Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Lives Of Loud Desperation

Martin Longman quotes from a newsletter from Al Giordano:

When we see or hear fifty-year-old guys in the media threatening coups d’etat or assassination attempts against a Hillary presidency, keep in mind that these dudes couldn’t win an arm-wrestling contest. Theirs are expressions of profound impotence: a lament that their whiteness and maleness does not today infuse them with the automatic privilege and power they were promised as boys.
Such expressions – whether from some asshole on social media or a bitter relative at the family Thanksgiving table – are meant to inflame. They respond to social cues that the rest of us provide them. Guys like that figure out what words are likely to offend or traumatize others and they shout them precisely to upset. In their lives of loud desperation, the moment when they cause stress to others may be the only time anyone pays them any attention at all. It provides a fleeting illusion of the power that they thought was their birthright. Alone at twilight, many with a couple of divorces later, with kids that generally hate them, causing trauma is the only move left in their playbook to say: “I am,” and to be noticed at all.

Damn, as the kids say.  That leaves a mark.

Longman and others are beginning to predict a wave.  Those that are beginning to predict a wave are some of the more prescient commentators out there.  Longman predicted Trump in the summer.

The summer of 2012.

I'm not as sanguine.  I hope for a wave that sweeps away the GOP House majority, because I fear for what may come with a government divided between Democrats and Lunatics.

If the demographic waves doesn't get here soon, hopefully the meteor will.

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