Zealots I’ve loved and lost
The encroaching release of Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened is bringing out the expected amount of chatter from the Bernie or Bust crowd, and I’ve deliberately avoided getting involved in conversations over social media from the few remaining friends I have in that camp. After the election, I pretty much gave up all hope, and almost nothing that’s happened in 2017 has given me any indication that this wasn’t the wisest course of action.
Once upon a time, I wrote about politics regularly…on this blog, in print here and there, through a couple of other left-leaning publications. But 2016…2016 was the year that made me go Roberto Durán on political writing.
It was the left wing that did me in, my own (roughly speaking) ideological brethren that made me say no más…no más.
This then is a tentative step back in. And it may get personal.
Let’s start in the halcyon summer of 2016 when a young Bernie Sanders filled American progressives with hope, enthusiasm & a renewed sense of purpose. I’d been a fan of Sanders since he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont and was as swept up in the movement as anybody. I voted for him in the Oregon primary, and just a few days later, I met him on the streets of San Francisco. He hugged me. I wrote about it on this very blog.
But I wasn’t anti-Hillary, any more than I’d been anti-Obama for the previous eight years. Bernie more closely represented my own political leanings, but I was under no illusion of the fact that Hillary was more closely aligned with the powers that be.
Was the fix in against Bernie? Of course it was. Politics in America is a rigged game and the fix is always in.
After Hillary was anointed by the DNC, I mourned a bit with my progressive brethren, then prepared for what seemed to many (outside of Michael Moore and the guy who created Dilbert) to be the obvious outcome of a race between a competent, experienced and thoroughly qualified candidate and and an angry, unqualified nut-job who didn’t really seem to want to win.
Many of my Bernie supporting friends were apoplectic over what was presumed at the time to be an inevitable Clinton victory; nearly all said in one way or another that, given her perfidy, a Trump victory would be preferable. Sensing this inevitable Clinton victory was not as inevitable as Nate Silver would have us think, I spent the month before the election working to get out the vote.
And then things got ugly in a very personal way.
Several friends started countering anything I wrote that they construed as being pro-Hillary with virulent, angry anti-Hillary rantings. This, of course, was happening across the social media landscape. I challenged a few of these, and the attacks got viciously personal. “You’re a fucking Hillbot!” “Stop drinking the DNC Kool-Aid…” That sort of thing.
At one point, one of my oldest friends posted on my Facebook page (in response to a fairly tepid post along the lines of “She’ll be an OK president, all things considered”) with “Fuck you you fucking sell-out. If Hunter Thompson were alive he’d fucking piss down your throat for supporting Hillary”-this was a pretty disturbing image, not to mention a nasty sentiment from someone who’d been a friend for three decades.
I wound up just deleting his posts and figuring we’d put it behind us after the election when Clinton was president and Sanders was the most powerful Senator in the country. (What a fool I was, eh?)
Though many were the Bernie supporters among my circle who spent the final months before the election advancing the narrative that Hillary Clinton was evil incarnate, one old friend really went out of his way in trying to convince me of this, sending me several articles and recommending books about Clinton’s links to the nefarious Bilderberg Group, her overall war-mongering ways, and advancing the narrative that chaos would be better than the current state of neoliberalism.
That last word came up a lot in our conversations; while defined roughly as “a modified form of liberalism tending to favor free-market capitalism,” to my friend it was always connected to some deeper conspiracy involving United Nations sponsored plans to reduce the population, a corporate conspiracy to control the population using the hoax of global warming, and also, somehow, the Bilderberg Group was involved.
Anyway, this particular friend was always decent about it, so I read the articles he’d recommended, and found them to mostly contain a varying degree of verifiable fact to paranoid conspiracy theory with about the same ratio as that of marshmallow to cereal in a box of Lucky Charms.
For the record, I wasn’t madly in love with Hillary Clinton’s politics. (Though I did have a deeply erotic dream involving her and Bill in the mid-nineties…I’d been invited to the White House and stumbled upon Bill and Hillary in the middle of a BDSM scene. Hillary was dressed in leather, and holding a whip. But I digress.) Without getting into too much detail, she struck me as a continuation of the neoliberalism (as defined above) of the Obama administration, which I found a mixed bag at best.
But I did feel strongly that she'd be a competent president, and that once the dust settled, a lot of what Bernie was fighting for would be implemented in a Clinton administration.
Whether this would have happened or not is a question being answered in a parallel universe, but in this one, we know all too well what happened, and what's continuing to happen.
To bring it full circle, my circle of friends has shrunk since the election. At least friends with whom I’ll discuss politics. People whom I’d known and respected for years allowed themselves to get ginned up far beyond what I’d experienced before, and that the viciousness was turned on their moderate friends (with “moderate” becoming a dirty word) who’d supported left wing causes and endeavors for their whole lives was too much to deal with.
Would Bernie have won the general election? No way of knowing. Maybe. Maybe not.
Would the world be in better shape had Hillary won? I'll leave that up to the reader to decide From where I stand, Trump's election has made good people sad and shitty people happy.
Of my Bernie-or-Bust friends (I’m only still on speaking terms with a small handful), not one has even made the merest glimmer of admission that they maybe…just maybe…allowed themselves to be used as pawns in a scheme to bring Trump to power.
Used by who? Trump? Putin? The Bilderbergs?
I’ll leave that to someone more energetic to debate. The loss of friends on the left has left a personal mark on me, making the obvious heartbreak of watching America slide into fascist theocracy all the more bitter.
“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.” ― Hunter S. Thompson
Once upon a time, I wrote about politics regularly…on this blog, in print here and there, through a couple of other left-leaning publications. But 2016…2016 was the year that made me go Roberto Durán on political writing.
It was the left wing that did me in, my own (roughly speaking) ideological brethren that made me say no más…no más.
This then is a tentative step back in. And it may get personal.
Let’s start in the halcyon summer of 2016 when a young Bernie Sanders filled American progressives with hope, enthusiasm & a renewed sense of purpose. I’d been a fan of Sanders since he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont and was as swept up in the movement as anybody. I voted for him in the Oregon primary, and just a few days later, I met him on the streets of San Francisco. He hugged me. I wrote about it on this very blog.
But I wasn’t anti-Hillary, any more than I’d been anti-Obama for the previous eight years. Bernie more closely represented my own political leanings, but I was under no illusion of the fact that Hillary was more closely aligned with the powers that be.
Was the fix in against Bernie? Of course it was. Politics in America is a rigged game and the fix is always in.
After Hillary was anointed by the DNC, I mourned a bit with my progressive brethren, then prepared for what seemed to many (outside of Michael Moore and the guy who created Dilbert) to be the obvious outcome of a race between a competent, experienced and thoroughly qualified candidate and and an angry, unqualified nut-job who didn’t really seem to want to win.
Many of my Bernie supporting friends were apoplectic over what was presumed at the time to be an inevitable Clinton victory; nearly all said in one way or another that, given her perfidy, a Trump victory would be preferable. Sensing this inevitable Clinton victory was not as inevitable as Nate Silver would have us think, I spent the month before the election working to get out the vote.
And then things got ugly in a very personal way.
Several friends started countering anything I wrote that they construed as being pro-Hillary with virulent, angry anti-Hillary rantings. This, of course, was happening across the social media landscape. I challenged a few of these, and the attacks got viciously personal. “You’re a fucking Hillbot!” “Stop drinking the DNC Kool-Aid…” That sort of thing.
At one point, one of my oldest friends posted on my Facebook page (in response to a fairly tepid post along the lines of “She’ll be an OK president, all things considered”) with “Fuck you you fucking sell-out. If Hunter Thompson were alive he’d fucking piss down your throat for supporting Hillary”-this was a pretty disturbing image, not to mention a nasty sentiment from someone who’d been a friend for three decades.
I wound up just deleting his posts and figuring we’d put it behind us after the election when Clinton was president and Sanders was the most powerful Senator in the country. (What a fool I was, eh?)
Though many were the Bernie supporters among my circle who spent the final months before the election advancing the narrative that Hillary Clinton was evil incarnate, one old friend really went out of his way in trying to convince me of this, sending me several articles and recommending books about Clinton’s links to the nefarious Bilderberg Group, her overall war-mongering ways, and advancing the narrative that chaos would be better than the current state of neoliberalism.
That last word came up a lot in our conversations; while defined roughly as “a modified form of liberalism tending to favor free-market capitalism,” to my friend it was always connected to some deeper conspiracy involving United Nations sponsored plans to reduce the population, a corporate conspiracy to control the population using the hoax of global warming, and also, somehow, the Bilderberg Group was involved.
Anyway, this particular friend was always decent about it, so I read the articles he’d recommended, and found them to mostly contain a varying degree of verifiable fact to paranoid conspiracy theory with about the same ratio as that of marshmallow to cereal in a box of Lucky Charms.
For the record, I wasn’t madly in love with Hillary Clinton’s politics. (Though I did have a deeply erotic dream involving her and Bill in the mid-nineties…I’d been invited to the White House and stumbled upon Bill and Hillary in the middle of a BDSM scene. Hillary was dressed in leather, and holding a whip. But I digress.) Without getting into too much detail, she struck me as a continuation of the neoliberalism (as defined above) of the Obama administration, which I found a mixed bag at best.
But I did feel strongly that she'd be a competent president, and that once the dust settled, a lot of what Bernie was fighting for would be implemented in a Clinton administration.
Whether this would have happened or not is a question being answered in a parallel universe, but in this one, we know all too well what happened, and what's continuing to happen.
To bring it full circle, my circle of friends has shrunk since the election. At least friends with whom I’ll discuss politics. People whom I’d known and respected for years allowed themselves to get ginned up far beyond what I’d experienced before, and that the viciousness was turned on their moderate friends (with “moderate” becoming a dirty word) who’d supported left wing causes and endeavors for their whole lives was too much to deal with.
Would Bernie have won the general election? No way of knowing. Maybe. Maybe not.
Would the world be in better shape had Hillary won? I'll leave that up to the reader to decide From where I stand, Trump's election has made good people sad and shitty people happy.
Of my Bernie-or-Bust friends (I’m only still on speaking terms with a small handful), not one has even made the merest glimmer of admission that they maybe…just maybe…allowed themselves to be used as pawns in a scheme to bring Trump to power.
Used by who? Trump? Putin? The Bilderbergs?
I’ll leave that to someone more energetic to debate. The loss of friends on the left has left a personal mark on me, making the obvious heartbreak of watching America slide into fascist theocracy all the more bitter.
“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.” ― Hunter S. Thompson
No comments have been added yet.
