Forget Fear and Loathing. The US Election Inspires Projectile Vomiting

Barbara Ehrenreich is brilliant. She nails it. I appreciate my husband for sharing this one. Ron read much of this piece to me last night as I was driving us to pick up my mom for dinner. We could have laughed or cried. We laughed. These are dark and challenging times. Remembering laughter is essential. ~ Molly

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The most sordid side of our democracy has been laid out for all to see. But that’s only the beginning: whoever wins, the mutual revulsion will only intensify

by

Barbara Ehrenreich

 

Published on

Sunday, November 06, 2016

by

The Guardian

‘At the milder end of the conservative spectrum, there is talk of ‘civil unrest,’ and at the wilder end, talk of armed revolution and civil war.’ (Photo: Brennan Linsley/AP)

Back when America was “great” – say, in the 1970s – the most unpleasant emotions a presidential race might inspire were “fear and loathing”. We expected our political process to provoke antagonism and ennui. We did not expect it to trigger projectile vomiting.

But this year is different, with psychotherapists reporting widespread depression, insomnia and digestive problems among the electorate. Record numbers are voting early, by mail, as if to purge themselves of all connection to the proceedings.

Add in the realization that the whole world is watching this spectacle and the sensitive American is likely to feel something akin to physical shame – as if someone had walked in and found them deflowering a close relative or a pet. And just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Clinton email scandal looped in penis-fetishist Anthony Wiener, estranged husband of Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin. The most sordid side of our democracy has been laid out for all the world to see.

On the Republican side, there is a person so broadly offensive that the liberal news source Huffington Post feels obliged to end every article mentioning him with the kind of warning you might expect to find on a cigarette pack:

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar,rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the US.

 

His supporters – generally portrayed as laid-off blue-collar workers who, in the absence of unions, have devoted themselves to the cause of whiteness – cheer on each of his macro-aggressions. To them, he is a giant middle finger in the face of the bipartisan political elite, and the crazier he acts, the more resounding this fuck-you gets. It doesn’t matter that most of Trump’s assertions can’t stand up to fact-checking; ignorance has been enshrined by an entire alternative media, stretching from Fox News to Stormfront on the Nazi-leaning right.

 

On the liberal left, tragically, we do not have Bernie Sanders, who would have dispatched Trump’s populist pretensions with a wrist flick. But no, representing the side of tolerance, good government and cosmopolitanism, we have the very epitome of Democratic party elitism, a woman who labeled half of Trump’s supporters “deplorables”, a politician who is so robotic that any efforts to analyze her motives risk the charge of anthropomorphism. Consider her statement on the Standing Rock occupation in North Dakota, which could have been issued by an unmanned typewriter. As soldiers and police bore down on the protesters, she urged all parties – tribal peoples and the pipeline company that threatens their culture and habitat – “to find a path forward that serves the broadest public interest”.

Please continue this article here: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/11/06/forget-fear-and-loathing-us-election-inspires-projectile-vomiting