Sunday, November 12, 2017

Entry 400: That's Right, 400

Wow, 400 entries.  I've been regularly posting to this blog for over seven years now.  If you do the math, I've averaged a post every 6.5 to 7.0 days.  It's a little under a week because, although now I regularly post once a week (with the occasional skipped week), when I first started it (pre-kids), I posted twice a week and so that's reflected in the average.

It's been a positive exercise overall.  Sometimes it's a drag to write something, or I don't have any ideas or time.  But for the most part it's very nice to create something that I can look back on and smile about.  It's fun to go back and read old entries sometimes.  I remember things from the past that would literally be forgotten forever if they weren't written down.  It does feel a strange at times -- inefficient -- to put so much effort into something that so few people actually consume, but that's how it goes.  Not everybody can be David Sedaris, and I bet even David Sedaris has written thousands of words nobody has ever read or heard.  In my own publishing experience -- crossword puzzles, academic papers, guest articles at "real" blogs -- the ratio of time I spend working on things that will never see the light of day to things that will is embarrassingly high.  Or at least it would be if I let myself be embarrassed by it.  But I don't because it's a way to spend my leisure time -- and it's just as good as any other way.  If you derive satisfaction from the process, then it's never a waste of time.


Anyway, more news about sexual assault this week.  That's... good?  I dunno.  Certainly it's not good that men are sexual assaulting women (and other men), but it is good that it's coming out and (mostly) being condemned.  It appears to be one of those cultural waves that seemingly hits the public all at once with a tremendous force -- like how almost overnight gay marriage went from being a taboo, even among mainstream liberals, to being so widely accepted that you will be criticized (rightfully) as being a bigot if you don't accept it.  The public rose up and said "there's nothing wrong with gay people getting married" and now we seem to be saying "it's not okay to treat women the way we've been treating them."

Not everybody is on-board, of course.  Republicans, as you might expect, are loath to embrace this anti-harassment movement.  Oh, they are fine with it when it's a "liberal" doing the transgressing, but not when it's when of their own.  There are a shockingly (but not that shockingly, if you've been paying attention) high number of GOP members earnestly positing that a child molester is more fit for public office than a Democrat.  Sexual predation against a minor is not a deal-breaker.  Indeed you have people who think a 30-year-old man forcing a 14-year-old to feel his erect dick is not all that bad.  It's sick -- but that's today's GOP.  They are a sick party.  That's the harsh, sad reality.

And they've always been resistant to social changes.  In fact, it's really why they exist.  At the top, you have super rich people who want tax cuts and ideologues who want to dismantle the welfare state, but the base -- Trump's people -- are held together almost completely by social and racial grievance.  They see the country changing -- becoming less white, becoming more LGBT-friendly, becoming more multicultural, more wary of "family values", less accepting of traditional gender roles -- and they don't like it.  They could give a shit about public policy and foreign affairs.  They just want somebody in office who hates the same things and the same people they hate.  They want somebody who is on their side, fighting the wave of progressivism they feel is overcoming the country.  (And they are not necessarily wrong about this wave coming.  Where they err, in my opinion, is in thinking these changes are necessarily going to make their lives tangibly worse.)

I thought this was a good article about Trump supporters.  This has been my take on Trumpism from the beginning.  It's not really a con, as many people like to say.  I think a lot of Trumpies know he's full of shit.  They know he's making promises he can't keep.  They just don't care -- they might even like his lies, knowing full well they are in fact lies, because he's lying on their behalf and telling them what they want to hear.  His lies are part of the deal.  The deal being -- you support me and put me into power, and I will stick up for you.  I will insult the people you want me to insult.  I will normalize your bigotry and make you feel good about your racism.  That's the quid pro quo.

Now, to be clear, getting back to the problem of sexual assault, this is most definitely not something on which any part of the political spectrum has a monopoly.  You find it on the left, the right, the up and the down, the in and the out, and other dimensions we haven't even discovered yet.  The difference is how do people respond when it is revealed.  And right now the left is better at disowning its sexual abusers (see: Harvey Weinstein and Anthony Weiner).  Maybe if you go back to previous generations with Bill Clinton or the Kennedys, this wouldn't be the case, but we aren't in a previous generation at the moment.  Also, with respect to Clinton, other than the fact that he last ran for office before a decent chunk of the electorate was even born, he also was impeached and thoroughly investigated at the behest of his political enemies, and the worst that came out is that he lied about an infidelity with a consenting adult.  (With that said, I would have no problem with Democrats casting Slick Willy aside.)

Well, one thing that remains true after 400 entries: I always run out of time way before I think I will.

Until next time...

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