The Libtard or Magat is Your Brother

I hate you all for forcing me to be the hippy, but enough is enough

Fine, it’s hypocritical to begin a plea for calm and sanity by telling you that you make me sick. But maybe we ought to consider letting each other be human once in a while—accompanied by high-quality air fresheners—so in that spirit I would like you all to know that I am very, very annoyed that you are forcing ME to be the hippy in American politics.

This is repulsive. Aesthetically speaking.

Look… you really don’t want to know what prompt I used to get this image.

ME, telling people to calm down, be quiet, stop insulting each other for not having the same opinion—ugh.

But fuckin’ KNOCK IT OFF, as my favorite managing editor used to say:

You all are getting out of hand for real. Shooting ex-presidents is probably going to be an Olympic event for more cycles than breakdancing—and look, come on, guys, I have SCIENCE on my side : 

Political orientation isn’t something you choose because you’re a right-wing nutjob or a liberal weenie, to quote JibJab from the first Obama campaign. Science says, it chooses you.

Not quite like eye color, but a bit like height, or sexual orientation: here’s the Wiki, I’m not a fuckin’ scientist, I’m just here generally trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.

We all love science, right, as long as it goes our way?

So suspend your way for a sec and promise to respect the referee’s temporary compromise before you ruin everything that all this blood’s been spilt to build; I promise there’s something to flatter everyone.

We could be having a real nice time here. We have rockets and computers and telescopes that can practically see God. I want to go to Mars, examine the fabric of reality, teach the cats to talk—there’s all kinds of cool stuff we could do, but instead the United States, holder of the world’s reserve currency, is slowly sliding into civil war because the red team and the blue team can’t get along, and treat each other like moral and mental defectives.

Even though—and this is the real kicker—we also have in our hands the very science to tell us that this political tribalism is stupid, blind bigotry.

Arbitrary hatred based on an immutable characteristic, even.

Hasn’t it ever seemed strange to you that elections are converging on a 50-50 split, with trying to truck as many unwilling or Gogolized bodies to the polls as possible becoming the deciding factor?

Like, shouldn’t REASONING be the deciding factor?

I don’t wanna sound crazy, but c’mon. Reasoning! But you seem to prefer trying to push what looks like a natural cleavage into sole power for your half of the human race or local population for the next term-length of years, O imagine the glorying and gloating—and longer if you can get the gerrymandering right—maybe permanently! LICK ME FASTER!! Yeah, CRUSH the enemy, salt the soil! All while somehow still unironically lecturing others about sexism and racism and other arbitrary bigotries….

Oh, dear.

I mean, when you put it that way, it sounds kinda dystopic, don’t it?

The rough answer is that political orientation is turning out to be somewhere from 50 to 80 percent heritable, which yes it’s a broad answer and no not all the chads have been counted but Jesus Christ there’s enough information here that you ought to be able to figure it out, especially considering the danger of the hysteria into which we are spiralling:

Political orientation appears to be not proof that your dad is a troglodyte or a closet case, but a normal difference in reactions to one of our most terrifying objects of obsession—The collective future.

(Whether we can actually control it is a philosophical question; for now I’m worried about the battle for the helm. If it turns out the helm is a toy disconnected from the rudder, then here comes the irony poisoning, duck!)

If you’re going to insist on democracy, it appears this left-right cleavage—terms that make no actual sense unless you’re in 18th-century Paris, where all the guys who thought one way sorted themselves into one side of the Hemicycle and the half that thought he other way sat in the other, like teenagers in a cafeteria—is a normal human thing. Like picking a spouse. Or not knowing quite why you feel compelled to feed that cat who followed you home after his ancestors helped yours survive the Bubonic Plague.

And the metaphor of wings is actually useful, because you need two of them to fly. You dumb fucks.

So when you want to kill right-wingers for being frustratingly, intractably different, congratulations: all these murderous wishes are very safely analogue to behavior that is precisely as racist, or misandrist, as you are afraid of being and then some, so, once again, mazel tov: You, too, are human, and repulsive.

Bojack Horseman keeps popping up goddang everywhar

I mean, I think about killing people a lot, too. But I don’t think of it as a political crusade. More like… keeping myself sharp. Just in case. Ya know?

Not to say that being an ideologue, or power-hungry, is normal. You can’t look at the crap that powerful Democrat or Republican politicians do and blame it on the basic liberal or conservative impulse, for instance.

Even though that seems to be about all we do.

It’s even less sensible to blame the red or blue pawn population, frustrating as their idiotic sheeplike behavior may be to a reasonable genius such as you. By the time a rat-type of person, which comes in all packages, becomes a politician, a lot of its behavior is driven by the desire for power, just as much as the ideology, till they feed into each other in a loop of horror—but they are still separate things.

Your cousin who works at the bike shop and has his stupid opinions is not the same thing as Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, no matter how fannishly and irrationally they support the jackass. There’s philosophy and there’s power, and there’s personal wounds and grudges and ambitions and vengeance, too.

Basically, science seems to want to boil it down to the size of your amygdala or whatever, while society sorts you into one of two camps holding up the assholes, but at base it just looks like there are two basic ways of looking at the future, and change:

There are some people who want excuses for change, because they think that makes them feel better, and other people who want excuses to hold back from change, ditto.

I mean… they both have a point, depending on the situation. Which, guess what, geniuses? : That’s likely why we evolved this way.

And possibly why you’ve also got especially disgusted people like me (I am out of patience with other people’s obsession with their own petty anxiety), who try to avoid the whole insincere Whine-O-Lympics until it gets trashy enough that if I don’t figure out which one of you is lying, we’re all getting et by a bear.

That’s the medium-charitable version of the paradigm—uncharitable would be knuckle-draggers versus utopian morons, which is how we see our enemies, vs. the charitable way (sensible, visionary) we see ourselves—and in developed democracies or anything close, these tendencies seem to sort people into two general camps, which repeatedly sort themselves into political movements. It appears to be partly biological, and partly a response to your environment.

You know: Like how everyone’s dumb political opinions basically boil down to either pleasing or rebelling against their dumb parents. Science says your observation is correct, there.

It looks like the kind of thing that you would expect to emerge from a high-level social animal, actually, doesn’t it? When animals got complicated enough for sexual reproduction we sprouted two genders; when our superorganisms got complicated enough to force us to think about our vision of the future together, we sprouted two ways of looking at it.

So far we tend to think of these two ways as adversarial, struggling for control of the ship: Do we go backward, to another form of oligarchy? Or do we go forward, to democracy, whatever the fuck that means?

Failing to decide on even so much as the definitions of things, we seem to have found a level where we are no longer ascending, but going in bloody circles.

Cycles, really. Political cycles, which blossom into cycles of violence, just like the House of Atreus.

I don’t want to do this. Do you?

I don’t want to do the gender war either. It’s the other half of humanity, guys. Stop psychologically splitting and projecting—easier said than done and I’m not a doctor but the first step, and the least you can fucking do, is to try.

Sinister red elephant beats up an evil blue donkey

Jesus CHRIST do I ever sound like I’ve been drinking essential patchouli oil—but shit has become that desperate. I can’t stress enough how fucking painful it is for me to have to take on this role. I’m a former mudwrestler. I find no greater joy in life than in the moment right after you hit me first and now I get a free shot.

But you jackasses have made this shit SERIOUS, so here I am:

KNOCK IT OFF, GUYS!

Not only is political violence the national sport, some of you think it’s cool, I guess because you’ve never thought beyond the end of next week or whenever your trust fund pays out.

And ya know, in the spirit of putting things in perspective, the end of civilization would get a HELL of a lot grosser than being a hippy, as much as it pains me to admit anything could be grosser than, say, eating lentil soup high on smack in bell bottoms and wearing an untrimmed beard.

Yes, a lot of my traumas are hilariously specific.

Anyway, speaking of trauma and perspective:

I wonder how many of you who are giddy with the excitement which you imagine a revolution (start all over CLEAN, man! Just like my acne routine!) or civil war (fuck them, I’ll show them!) would bring to your anxiously boring life—not to mention putting your eneminks in their place—how many of you screaming mean girls and Wednesdays, you jocks and nerds, have ever seen a dead body?

Or a pile of them?

You ever get trapped UNDER a pile of the dead—like when you’re at the Bataclan trying to headbang and some God-botherer decides they don’t like rock and roll?

Maybe this is a bad example, since you can’t argue with god-botherers really, and I’m trying to argue with you. But are our political parties really that different from religion? You all look pretty exalted to me. Would-be Trump assassin #2 or #3 said this was a clear battle between good ‘n’ evil, just like in any movie.

Tell me again why Hollywood is better than novels? Why politics are sooooooo much more interesting to the hordes of would-be intellectuals and pundits than science?

Picking your friends’ flesh out of your hair is a great way to stick it to the man, I guess, is that it? You ever pick skin off your clothes and you know whose skin it is? You prefer losing a leg to feeling as though your life has no real direction and it’s not fair that you feel so small in a big giant universe?

No, stupid. Bad ape! Religious wars are unholy. Civil wars are anything but civilized.

Maybe instead of struggling over the cockpit, you each worry about tending to your wing. Instead of framing the left as people who want to do crazy shit and the right as fuddy-duddies who want to oppress everyone back into the stone age, we could frame each other as Team Hey Let’s Find Stuff Needs Fixing and Team Hey Let’s Check That Bathwater For Babies.

Or, yeah, you could go on spending 99 percent of your mental energy worrying about what will happen if that magat gets elected, and deciding you need to take drastic action because the thought patterns of the other 50 percent of humanity are basically the apocalypse.

And you wonder why I envy you, when you all look that way to me.

Oh, I fully concede that the adrenaline rush brings a spark of fun to the general horror of one of those days that’s gone apocalyptically sideways. But the rest of it—this exciting grown-up civil unrest and war and shit—is only fun if you’re a serious psychopath. And you don’t want the rest of us to know you’re a psychopath so easily, do you? No. Put it away.

It’s pretty ironic that the prestige of literature is approaching rock bottom, because I swear to god I feel like I’m living in a Greek tragedy.

You know why Greek tragedies are so poignant?

I mean, yeah, it’s partly because the Athenians (when we say Greek tragedy we mean Athens) were in the throes of inventing theater as we know it. It was new, so it felt fresh. The way Public Enemy feels fresher than the Jell-O-shot rap they got on the radio now.

Also, sure, theater was very important and prestigious, so the cleverest guys went into it, instead of the hordes of BookTok assholes we have gumming up the works now. (But that’s only because the prestige of literature has yet to hit rock bottom so we can rebuild it; I digress into a whole other upcoming series of thoughts.) Theater was largely their religion; they bathed in and honed it, I imagine.

But also, those plays hit the modern American heart right where it hurts, or they would if anyone read anything more complicated than Harry Potter anymore, so instead we just road rage and smash each other with two-by-fours… (cough)…

…but they SHOULD seem poignant to you right now. The great tragedies of Sophocles and the anti-war comedies of Aristophanes were written at a time when the Athenians were celebrating their groundbreaking democracy by shooting it right in the gut.

The plays were a warning.

They were praised as entertainment.

Oh, yes, the rich and the populace alike petted and patted the playwrights on the heads, gave them laurels, completely missed the point, ignored the warnings, and stupidly drove their beautiful civilization right over a cliff.

Specifically, they kept going to war with their neighbors because the guys who rowed the triremes could all vote, and there were a lot of them, and they got paid a war bonus and weren’t actually in a lot of danger, so it was a real gravy train.

The first industrial-military complex, actually.

The greedy rowers kept voting themselves into wars until Athens and Sparta wore each other down; the whole ship of state went into the drink, and Philip of Macedonia was waiting in the wings with a terrible grin.

I imagine Aristophanes tearing up his laurels, screaming swear words we don’t even know about, alas.

Sure, on paper they were kings of the world during the reign of Philip’s son, Alexander the Great—that tshould sound vaguely familiar—but he wasn’t even Greek. Alexander was a Macedonian whose family swept down and used the Greeks’ own hubris to make them his impotent subjects, then used their cultural prestige as his banner for taking over the known world.

The Greeks INVENTED the word hubris. They were obsessed with not being hubristic. Did that help them? Helped them hubris themselves right into the shitter!

Yes, the first famous democracy didn’t last any longer than this one seems to want to not last. Like Oedipus, their obsession with this fate drove them right into Fate’s arms, which is I guess a lot of words for saying, “Sigh, nobody is going to listen to this,” but there’s already an account on here I like called the Cassandra Complex.

But I have to say something, because for all our stumbling around, people are scary-powerful as a clot, now, and we scare me. Fuck, we’re so smart and so fucking stupid. And such big toys—with the Internet, and the nukes, and these freaky new weapons, and the fires and riots and airplanes flying into buildings (maybe we can’t reason with people who are that far gone, but the rest of you mob aren’t that much saner, I swear to god)… and yet everyone feels like they’re getting the short end of the stick and they’re not getting their due.

I get it, this is an incredibly hard pill to swallow, so maybe it’s easier to go on a crusade against the Magats or the Libtards. We’re incredibly small parts of the whole, true—but it’s an incredibly large whole and you’re part of it, so, there’s that.

I hope that in 20 years—or maybe right now, if you want to take the speed track to sanity and pump the brakes on the piles of dead bodies—you’ll think about the shit you said about the Magats or the Libtards and feel exactly like as much of a creep as you would feel if you said that about women, or men, or gays, or straights, or people like me who kind of just feel like a pair of eyes and a fizzy green cloud of confusion. Yes, they’re stupid assholes but so are you, and so am I, and so was Einstein. Even Newton had some woo-woo beliefs, and yes, Tim Walz got excited and said something that wasn’t quite true because he was just nominated for the fast track to being king of the world—why can’t we leave things at that?! We’re repulsive but we’re in this together, whether we like it or not. You can deport all the Venezuelan gang members, but political orientation is not heritable in a simple direct way, so what are you going to do, deport your red child?

Maybe don’t answer that, crazy people.

How is it that you understand racism is wrong (well, you understand that SOME racism is wrong, which is even weirder) but you can’t see that your political hysteria is tribalism?

Be honest: Are your feelings on election night and the Super Bowl or Eurovision all that different?

Slowly, insidiously, over the past 20 years we’ve replaced our personal lives and gossip with political fights and gossip. Remember when we used to talk about our friends and enemies as though they were annoying people, and not avatars of their political orientation? Old people are too hypnotized and hypocritical to notice; young people are too inexperienced to know anything was ever different—and we tell ourselves that being self-styled experts on politics because that’s where the attention goes is in fact more intellectual than our former lives, when we had personal, literary, historical passions, and not fucking insane.

I worked at a newspaper in the early aughts and even WE didn’t give a flying fuck about politics unless it was work. We’d go to the bar after a long day of farming for horseshit from politicians and talk about what really mattered: Music, sports, books, FUCKING. That’s a whole different topic, though, and related to the way the Internet requires daily refreshing fodder that we all are connected to; I’ll just say it’s profoundly sick that politics became the anchor of our daily water cooler and not, say, literature, or particle physics, AND STILL WE ALL THINK WE’RE FUCKING SMART AND INTELLECTUAL FOR OBSESSING OVER THIS.

But look at me, I’m dragging in all these different threads of my wide and deep complaints into this; the Bubble in Your Mouth Lady would say I have big feelings, eh? Well, she should try reading a grown-up book, like real porn or history. But she would be correct in the sense that this account is beginning to drag with all these waves of excess information which is a shame because, christ, I try to be funny but this is really a desperate message:

We are becoming extremely emotional about political orientation, even as the low hum of science is beginning to inform us that these differences are biological, and should be approached with cerebral respect rather than fiery, annoying, phony-except-for-the-hatred passion.

Ha ha, is that a tragedy, or what?

We almost have the answer in our hands. Instead we’re gonna shoot each other.

Do you want to go out that way?

This was supposed to be better.

Do robots dream of whatever this cold nightmare did?

…

I hope in 20 years your kids are doing well. I hope things are peaceful, prosperous, and quiet, that everyone is well integrated, and we’re all teaching the dogs to talk and heading for space. We made it through all this. But because you were up in those big feelings, it was no thanks to you.

Your kids’ friends are going to laugh as they forward your old TikToks, where you’re screeching about breaking into the neighbors’ garage and burning all their campaign signs like you’re suffering alcoholic psychosis on Everclear.

Nope! Grandma was high on pure Politico! Or Newsmax. Whatever. (They used to be more distinguishable, but as the money flows all the slime runs together.)

They’re going to laugh at your constant stream of buzzwords, cringe every time you say “cringe” or “weird,” wish they could sink into the Earth the 40th time you throw a currently acceptable slur, like “cracker” or “libtard” or “magat” (quick clarification: Libtard is obvious, but with “magat” you’re actually comparing the other half of the human race to maggots, I presume? Is that it? How would you feel if someone said that about your race or gender? Not that it will be reupped for a new season because most of you are stupid and prefer garbage, but I suggest you put your slack-jawed subscription to Netflix to good use for once and watch Three-Body Problem), and be generally ashamed by you.

Considering how youse seem to feel about social approbation, this ought to be terrifying.

I mean, unless the kids turn out even worse than you are, which, I don’t know if we would survive that. Too bad, when we could choose the peace, prosperity, going to space stuff.

And whether being prejudiced against people, indeed dehumanizing them, for something that’s roughly as close to being a fixed inborn characteristic as sexual orientation (yeah, I guess you can pray away the gay or the magat, but why do you get to dictate life to another person?), is morally wrong, is up to you.

But it ain’t working.

Your species has, for better or for worse, gotten powerful enough that it’s quit being appropriate to use words like “inefficient” and “sub-optimal” for the fact that half of you refuse to cooperate with the other half:

It’s now what officials should be calling “shit-your-pants dangerous.”

But that power also means we have the potential to have a pretty good time, here! It’s not the potential for paradise; paradise is impossible and utopia is dangerous, as if it makes any sense for me to have to keep fucking telling you that with all the mounds of evidence heaped up around your ears, but you aren’t listening. POINT BEING, we can optimize, OK? Irony is you’re still trying to create a paradise by subjugating the other half, strangling them out of any shot at power…

Speaking of which, let’s repeat for memory: power and the powerful throw a wrench in the diagram; magats might seem like sheep to you but that ain’t the same as a shepherd.

There’s a line, generally on an income graph, between those who tend to be leftist or liberal in their hearts, and the frustrating, obnoxious, Dunning-Kruger cabal that seems to have latched on to the power structure created by the liberal half of the population during 250-some-odd years of trying to sort out this, the first and oldest really large-scale democratic project in the history of our species’ speckled history.

Well, there was Rome, but we’re trying to avoid that particular ending. Aren’t we? Jesus, don’t answer that. Like one’s own IQ, it ain’t wise to ask.

But as the general population, we don’t need to allow politicians to use this divide in their goddamn reindeer games. Even though you probably will.

But you could also not.

Step back. Get some perspective. Don’t be an angry pawn. That is the other half of humanity. You need them. I’ve made a point of spending time with people on both sides, and you know what? They both have decent motivations.

No, seriously. You guys just have different sets of thoughts, both of which make sense if you—yeah, yeah, I KNOW you don’t accept their basic principles, but have you ever stopped to think about what’s down there, the nitty-gritty, why you disagree? I would never, ever listen to an album that was just one instrument. Well, never say never, some of those barbershop quartets have the (insert positive slang term), but you know what I mean.

You’re all worried about who’s got the cockpit, but a plane needs two fucking wings so quit trying to saw the other one off, psychos.

All this gerrymandering and attempts at creating a one-party state and electoral cheating and feeding the orange man’s christ complex like you want to turn him into some kind of evil Roman god-emperor just so you’ll really have an excuse to drink…

Yeah, if you think I sound crazy, think about what I’m looking at.

Like I said, I’m the last person who wants to be a peacemaker. Probably 75 percent of my heart smiles like the Grinch as I imagine you all shooting each other. Oh my god, I don’t even have a dick but I have a boner. Totally sure you’re right, and God is on your side, yap yap yap yap yappity YAP; I can hear the housing prices go down with the thud of every slack-jawed self-righteous dope that hits the floor.

But unlike most of you I still have that lucid 25 percent that realizes my ass will probably be grass right along with you, if you keep marching to civil war.

So, like, stop.

Or not, whatever, I was just hoping we could get together one last time before the summer ends.

XO

PS: I know humanity has a real bad track record when it comes to Utopianism, especially me, but what are we going to do about this?

I feel like we’re living in the lowest budget Godzilla movie: These two assholes fighting are laying waste to everything, and our elections are becoming farcical. Can durr-mocracy (TM MRDA) survive?

Tentative answers next time, unless we all get nuked, on Nuisance Online Distributor!