Working Class Trump Supporters: The Real Morons

I grew up poor in a middle class neighborhood. We didn't have a car or a phone. Phones in those days were big clunky things. I remember one used to sit on a table in the living room. It had been disconnected because my single-mother couldn't pay the bill. She was a waitress at a soda fountain.

My father was a bigot, well they both were, but I remember not speaking to him for basically the rest of my life after he told me he went to see boxing to "see the nigger get beat."

They were working class. Probably would have been Trump supporters.

I have no respect for Trump supporters. I know I'm supposed to. It's politically correct to. But I don't. They've destroyed America. Will we ever recover from Trump? Most likely a worse Trump will come along, less crazy, less stupid, more like Putin. They'll welcome him because he talks a good game.

The working class, people like my parents, made it happen. I'm supposed to be politically correct and admire them for their....what? Really. What? Ignorance? Stupidity? Lack of character judgment? Admiration for a con man?

If they couldn't see he was a fraud, what are we to make of them? I don't excuse them. I condemn them. If they get all their information from Fox News? What of that? When I wrote for a supermarket tabloid, I always laughed and thought, "There are a lot of really stupid people out there who will believe "Mother Gets Pregnant, Has Baby Same Day."

I yucked it up. The stories read as any normal newspaper story. "It's exactly like wrestling," I told myself. A couple of decades later Roger Ailes took that concept, walked it back a little (not much), started Fox News and the suckers bought it, ate it up, allowed Roger Ailes to fuck them.

"Oh there's anger and disappointment in the country," we heard. Good enough. And the manner of addressing this is to elect Trump? I'm not going to go into his mania, if you have half a functioning brain you already know.

So these "morons" (thank you Mr. Secretary for making ok to say that again) got fooled, bamboozled. And we're to revere them because of some love we have been told we should have for the working class.

Fuck them. I'm one of them. I've never had a penny to my name. I live in fear every day that the rent will be raised, the car will break down...or any other emergency that is destined to fuck up my life.

So don't feel sorry for them. They could have made other choices, but they didn't. They chose wrong. The were gullible. They're like the little old lady who used to bang her shoe on the edge of the wring during wrestling. Like it did something. Always expecting something to happen. Nothing ever did.

Now something is.

Disaster. Thanks mom and dad.

It's a MALE problem

I wrote this in early 2007 when the topic of having gays in the military was a hot one (it is again, but...). It has more to do with the nature of men than the nature of gay men or women. Given the "Me Too" proliferation, I thought it might be a good idea to re-publish it. -- TVD

The problem with gays in the military being out of the closet is not a gay problem. It’s not even a straight problem. It’s a male problem, it has to do with how men behave.

In the entire debate, which began again once last week, there has hardly been a peep out of lesbians or hetero women on any of the issues raised by straight men opposed to the idea. We didn’t hear anything about women not wanting to shower with other women, or sleep in close quarters, or…. anything.

Why? Because women don’t behave the same way as men do, sexually. For one thing, with very few exceptions, women don’t rape.

There is within every man, straight or gay, an unconscious understanding of male sexuality. It is, I am told by my gay male friends, better understood by gay men, because they deal with other men’s sexuality on a regular basis. But straight men (like me) know that, given the opportunity, men will have sex with anything that attracts them; be it male, female, animal, vegetable….basically any other person or object in the universe.

And when are the male peak sexual years? The same years most men serve in the military, including the years when the main thing men think about is sex.

That’s what straight men in the military are afraid of, even though they may not know that’s what they’re afraid of. Unfortunately, they may be right. This is not an argument against giving gay men and lesbians the same rights for which they are putting their lives on the line. It’s just a fact about men.

If gay military men were allowed to be out, it could well be a tremendous lesson for men in general. It could help men in confronting the fact that it is the men in the world who do the raping, and most of the sexual harassment. When these straight men are confronted with gay men who behave the same way toward them that they have behaved toward women….well, we may have some old fashioned consciousness raising.

And, by the way, anybody who thinks that gay men won’t be checking out every good looking man who walks by, just doesn’t understand men.

Does this mean that men can’t control themselves? Of course not. It means that men might better learn to, finally, or at least learn that anything that turns them on is not fair game.

It’s all a learning experience. Learning how to live with each other in or out of the military is tough, given the random nature of human behavior. There should be a lot more talk among men about their sexuality. And I mean neither Howard Stern-type discussion, nor running to the woods and beating on drums.

There aren’t any simple answers to the questions of how to deal with men of all sexual orientations in the military. Men just don’t deal with their own sexuality very well.

Perhaps a calms discussion of how men of all sexual persuasions can live together in the military is a good place to start.