Snatch it back and hold it

By Mr Amos Wells Blakemore, Jr. late of Chicago, Illinois by way of West Memphis, Arkansas, and known better to the world as Junior Wells:

Rocky Horrors

Debra Messing is at it again.  She can't seem to let go of the notion that Susan Sarandon is responsible for Trump being in the White House.  What did Susan Sarandon do?  She inserted herself in earnest once again in the 2020 Democratic primary by publicly endorsing Bernie Sanders' candidacy.  After Sanders conceded the 2016 Democratic Primary to Hillary Clinton, Sarandon, who had already fallen out of love with Clinton in 2003 when the then New York Senator voted for the Iraq War,  publicly urged the disaffected to vote with their feet and abandon the ship of the Democratic party.  Her own vote was for Green candidate Jill Stein, but she intimated that even Trump would be a safer pick than Hillary Clinton.  Less fracking, she predicted; less war. 

Like Susan Sarandon, I was bitterly disappointed after the 2016 primaries.  It was hard not to crash after soaring on an unprecedented opportunity in my lifetime to dream with some realistic hope about an opportunity to vote for a Socialist in the General Election.  When Sanders conceded, I remained unenthused about his challenger, the nominee, and briefly, quietly contemplated abstaining from voting for president in November.  But on listening to the arguments of Stein, Sarandon and others and especially due to increased exposure to the cesspool of Trump, I was not convinced.

I have no regrets about voting for Hillary Clinton to avoid Trump in 2016, but neither do I harbor any special animus toward Susan Sarandon, at least, for voting her conscience.  Her supporters are right - Sarandon has many times over earned the respect of those on the left for putting her beliefs into action consistently for years.  I have never thought (for longer than an instant or two anyway) that Trump's election is owed to Sarandon's abstention from voting for his most serious opponent.  In the fight between Sarandon and Messing, my money is on the actual fighter.

Where I disagree with Sarandon's 2016 stance is not out of blame for Clinton's loss.  Rather it is with the notion that anyone with eyes open about Donald Trump before the general election can be excused for shirking in the effort against him.  Pissiness about Bernie Sanders' loss in the primaries is an especially feeble excuse considering Sanders' own commitment to Clinton's campaign following her nomination.  But by all indications at the time, Susan Sarandon's withholding of support for Clinton was due to a confidence in her impeccable moral purity that constrained her from participating in a Clinton victory, a purity that was no doubt persuasive and influential-- and certainly encouraging-- to some small percentage of similarly disgruntled Bernie supporters in swing states.  I've talked about my feelings about  the begrudgers, but I have to confess I reserve a special place in my personal conception of Hell for the saintly abstainers who actively sought to side with the Trump voters against Clinton in the wishful belief that Trump's blatant horribleness would "heighten the contradictions" inherent in the system and perhaps instantly foment revolution.  What made them so singularly special that they could be excused from the duty to vote responsibly, heedless of the Republican congress that Trump, if he won, would have at his disposal?  How bad does the greater evil have to be to vote for the lesser evil if Trump is not it?  How come they got to vote for the dreamy far out radical?  Why was it up to me to vote for the war-mongering fracking neoliberal in an effort to save our mutual society from the fake tanned, pussy grabbing, incurious, racist fascist bastard?

Is the effect you're getting the effect you want?  Was Susan Sarandon wanting to punish Hillary Clinton in 2016?  Was she hoping to signal a greater virtue in voting for Trump?  She is a dramatic actor.  I now suspect she was just being dramatic.   An interview with The Guardian in November 2017 if accurate and fair strongly suggests that far from being a super virtuous superwoman of the left whose vote for Jill Stein was too superior for its mighty purpose to be comprehensible to mere run-of-the-mill pants shitters who voted for Clinton to avoid Trump (I include myself), Susan Sarandon was a common naïf who assumed Clinton was going to win and was compelled to use her public platform to make clear that she wanted to claim no part in it.  In spite of her bluster about how Clinton was more likely to start a war and to pursue frantic fracking than Trump, in the Guardian intereview, she referenced the safety of her district for Clinton among the conditions that enabled her protest.  Explaining her stance in the general election, the article quotes her as saying, "Well, I knew that New York was going to go [for Hillary]. It was probably the easiest place to vote for Stein."  She has this to say about her widely cited argument in an interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC in the runup to the election that Hillary Clinton was "more dangerous than Trump":

I don’t mind that quote ... I did think she was very, very dangerous. We would still be fracking, we would be at war [if she was president]. It wouldn’t be much smoother. Look what happened under Obama that we didn’t notice.

Acknowledgement that Clinton would be smoother (if not by much) than Trump doesn't sound like a pure belief in Clinton surpassing the danger of Trump.  The virtue is cast in doubt even more by the argument that Clinton was going to win anyway.

 In other words she spoke one thing publicly but justified her actions on a faulty foundation of the tragically mistaken belief about what the outcome of the election would be which in 2017 she apparently indicated regret in having wrong.  Could her story be unique?  The humanness of her mistake (if the impression left by the Guardian article is fair) gives me an odd kind of hope.  I don't doubt that there were some small number of Clinton abstainers who genuinely evaluated Clinton's capacity for malevolence as on a complete par with if not surpassing Trump's.  But Susan Sarandon, who is as virtuous as they come in leftist politics, appears with hindsight at least (which is 20/20 mind you) to not be among them. 

What about Debra Messing's intentions?  Does she want a mea culpa from Susan?  Does she want to lock Sarandon's support for whomever the Democrat is in 2020?  I suspect she's just being dramatic -- and hoping in the process to preemptively ridicule the wasting of votes on anything other than anti-Trump in 2020*.   But based on the frantic righteous (and absolutely correct) defense of Susan Sarandon that Messing's repeated attacks inspire, I'm not so sure she's helping her own cause.  Let's get the best candidate for 2020 now, and stock up on outrage until we need it. It's too late from a planetary perspective to quibble over purity displays in the general election.  It's too early politically to do anything but get the nomination right.
~~~~~~~~~~

* Would Debra Messing support the ticket in November even if the nominee were Bernie Sanders?  I'd really like to know.

Daddy-o

I generally have high standards in my choice of entertainment, but occasionally I get sucked into certain unpardonable indulgences.  One in particular is a very popular streaming show of a sci-fi nature* with no particular redeeming value-- not even a personal one I could point to, like, "It's so bad it's good" ... or "It fills some cultural void in me" ... or "I like it".  This show is actually not good at all and it's not even not good in an interesting way.  It's not a show I would necessarily want to participate in discussions about.  With one exception.  One of the main characters on the show is a singularly average looking small town police chief.  He's paunchy, balding and middle aged.  He's got a mustache-- not a stylish job, just hair on the lip.  He also has, not a beard, but several days of beard growth.  He's got a big fat head that his Smokey-the-bear police hat is too small for.  I. Hate. Him.  The average looks are not the problem-- the non-Hollywood casting is one of the few things I admire about the show.  What gets me is the flavorlessness of the role in combination with the cockiness of the performance.  There's a swirl of picky little things I contend with every time the character shows up:   His touch with comedy is not light.  There's not a tremendous amount of intelligence shining from within.  He's not merely crabby, he oozes entitlement to be crabby.  While he's called upon to mete out justice without a lot of formality, Dirty Harry style, he's not particularly deft with the tough guy act. Most galling of all, for some reason this guy with the sex appeal of a turnip is called upon to parade his half-naked dad-bod around in one context or another every other show it seems.  I haven't taken the trouble of remembering the character's name but in my mind it's Dad (even though I couldn't tell you whether the character actually has children.  It's not the children that makes him Dad.  It's the mustache.).

On principle, I don't fast forward through shows I'm watching-- not even the not particularly good ones.  It's a solidarity move.  It doesn't seem fair to people who actually watch the shows. But the antipathy I feel for this character has tempted me to make an exception in his case.  On the other hand, I have to admit to a certain fascination about how this vacuum of charisma continues to be a center of the show.  It's like a kind-of-near train wreck that didn't-actually-happen.  I can't take my eyes away from it even though there's not really anything I could point to to look at.

My daughter, who does not watch the show, tells me that she hears that this character has a fan base among her cohort, the millenials.  What could they possibly see in him, I wonder.  She tells me it's exactly what I hate: that he's just a big dumb Dad.  They like him because he's a Dad??!  Ugh!  I suppose it should have been obvious to me since there is literally nothing else going on with this guy.

What is it with young people and their capacity to be entertained by Dad figures?  Someone my daughters' age enthusiastically recommended I watch a Bert Kreischer comedy special.   I'm going to give them one more chance at a recommendation to redeem themself.  I've also learned from my daughter about a popular video "dating game" released not too long ago in which the object is for the protagonist, a new-Dad-in-town, to choose a "date" from among a selection of other Dads in the neighborhood.  What!?  You're kidding me.  Is it a horror game?  No!  Is it political education disguised as discomfiting social satire?  No!  You mean, it's just supposed to be fun?  Yes. And young people actually buy and play this game?!  Yes, they do.  I'm not at all worried about this up and coming generation, until I hear about shit like this.

Always on the cutting edge of music I noticed in my YouTube recommendations not long ago new videos from Soccer Mommy and Hockey Dad.  Something is really terribly wrong when college students are naming their bands after their parents.†  This indicates to me a failure of parenting.

We're supposed to be progressing, but instead we're indulging in stale, dad-aged obsessions like racism and misogyny again.

Kids!  Dad is not cute!  Dad is not cool!  Dad is Donald Trump.  Jordan Peterson will not save you.  Joe Biden will not save you.§  You're not supposed to like Dads, you're supposed to resent them.    You're supposed to rebel against them.  They are the enemy!  They are old, they are overweight (and if they’re not overweight, they’re vain), they are angry, they have terrible taste in music.  They watch Fox News.  They criticize you for no reason.  They laugh at cruelty. They have stopped learning.  They don't understand you!  What's more, they made this world that you're inheriting.  They could have done something about global warming but they only made it worse.  They could have made this a safer, fairer world but instead they acquiesced to the most evil systems of politics and economics in the world and a devotion to or at least an okayness with a bullshit concept called the free market.  And now we're enslaved to it. You want to fix it and they're telling you what they always say about anything that could make your life better: We can't afford that!   This is a lie.  It's just a reflex with them.  They don't know what they're talking about, but they do know that you can't have what you want.  They have ruined your future.  And they did it accidentally on purpose because it was more fun for them, it was easier for them, and they could get away with it because nobody could tell them what to do.  They are selfish. They are uninformed and proud of it. They are complacent and they have taught you to be complacent too.

So drop the obsession with the old man, kids!   When it's time for Fathers' Day, just remember this:  Every day is Fathers' Day...

~~~~~~~~~~~~
* It's the one where all the originally pre-teen characters still wear rugby shirts and beanies and socks with shorts even though the actors portraying them are by now beyond puberty.

† It really pains me to report that Soccer Mommy is actually pretty good.  I refuse to listen to Hockey Dad.

§ Bernie Sanders will save you.

Pwease no steppy!

When we see the scurvy, morally decrepit Reprobate-in-Chief literally hugging the American flag for the cameras like the perverted weirdo that he is and spouting inane platitudes about the US of A it's not difficult to understand what Samuel Johnson meant when he called patriotism "the last refuge of a scoundrel."  But is that all that patriotism is?  In the relative halcyon days of the early 1960's when life was somewhat sweet; when our commonality was celebrated and we were engaged actively (if not always unanimously) in the broadening of it to include Americans of all types, backgrounds and walks of life; and when the memory of our collective successful struggle to defeat Hitler and fascism in World War II-- the last defensible international endeavor undertaken by our military-- was still rather fresh in our minds, it was assumed that Patriotism was a virtue shared by (or available to) all Americans.  I confess, when I see Trump mugging like a dope, the impulse to want to slap the flag out of his filthy mouth is probably as close to that classical ideal of patriotism as I ever get.  But I was witness to the absconding of the concept of Patriotism by the jingoistic scoundrels of the right when Presidents Johnson and Nixon's escalation of the dubiously conducted Vietnam war turned popular opinion against it, and it became difficult to see it as anything other than a veil behind which the worst impulses, deprivations and policy impositions of the ruling class were routinely masked.  They must have thought we were idiots.  Given their successes and the way they translate to our tribulations, they may have been right.

Still it is not correct to say that "the last refuge of a scoundrel" is all that patriotism is.  When you see it manifested in spontaneous expressions of gratitude for the service of those suddenly revealed to have served in the military, or in the ubiquitous square flag decals and slogans that have become de rigueur decorations of the back of dump trucks and semis, or in the flag pins that had better adorn the lapels of our elected representatives, it's clearly also a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, a manic escalation of the competition to display one's unbridled devotion to the country-- even though no one asked or particularly cares unless reminded to, and certainly not to an extent that merits the shameless exhibitionism.  The gratitude is backhanded-- it's really an assertion of ownership.  In the service of their overseas adventures, in response to the emergencies that arise from their clumsy lack of neighborliness in the world, you give your life and limbs.  As thanks to you for your willingness to proxy in person for their aggressions, they wear a pin.

Ostensibly, patriotism according to Merriam-Webster is "love for or devotion to one's country."  Given the arbitrariness of the circumstances of one's country and the many ways it could have gone differently, I can see how the patriotic impulse could be considered nothing more than an adaptive behavioral tic to the situation you find yourself in, but a virtue?  This is one of those things that survival sense dictates we should probably not probe too deeply (because challenges to it engender such inchoate and hot emotions in those who think with their fists), but it withers under any kind of honest rational scrutiny.   It's telling that the usage samples in the Webster definition reveal nothing but pathology about the meaning of the word:

Although poles apart ideologically, they are both unashamed of their patriotism.
— Christopher Hemphill

 You may not agree with him politically, but no one can question his patriotism.

They supported the war with a fierce patriotism.

As Voltaire noted, "It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind."  Patriotism, being based on the accident of one's birth, or at best fanaticism about one's chosen home, is the sort of thing that is both indefensible and something to be used usually in its least defined and most undefended state as an instrument to cast aspersion on the integrity of one's adversaries.  While it shares this feature with much of religion, at least religion is codified to an extent that it can be argued with.  Still my lack of religion and basic disdain for patriotism if disclosed publicly would disqualify me from public office and from the trust and basic respect of a good majority of the country.  If you wanted to impugn my character on the basis of my lack of patriotism, you could absolutely do it; I'd only be consoled that at least the feeling is mutual.

I'll grant that my experience of patriotism as on balance a pathology causes me to disfavor it, but is there anything to redeem the concept for me?  Am I the pathological one for having such animosity to it?    No one defends the patriotism of citizens of other countries; likewise it is only American patriotism that I as an American am qualified to consider.  It seems to have been a useful quality for the American revolutionaries who sought to divorce the territory from Great Britain, since it seized them with an image of something worth defending.  I'd be loath to argue that the enlightenment ideals of the original patriots were not something to be patriotic about and it would have done them no good to dwell on how far their own behavior and lifestyles deviated from it.  That our nation would then go on and wield patriotism as an excuse to persist in enslaving humans to perform our labor for free and to engage in genocide against the original inhabitants of the continent as we expanded our borders exemplifies the type of mischief that it can accomplish.

The problem with Patriotism is that it's usually either isolationism, nationalism, imperialism or war-mongering pretending to be a virtue.  The masquerade becomes a reflex.  The mindless devotion becomes the point, and through the lens of Patriotism, those who point out the widening gap between the ideal of America and the reality can appear as opponents rather than champions of an America worthy of devotion.  I've been encouraged by a proliferation of the champions recently, maybe best exemplified by the freshman class of Congress, but I'm not ready to let go of the sense that their challenge to the status quo could be met as usual by the masterfully practiced enemies of progress at any turn.

The idiosyncrasy of one nation's patriotism over another's raises an obvious point.  The US did not always exist and there is no reason to think it will exist in perpetuity.  Perhaps a revolution may some day come out of the observation that the dysfunction of a place is directly proportional to its size.  Perhaps the world will for instance one day reject the tyranny of beholdenness to a few primarily unjustly advantaged super-powers and the elites that prop them up, favoring instead a return to an organization along the line of mutually cooperative and peaceable micro-states,  the concept of empire having been relegated to the dustbin of history.  In this case, the memory of patriotism toward the former empire will be exposed as vanity.  Why wait?  Be skeptical now.

The logical endpoint of organization of the world into micro-states  (Burj Al Babas, Turkey)

Trouble brewing

The president is on a roll lately.

The recent ugliness surrounding The Squad is a case in point.  Frustrated by the continued string of off-the-script attention garnered by freshman Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rasheda Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley (known collectively as "The Squad"), Nancy Pelosi groused publicly about them a while back, mustering as much condescension as she could.  A back-and-forth continued for days as the Squad was not prepared to take the digs lying down. Seizing on the moment, the president jumped on Pelosi's bandwagon, commandeering it until it went careening down a hill of flaming bigotry and racism to the delight of Trump's base and forcing Pelosi to attempt a backpedal in defense of the women she had been trying to tarnish.

But you have to wonder who Pelosi is defending them to?  She has no influence over Trump's base, and her recalcitrant refusal to hold Trump accountable for his abuse of office -- her preference to run out the clock on his first term, thereby in effect doing her part to keep Trump's agenda in motion -- is destroying any credibility she may have once had with the vast and nebulous multitude of potential democratic voters who needed no help in supporting the Squad to begin with.  That leaves her true constituency, the Democratic establishment and their corporate donors, a well-heeled group who will have no guarantee of success in defeating the Know-Nothing Trump in 2020 on their own, and whose tenuous grip on what motivates voters in these times shows no sign of tightening, a predicament that spells continued, and by now all-too-familiar trouble for the coming election.  In this case, it was clearly trouble of Pelosi's own making.  And it's no trouble for Trump.

The answer for Pelosi and these types always seems to be to tone it down, stay the course, hold the middle.  It's really no mystery why the sexless, featureless, flavorless center that voters understandably reject-- and after all, why not reject it since what has it done for them lately?-- is so seductive to the Dem establishment: it's the Benjamins, baby!  Come on!  This is exactly what their donors are paying for.  That glazed look in Nancy Pelosi's eyes that you observe whenever she is explaining herself for the cameras is the 100 yard stare at her true audience, the donors watching the show from their skyboxes.

That show is going to continue for as long as it has sponsors.  Sponsorship seems to have little to do with popularity as measured by the count of heartbeats, nor with effectiveness-- although we can almost certainly rest assured that it is having whatever effect the sponsors are after.  What really concerns me is the sway that it seems to continue to have on a certain segment of the electorate that votes Democratic.  These are the voters who if you polled them would state as their first priority for 2020, defeating Donald Trump.  According to a Harris Poll taken in May, 65% of voters who identify as Democrats say the top characteristic they are looking for in a candidate is his or her ability to defeat Trump, above any policies that they may agree with.  This singular focus no doubt accounts for Biden's enduring support in the face of public airings of his superhero origins in States Rights, advocacy of amped-up privatized incarceration, credit card company favoritism and the propounding of anti-busing legislation, which support we can expect to endure as long as the mysterious perception that Biden stands a good chance against Trump survives.  It's hardly worth constructing an argument against, given Biden's pattern of imploding on his own.

I am the first to say that Trump has got to go.  That's obvious.  But obviousness is exactly the problem with investing all of one's hopes and dreams on that one anti-goal at this stage of the game.  Defeating Republicans is what Democrats exist for -- obviously!-- but it cannot be everything that they exist for, or they will lose again.

Until there is only one Democrat left in the race, it should be the mission of democratic voters to define the alternative future that their candidate is going to represent.  Trump has clearly laid out the future we do not want to have. If Democrats don't sell us a better future, Trump's may continue to be the dystopian one we live in.

Spells

Ellie Davies gets me

Do you ever get an itch in a place you can't reach?  Please tell me it's not just me.  There are a couple of options when this happens.  A person can ignore the itch, but I am not that person.  There is sometimes the option of finding (or declaring some existing feature of one's available environment) a scratching post to scratch yourself against, but this is not always practical or appropriate given the social situation or the location of the itch.  One could overcome one's reticence and ask someone in the immediate vicinity to find the compassion within their heart and the communal ape within their bosom to act as an extension of one's mind and perform the scratch for one, but in these too divided yet too apathetic times, success in the quest for a volunteer is not always assured.

For me, the answer to this, and to so many other quandaries, is witchcraft.  It so happens that regardless of what ails you, no matter what plagues you, for whatever you lack, there is a spell for that.  For instance:

Skay-brus scab-rous
Abracadabrus
Pepsi Free and Classic Tab-rus
Hey there hi there ho there hee
Itchiness fly away from me!

Saying the above, spin anti-clockwise 3 times until you're facing east, now click the heels seven times and --- Ahhh!  Doesn't that feel a whole lot better? 

Indeed, witchcraft serves me in traditional ways as well for my more typical venal urges.  To get a refund at tax time, I prepare a tincture of owl whiskers boiled in the sweat of a toad, dab a spot the size of a hedgehog's freckle behind each ear and intone the following:

Apis Avis
Pops and Mavis
Lay some on me, Ossie Davis.

But the true function of magic is to coordinate the wills of mortals who would otherwise stand in one's path.  Quite literally sometimes:

Hocus Pocus
Big Fat Dokus
Hee-nuss Hay-nuss
Podilliokus
Land of Nod and Land of Goshen
Set this traffic lane in motion!

You'll need a branch cut from the north side of a yew tree on a full moon at midnight whilst a raven calls.  Now say the above while waving the branch three times over your head in a counterclockwise direction and you'll soon be on your way.

I am not above using my powers for good from time to time especially in these times. For instance when I'm nearing my limit watching the news, I sometimes direct my magic on the Durwood-in-Chief.  In preparation I procure the blood of a gnat, the sighs of a sparrow and the tears of a shrew.  I pour these into a vat and bring to a boil.  Add the eye of a fly and 3 warts from a whip-poor-will's knee and stir until viscous.  Now sprinkle the potion on the soul of a salamander while speaking the following:

Flea nut Peanut
Flipperty pan
Kangaroo Bangaroo
Fast as you can
Kiss me a kinkajou
Son of a monkey!
Resist these words
With the will of a junkie!
Video Radio Vo-dee-o-doh!
Who shall to the rodeo go?
Easy peasy, dopey sneezy
Bashful rashful,
Enough with the sleazy!

The one obvious question is, given the unmagical state of the world why doesn't magic work?  I think I know the answer to this:  We're all practicing it at the same time.  My good magic is being cancelled out by your sucky magic.  I'm working on a spell for this.  I'll keep you posted.

Take that!

As a youngster transplanted to the deep American Northeast in the 1960's I became invested in the fates of sports teams from the nearest metropolis to the south, Boston.  When I was young, the Red Sox had not won a world series since 1918.  They had not been in a world series since 1948.  They had not even made it to the playoffs since before I was born.  So when they took the American League pennant in the Impossible Dream season of 1967 it was a huge deal for me along with everyone else in New England.  They lost to Saint Louis in seven games.  When they returned to the World Series in 1975 (losing to the Reds 4-3), I was too deep into becoming the renegade that I am to be bothered; but in 1986, living at the time in a landlocked state in the American South, I got wrapped up in Boston’s next World Series appearance through a lens of irony-tinged nostalgia, and my heart skipped a beat along with everyone else watching Mookie Wilson's line drive to single roll between Bill Buckner's legs in Game 6, allowing the Mets to score, and tying the series which the Mets would go on to win in Game 7.

Some years later, I am back on the east coast, happily working for an outfit that merges with a firm from Boston.  My initial excitement at the prospect of reconnecting a bit with my roots is immediately squashed by my experience of dealing with my instant colleagues.  A trip to Boston which I had eagerly anticipated in order to get acquainted with the other firm's business practices does nothing to mellow the impression I'm getting.   It seems that in spite of the transaction being touted as a "merger of equals" every accommodation, every sacrifice, every ditched plan, every lost benefit, every draconian policy adoption is being made by us.  "You can't think of it as us versus them!  We're all us now!"  Easy for them to say.  Suddenly the association I have with Boston is "interloping assholes."  Now the chip on its shoulder that I always thought was Boston's due is annoying the crap out of me.  It is 2004, the first World Series the Red Sox have been in since 1986, what could be their first World Series win in 86 years, a rematch of 1967 with Saint Louis, and this time I'm praying for the Cardinals to kick Boston's ass again.

My prayers fell on deaf ears, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I've moved on to greener pastures leaving the "Bostards" as I came to call them behind me, and have even had a pleasant time or two in the city since those days,  but my feelings about Boston have hardly changed.  What I'm dealing with is a grudge-- a debt owed me that Boston can never repay. I don't know what to do about it.  Even knowing that I come from a long line of grudge holders whose lop-sided beefs with neighbors, politicians, tv stars, car manufacturers-- food products, for the gods's sake-- sometimes looked ridiculous to me; even knowing a grudge is pointless, silly, petty, counterproductive, I can't deny that it's deeply, deeply satisfying.

I  mention grudges because I believe I've tapped into it as a volunteer for the presidential campaign of a certain Vermont senator.  As one of my contributions, it has been my pleasure (if you can call abject terror and trepidation "pleasure") to cold call supporters of the candidate in 2016 who have been mostly thrilled to hear from me, sometimes less than pleased, but occasionally shocking in the venom they can't contain in telling me to piss off.  I'm no fan of unsolicited phone calls, so I'm surprised (and a little dismayed, truth be told) when anyone picks up at all, but I have to admit, I was really puzzled at first by the hate that filled some of these former supporters who could not tell me fast enough that they had jettisoned the revolution in the three years since the last primaries.  When this happens, as the script dictates, I politely thank them for their time and wish them a great day and move on.  I'm reading from a script and they are merely reacting to my self-identification as a Bernie Sanders supporter, so I don't think it's anything I've said.  Bernie Sanders has not changed a bit from what I can tell.  If anything his consistency -- utterly uncharacteristic for a politician in my experience-- is a great deal of his appeal.   He's consistent because he's never really been on the wrong side of an issue in 40 years of public service.  There's nothing for him to waffle about.  What appealed to his 2016 supporters I presumed is still there today, so I was puzzled by the fury of some of the folks, until I pondered possible reasons.  

What I came up with is something I can easily relate to, because I've written about it myself from time to time.  It's not Bernie Sanders per se that they're reacting to, I think, but to a tiny handful of his 2016 supporters who rather than following Bernie's lead after the primaries in supporting Hillary Clinton to avoid the certain disaster of a Trump presidency, took their balls and went if not into the Trump camp then to frivolous support of a third party or merely home after the primaries, often extremely loudly, making clear that they would have no part in supporting Hillary, even at the risk of Trump winning.  Given the hostility toward Bernie by the mainstream media and establishment Dems, some of these "Bernie Bros'" anger was understandable, but some of it was abjectly absurd, petulant, arrogant, some of it bordering on ugly misogyny, and as anyone with consciousness knows reckless as hell.  

People do forget (or simply do not know) that the contingent of "Bernie Bros" was smaller and on the whole less objectionable than the Party-Unity-My-Ass former Hillary supporters, the PUMA's who flocked to support John McCain after Barack Obama defeated Hillary for the Democratic nomination in 2008 and especially after McCain cynically inflicted the clueless Sarah Palin on the culture by selecting her as his running mate, a move precisely calculated to attract disgruntled Hillary supporters.  Nevertheless the contingent of Bernie Bros in 2016, although not as decisive as Hillary Clinton's poor campaigning in losing the election, were a convenient place to hang blame for Trump's victory.  Not content to harangue Clinton supporters for their "support of the Neo-liberal status quo" before the election, if you lived somewhat online as you tried to work through your grief over the election results you could not avoid many of them gloating at you afterward.  

It's difficult today to recall Trump's obscenely racist performance following the Nazi march on Charlottesville, to see the plight of immigrants as we speak on the southern border, to contemplate the portent for reproductive, worker's and voting rights of the appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, to behold the tattered state of the Iranian Nuclear deal,  to come to grips with the trillions of dollars starved from the public treasury in order to enrich the billionaire class even more, or to consider any number of other Trumpian outrages and not see the arrogant rebellion of Bernie Bros in 2016 as an extremely myopic and privileged response to Bernie's defeat in the primaries.  But Bernie was not himself a Bernie Bro!  He did not fade away or even shirk after Hillary's nomination, but rather held 39 rallies for her in 13 states (including the ones she badly needed to win but did not herself visit) by election day. 

It's not the nature of a grudge to be fully transparent and revelatory about the perceived crimes against the grudge holder that instigate it.  Once formed, grudges admit no new knowledge. Nothing feeds them, and yet they grow.   So I think I understand how the grudge of a Bernie Bro against Hillary Clinton and her supporters in 2016 might find itself engendering a reactionary if completely misdirected grudge against Bernie Sanders in the heart of even someone who like a grownup transferred support from Bernie to Hillary in 2016 when it was clear that she was the last, best hope against the election of Donald Trump.  Grudge holder that I am, I somehow avoided the trap, first by voting for Hillary in 2016, and then simply picking back up my support for Bernie in 2019.   But if I'm right that this explains the hostility to him felt by some former supporters even though if anything we need the revolution now more than ever, I recognize the pull of it.  And my quandary is familiar: I just don't know what to do about it.