Deindustrialization has stripped many men of their ability to earn a decent wage, as well as of the pride they once took in contributing to prosperous communities. Boys are sometimes overdisciplined and overmedicated for not conforming to behavioral expectations in school. And while more women than men are diagnosed with anxiety or depression, men are more likely to commit suicide or die of drug overdoses.
None of these problems are caused by liberals. But liberalism hasn’t offered a positive message for men lately. In the media, universities and other liberal institutions, it sometimes seems that every man is potentially guilty of something. As Mr. Hawley puts it, men are being told by liberals that “they’re the problem.” Our side — the progressive side — has struggled to articulate what a “nontoxic” masculinity might look like, or where boys might look for models of how to become men.
This has set up an existential crisis for the left, threatening its ability to win elections. For years, young men have been flocking to the far right, finding its messages and disgruntled virtual communities on YouTube and Reddit. In 2016, Donald Trump won the male vote by 11 percentage points. And with his attacks on pornography and video games, Mr. Hawley could appeal to mothers, too, who know that, in excess, these aren’t signs of healthy social adjustment.
Like Roosevelt, Mr. Hawley knows how to exploit the cultural anxieties of ordinary people to advance his brand of politics. But he hasn’t offered solutions to this “masculinity crisis” because neither he nor his party has any.
Men and boys need good jobs, affordable access to team sports, an education system sensitive to their social and emotional development, public parks, mental health support, access to substance abuse treatment and paternity leave. [Don’t forget the arts. Manly men like art. – JDW] All of this requires public funding, which is far more likely to come from the left than the right. To thrive, many men also need the freedom not to be “men” at all, but rather to become sissies, scrawny historians or even women, a cultural evolution Mr. Hawley and his conservative ilk adamantly oppose.
In his book, Mr. Hawley rightly condemned Roosevelt’s racism and commitment to violent conquest, but he also wanted to salvage from Roosevelt’s legacy a vision of the common good, an insistence that we can live nobler and more meaningful lives. In his speech, Mr. Hawley tapped into this legacy: “To each man, I say: You can be a tremendous force for good. Your nation needs you. The world needs you.”
I don’t hate this message, taken alone, for our sons. Who would? But that vision of shared purpose and civic virtue won’t come from Mr. Hawley any more than funding for more public baseball fields will. He, after all, has opposed just about every common public project recently proposed, from the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the Build Back Better Act to the Green New Deal.
Meanwhile, the left will need to find a better way to talk to men; half of the population is far too many people to abandon to the would-be strongmen of the far right.
And so it goes.
UPDATE. Conservative Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark offers this follow-up.
This, obviously, had nothing to do with the spirit of Christmas, and really was not about the Second Amendment, either. His flagrant display of firepower was intended to trigger, and flaunt.
It was, in other words, the gun zealot’s equivalent of a d*ck pic.
MSNBC anchor Lindsey Reiser piped up: “Sorry, everybody, I’m not sure we can say that, Charlie!”
Sykes, founder and editor-at-large of The Bulwark and frequent MSNBC contributor, apologized for “being offensive.” But he added, referring to Massie’s equipment: “He’s basically trying to show off. He’s trying to trigger to get the reaction.”
He added: “That is not designed to make a serious argument … It is designed to show off in this fetish kind of way.”
The website “Raw Story,” reported: “Charlie Sykes stuns MSNBC host with lewd description of Thomas Massie’s gun photo as like pic of his privates.” And, for that, I suppose I should apologize.
But no.
Massie is a not a serious man, and his performative assholery did not deserve a serious or respectful response. Posting this photo has the same relationship to responsible gun ownership as sending out a d*ck pic does to genuine romance.
Unfortunately, it also seems to capture so much of what the post-policy, post-governing GOP has become these days.
His Christmas tweet — with its callous and vicious indifference to the latest gun-related tragedy — was not about any coherent idea at all, but it fits a pattern. As the GOP becomes an ever-more unserious party, its pols increasingly compensate for their various inadequacies by flaunting their hardware.
For a certain class of GOP politicians, this gun cosplay is a subset of their obsession with faux toughness. But it also reflects the way that triggering memes have displaced the business of governing, or even the attempt to govern. Who needs statesmanship, when we can text out pictures of our big guns?
It should be noted that, at one point, Massie himself seemed to understand what was happening. Back in 2017, he explained:
“All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand [Paul] and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”
Now, however, Massie seems intent on snatching the “Craziest SOB” title back for himself. But the competition is fierce.
Who, after all, can forget this great moment in American statesmanship? When Ted Cruz fried up some bacon on the barrel of a machine gun, because, well, you know.