The Witches are Coming

by Lindy West

If we’re going to pull our country and our planet back from the brink, we have to start living in the truth. We have to start calling things by their real names: racism is racism, sexism is sexism, mistakes are mistakes, and they can be rectified if we do the work.

Plus, if you say things like “I’m convinced I will get serial killed” and then by coincidence you do get serial killed, it becomes a whole thing in your Dateline. Keith Morrison is like “A beautiful young nymph. Haunted by visions. Of being? Serial killed. BuT ThEY wErE OnLy vIsIoNs… right? [plaintive glissando] WROOONG. One hot summer night. In a sleepy tooooooown! Deep in the heart… of Texas. Those visions! Became all too reeeeeeeeal.”

It’s easier to be titillated when fear is an abstraction. Ooh, BTK installed security systems so he could disarm them later. Isn’t that smart? Gary Ridgway eluded the cops for twenty years. Bundy wore a fake cast! Diabolical! No, you dick lickers, they were fucking pathetic, opportunistic, incel losers who leveraged the staggering confidence that our society confers upon bare-minimum white men in order to get away with obliterating the lives of sexual objects they despised because they could not own them.

I don’t want a candidate that the alt-right likes. I don’t want to have anything in common with George Zimmerman. A person’s standard of likability is a reflection of his beliefs, and unfortunately, in this country, a whole lot of people believe that Donald Trump is not a racist shart in an eight-foot tie who is unqualified for literally every job except “lie down.”

We don’t need neutrality; we don’t need “nice.” It’s not enough to just stop being terrible. We need new work that actively challenges old assumptions, that offers radical models for how to conceive of ourselves and how to treat each other. We need artists and studios fighting for diversity because it’s the right thing to do.

Both sides, inasmuch as there are two “sides,” are not equally stupid or equally bad. The notion that they are is human-extinction-level dangerous. Maybe it took you until Donald Trump started tearing children from their parents and then LOSING THEM like he’s fucking Andy Capp looking for his keys to notice that Republicans have slightly different priorities than even fully starfished, middle-of-the-bed centrist Democrats, and that’s fine. We are all in process. But at this point, when we have maybe thirty more years (if we’re lucky) before there is no more ice and many people on the right are over here calling for a RETURN TO MOTHERFUCKING COAL, and you’re still smirking at the libs for being try-hard, bleeding-heart “social justice warriors” because we want our grandchildren to experience, I don’t know, fish, then you have crossed the threshold from kicky contrarian into fully detached-from-reality genocidal psychopath.

Liberals are imperfect. Yes, of course. Liberals need to grow one fucking vertebrae, stop massaging capitalism’s nards, and actually serve their constituents. But, on the other hand, if you look at the actual fucking laws they are trying to pass and the actual fucking leader they are supporting, the Republicans of 2019 literally do not want human beings to have health care. They do not want millennials to be able to earn a living wage, own property, or comfortably retire, ever. They want to expand access to guns and shrink police accountability. They want refugees tossed into concentration camps. They want pregnant people to be forced to incubate and birth unwanted children and for barely pubescent rape victims to die in childbirth. They certainly want to roll back marriage equality, if they can, and they’ve already begun stripping rights and protections from trans people. They want to squeeze every last resource out of our ecosystem until everything you love—manatees, dragonflies, fruit, your grandchildren—either burns or starves or drowns. They want to steal your money and waste it on gold-leafed steaks that they can shit into their gold toilets while they watch the sun swallow the earth. They are very, very bad! Similarly, sometimes Democrats ask you to respect people’s pronouns!

There is no cool version of conservatism, no ethically responsible version, no rational version ready to reclaim the tiller after Trump leaves office. The word itself betrays an inherent violence: to conserve is to avoid change, to embrace stasis, to freeze frame the now because the now is treating certain people very, very well. And those who aren’t being treated well under the current system? Better not complain.

“Common sense” without growth, curiosity, or perspective eventually becomes conservatism and bitterness.

Carolla isn’t angry because he’s being silenced; he’s angry because he’s being challenged. He’s been shown the road map to continued relevance, and it doesn’t lead straight back to his mansion. He’s angry because he’s being asked to do the basic work of maintaining a shared humanity or else be left behind. He’s choosing the past.

In the first debate of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump turned abortion into an American Idol origin story: “[W]hat happened is friends of mine years ago were going to have a child, and it was going to be aborted. And it wasn’t aborted. And that child today is a total superstar, a great, great child. And I saw that. And I saw other instances.”

Oh balderdash. He wanted to abort Tiffany, Marla refused, and that's why he had to divorce Ivana and to this day he resents Tiffany because of the beating he took in the tabloids over it.

For example, this morning, the president of the United States, angry about actor Alec Baldwin’s unflattering portrayal of him on Saturday Night Live last night, tweeted, “THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”

Gerald Ford thought Chevy Chase was funny. Gerald Ford wasn't a man baby with a tissue paper ego.

When a woman gets angry, the typical response is: She didn’t understand what happened. She misunderstood. She’s bleeding out of her whatever. She shouldn’t have taken all that sexual harassment, or her boss’s hand on her ass, so personally. It was just mixed signals! Locker room talk! She shouldn’t blow it out of proportion. He was raised in a different time—nothing to be angry about. But what was that different time when being treated with zero bodily autonomy was nothing to be angry about, as if all our fathers and grandfathers were sexual predators? They weren’t. Men can choose how they treat us, and this is the world they choose. Frankly, not being angry would be irrational.

I know that people you trust told you that climate disaster isn’t real, but they were lying, because they know that’s what you want to hear, because they are corrupt and they want power and money. That’s it. Luckily, we are their boss. They are hired to take care of us, and if they are lighting the candles and setting the table for fire and death, we have to get rid of them and give the power to someone who will fight for this world, because—and I think this goes cruelly underacknowledged in the surreal, nihilistic upside down of Trump’s America—this world is beautiful and good and worth saving. Do not despair. Despair is the death of action. Go, act, fight.

Of course the kids of Trump supporters think that Priuses—which, by the way, are still mass transit–killing, fossil fuel–burning luxury items manufactured by the automotive industry, so, yes, extremely granola—are effeminate and embarrassing, virtue signaling for cucks, because waste is manly and destruction is manly and real manly men drive trucks guns bang bang toot toot truck deer beer mud truck vroom black smoke logging antlers tits fire and blood.

If you train people to scoff at community and stewardship—at tending to the needs of others, yes, but also at advocating for oneself—you can do whatever you want to them and they will not complain. You can strip away their ability to earn a living wage, to send their kids to college, to retire. You can undermine their most sacred values. You can allow children to be massacred, and they’ll weep for the guns.

Being cognizant of and careful with the historic trauma of others is what “political correctness” means. It means that the powerful should never attack the disempowered—not because it “offends” them or hurts their “feelings” but because it perpetuates toxic, oppressive systems. Or, in plainer language, because it makes people’s lives worse. In tangible ways. For generations.