Walking home from the beer store it came to me. I’m voting for Sanders in the primary. I so did not see that coming.
Symbolic, I know Clinton1 is going to win, but still it matters somehow.
I really don’t much like her. Was going to hold my nose and vote for her just the same. She’s better rounded and worlds more pragmatic. She’ll get shit done, and most of said shit will be, at least domestically, more good than not, these fingers cross. What Sanders wants, I love and love him for, but he’s wildly unrealistic. Heaps of sympathetic economists concur. And he ain’t too very strong on facts beyond these murkin’ borders – and that, a little, turns internationalist me off.
What shifted it for me? Three thoughts fell, feather-light, to the floor.
He’s a better person than she is.2
His values align better with mine.
Most quadrennia, he’d be the weaker general election candidate, but this time round he’s stronger. And keeping Drumpf from power is the vital matter.
So, Bernie, you have me.
1. Am I fussy to be bothered by the sexism in her so often being called Hillary? It’s not like we need to distinguish her from Bill. Sanders’s advocates call him Bernie, yes, Drumpf’s fans skeptics and detractors call him The Donald, but Clinton is called Hillary rather more generally, by commentators assuming neutrality. Same phenom I see among students who call male authors by last name, female by first.
2. I know how problematic such a thing is to say. But it’s the form the thought came in and so I set it down in that form. I’m totally into authenticity. If I subscribed to Drumpfism, and never second-guessed my most base impulse, this footnote’d be fired.3
3. Some day in the future, when daring, a post on the liberation I think Drumpf seems to offer. Something to do with id energy uncensored by a super-ego. Something to do with a counter-swing from the sort of impulse-control of which President Obama – may blessings rain down upon him – is an acme.4
4. A complexity here. The counter-swing to Drumpf is a racist swing – from a scarily other president to a reassuring xenophobic anglo-puffball. And some of the anxiety around Obama is that he doesn’t plug into any familiar racialist narrative around American black men. He’s no animal. He don’t even talk black. He speaks Harvard. (Or Yale? I get those two confused. Went to Oberlin and worried more about the difference between tofu and tempeh.)
No wonder white trash find him condescending. That’s where you’re left when the back-and-forth of projection and introjection runs out of juice.
“White trash.” Well now that was asshole of me. I’m going to leave it, cuz I think Drumpf, his upwelling from the deeps of ‘Murka’s psyche, if it has value, it’s that he exposes the tribalism we’re all of us given to.
Myself too. “White trash” the surfacing of an ineradicable tribalism. I’m white and don’t want to be that white.
That’ll be the next post maybe – tribalism, rationalism. We all still do us-and-them, folks. We do it by skin colour, we do it by creed, we do it, here in Bellingham, by bumper sticker. You might have time, before I get to it, to read Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which lays out how Hume and Voltaire lead to Hitler, Hollywood, and our present bind.
“Return of the repressed.” What you repress returns, doublestrong.
That includes, repress the repressor. Trump’s our asshole, and that’s hardly even a metaphor. He’s America’s id, unrepressed but constipated.
the art of compost 