Richard Rorty, an American philosopher, wrote in Achieving Our Country (1998) –
[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
The old man himself had issued the alarm when President-elect Oz, Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief, first glided down that golden escalator from his tri-level one-hundred-million dollar gilded penthouse.
Everybody said the old man was crazy. Everybody said, no, Americans have more sense. The Republicans claimed to have a deep and talented field. But hideously Bloated Orange Blob said what we were all thinking if we were stupid enough to say it aloud and inveterate liars to boot.
The old man thought there was a fine line between insanity and prescience.
***
He had talked to three people after the election. One of his closest friends – an advisor, a sounding board, a good example always – said he voted for Prez-elect B.O.B. because he wanted a ‘strict constructionist’ appointed to the Supreme Court. The old man asked about a rightwing Court that already decided money is speech and racism is over and corporations are people.
Speaking of black people. He had asked his barber, an Muslim Africa-American small business owner… who didn’t vote. He relied on his faith, not politics. The old man was surprised but that made more sense than ‘strict constructionist.’
At the Black Dog in Cedar Key, on the back deck, HUGE black man, big cigar, nice face, didn’t directly answer the question. Just reached deep into his pocket, pulled out a bill with a picture of Hamilton on it and said, “This, this is what I believe in.”
The old man was still evaluating that response but it might make sense. Because these days, what the hell else do we have to believe? Not the truth.
***
Part of Witness Protection or WitSec, as the Feebs like to call it, they put you someplace nobody would ever think to look for your duplicitous ass.
They put me here. Deep red rural exurban white old fat and unhappy. He was none of those things, okay, white technically.
No bookstores. No titty bars. Whittling is considered a fine art.
He had no friends. Didn’t golf and he looked terrible in a pointed hood and white sheet.
The old man had been sick all year and he was still happy. You just can’t let them break you.
***
He was thinking about getting the old gang back together again. All of them pretty much on their last legs anyway. What the hell, go out with a bang.
There wasn’t a tougher, meaner band of brothers than Steve The Beard and Uncle Roger and Wild Werner and our attorney Tenacious Tim, too few remain. Life is a killer.
James Lee Burke or maybe Stephen Hunter wrote a book about a suicide mission. Since they didn’t figure to get out alive, he only recruited men over age fifty-five. Because by fifty-five, your life is pretty much behind you. Not so much to lose.
He had been sixty when the young redhead had picked him up, but that’s another story.
Anyway, he was thinking about going completely Red Dawn all over these people if they dare get too close.
Not that puerile remake, the original with a buff Patrick Swayze.
