Give the People What They Want: Shame

Real America appears to want embarrassment too. Gen digital’s birthright pop culture mantra: nothing better than someone else’s public humiliation. Reality shows and mtv jackass its latest incarnation; 20 years ago it was America’s funniest home videos and people; 50 years back, candid camera. We’ve been laughing at others’ expense and all cost for years. And have now finally elevated a master of this truly degenerate art form to the highest office in the land: we earned this.

Roll the clip! And think what America’s funniest home videos theme song lyrics mean when paired with a show primarily about other people’s misfortune, pain and men hurting their balls:

“We’ve got laughs from coast to coast. To make you smile. A real life look at each of you. Capture all that style! Oh the red, white and blue! The funny things you do! America! America! This is you. Stories from your friends next door. They never told. You might be a star tonight. So let that camera roll! Oh the red, white and blue! The funny things you do! America. America. This is you.”

As the latest vicious prick to inhabit the oval office would surely say: sad.

Hypocrisy

Amazing thing about it is that the family values crowd ostensibly committed to virtue — yet obviously aren’t — are the ones who done it: conservative christian white supremacists who love rap music and athletics dominated by black folks.

The very, valiant defenders themselves of good, wholesome society against the moral decay of corrosive, corrupting pop culture put its ultimate manifestation in the white house. These sheeple voted in droves against their own convictions for the same sinfulness they disavow and make cornerstone of their culture war of indignation, obloquy and opprobrium.

Last time around, repugs had 16 he-man victims to choose from and ended up picking the least christian of them all. Whom they despised their entire lives until a few years back when impotence and age forced him to finally stop gang-banging supermodels in drug-fuelled, bisexual orgies at Manhattan clubs. 50 years cavorting with homos, blacks, celebs and libtards; fathering at least five known children with three admitted women.

Letting him get away with that is the rockbottom pinnacle of the deplorables’ pigsty-rolling hypocrisy. Try to imagine Obama, Clinton or Sanders doing the same: they’d never get away with it. Only reason Clinton kind of did is because his wife stood by her man when feminists privately admit she should have stood up to him. Yet despite this family values fidelity, real America considers Hillary antithesis of the good wife. And those who should have defended her meek family values virtue attacked her instead. The pit of their hypocrisy is bottomless.

Thoughtlessness

The oval office creature we now feature cemented his conversion to evangelical conservatism by claiming — without any proof or cause other than a floundering career rebirth as reality jackass pursuing cynical profit motives — that our first black president must have been born in Kenya. And then — in what can only be explained away with racism — promptly became conservative champion of the rural heartland.

A fitting crescendo to our national symphony of shame. Striking my inner erstwhile rural sunday school child as odd: the strange public spectacle of godfearers revelling amuck others’ misery and pain, discordant to their loudly declared love of privacy and locking skeletons securely in the closet. Because others would be horrified were they to learn who real Americans really are…

Or see what they do in their free time when they think the lights are off, door is locked, and no one’s looking. Lurking and hiding behind avatars, screen-names or preachers in the foul shadows of chatrooms and youth groups. Furiously masturbating in the dark. Softly lit by the electric glow of a laptop tablet handheld device. Pale, fat, stupid and immoral.

Like vampires they can bear neither light nor mirrors, yet can’t stop looking at themselves on their own antisocial media profiles. What would Jesus do? Definitely not anything that normally happens in a rural small town after dark once the police have gone to sleep.

Exclusiveness

The accused rapist we call president was anathema to this electorate until just a few years back when he loudly proclaimed his black nemesis to be foreign born and thus ineligible for office. An absurd, yet cathartic and epochal media experience. All the experts said he had no chance, then he won by a “landslide” and had the hugest inauguration in history!

Hence, did a man once derided by the baptized as the essence of our national excess and shame implausibly reemerge as their earthly savior. Haphazardly metastasizing into an ersatz version of one of those corny comeback stories so beloved by naive, unquestioning god-botherers and gunlovers everywhere: Rehab. Recovery. Resentment. Revenge. Repentance. Redemption. Resurrection. Salvation!

But soon a repellent new wave of self-loathing anti-americanism will sweep the nation beyond hillbilly jackass churches, as the rest of us strike back at dipshit moron insistence that this land is their land. This land ain’t yer land. They got a shotgun. And you ain’t got one. So if you don’t git off, they’ll blow yer head off. Cuz this land is private property.

Deplorables ain’t interested in the world’s tired, hungry, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Nor the wretched refuse of someone else’s teeming shore. Screw that, keep ’em; the land of immigrants is closed.

All the world’s opportunity at our fingertips, everyone wants to come here, and we greet them wielding lady liberty’s torch like a caveman’s club. Bearing no responsibility for the rubble heaps of the islamic world, the narcoslums of the latin one, nor the refugees and migrants fleeing both.

“From sea to shining sea, they can all love it or leave it! Or just not come in the first place.”

Contempt

Voters secretly thinking vicious, selfish thoughts like these with no one watching elected a would-be tyrant president. And once it all goes further metaphorically south than the confederate states of America, they will claim to friends they voted for Hillary or didn’t vote at all. If we polled in rooms full of people this wouldn’t happen. Being alone in the booth is bad. People do shameful things they later regret when they think no one is looking. The core of privacy is shame. WWJD? Definitely not vote for that guy.

In their eagerness and missionary zeal to do away with both the debauched Clinton brand and admittedly rank neolibercon perma-war establishment, these throw-up throwbacks declare they shall singlehandedly destroy the trading blocs, international economic systems and emissions agreements that hold the whole planet together in the face of imminent manmade catastrophe.

It’s not working for them, so burn it to the ground like great-great granpappy back at some black church in reconstruction-era Bama. Klan’s actually an ideal example of bad good people concealing breathtakingly shameful behavior: adult christian men hiding from neighbors, the public and law enforcement behind halloween costumes to get away with things they couldn’t possibly do without masks and hoods.

Shame

Though at the same time, perhaps liberals doth hyperventilate too much over the abomination now president, because he’s actually quite precedented. The impetuosity, bigotry and misogyny of the golden idol who makes handicapped jokes is neither new nor unique; it was normalized years ago. The only shocking thing about it is that people are somehow still shocked. This short-fingered vulgarian merely unifies under one big toxic tent all the worst component parts of his multifarious, obscene hypocrite predecessors.

For a quick pick me up, just pause to consider our great nation’s many discredited past generations of white christian male landowners: Truman, Johnson and Nixon always said nigger. Kennedy’s sexploits made Johnson so jealous that he’d bang the table and shout he had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose. Johnson also shook his dick at people. Nixon was an alcoholic, criminal and likely wife beater. Reagan fell asleep during meetings on account of his alzheimer’s and would abruptly jerk awake demanding jellybean bowl refills. Ithyphallic sexophonist Clinton ejaculated on his intern’s dress and became the first president to publicly battle sex crime accusations. And Dubya was a half-sentient, late-evolutionary primate who could barely read or craft his own sentences.

We’ve now elected a mad men/daddy warbucks/simon legree hybrid. Exposing the good and wholesome archetype of prototypical American man to be the scandalous, sometimes sinister hypocrisy it always was; perpetuating the worst disgraces yesterday has to offer.

Humiliation

Our country has long been a debased, humiliating spectacle incarnating the world’s worst stereotypes about us. But this election proved beyond any remaining doubt that the depraved anticulture of at least 60 million meatheads and bimbos does indeed fit neatly into this crass generalization.

There may be 320 million of us in all different colors and creeds, but the aging and raging, late-evolutionary ape crowd of face no consequences, don’t care, pussy-grabbing, white alpha males and their self-loathing airhead arm candy still predominate. Their freedom of speech unabashedly equaling the freedom to be as cruel and willfully ignorant as possible.

Cue dickwave in world’s face, à la LBJ suddenly turning from senate urinals to proudly flourish his member at unexpecting, stunned colleagues: “You ever seen anything as big as this?!” America’s prurient standards were already very low, but our new, accidental president is game to slink even further. Nothing is beneath him and the hooting, hollering, whooping, wailing, howling hillbilly horde that greeted the world the morning after the great upset: team USA staggering home on its latest walk of shame.

Revenge

Channeling the combined spirit of yesteryear’s most legendary embarrassments, they roll all the trashiest greatest hits into one. Doing their damnedest to turn back the last 100 years of human and civil rights. The last hurrah of an all-star idiot baby boomer ensemble time-machined here to torment us from the 1968 Chicago police department.

So cut your hair hippies; everyone else back to the kitchens, closets or fields from whence you came. Until these angry old men die, we got more Nixon and Reagan coming. Once again it’s mourning in America: two to 10 more years of yesterdays; max. If not, they’ll be gone for sure by campaign 2032.

They’ll likely never win another election because their demographic will be dead. No more relentless must-see tv like the 2016 election once those values viewers die. These aging hypocrites owe their brief reemergence to a moment in the sun of self-immolation to resentful old white men in a handful of rural states who tipped the electoral college in the orange god’s favor; all, demographics and constructs with at least one foot in the grave and that make no sense to most under-40s. That electorate is literally dying.

But for now, their man remains America. No surprise to me because all his most famous, offensive zingers are one-liners just as easily delivered by flyover friend good ole boys in camo, cutoffs and Carhartts jamming to some C&W; their triumphant faces the spitting image of trailer park, frat party, locker room gang-bang embarrassment.

Hating everything and everyone else who’s not just like them all the time ain’t easy; least we can do is extend them the same courtesy. So don’t deprive them of the scorn they’ve worked so diligently for all these years! Alienating and discriminating against the rest of us for generations was hard work and it’s unfair to suddenly deny them the fruits of their hideous labor. We shouldn’t diminish all their dedication to the culture wars over the generations by abruptly turning the other cheek now! They worked diligently to ensure forever scorn from the reading class, we ought not withhold it from them any longer.

America the degenerate

The land of unstoppable mass shootings, a generational rape epidemic, nonstop extreme hardcore and unreconstructed, braindead consumer morons hungrily lapping up this vapid dumpster-fire culture from the trough of mankind; wallowing in our sty.

Astute observers warned of this phenomenon for years, only to be met with patriotic fellow countrymen’s scorn and derision: love it or leave it! Dismissive claims that any and all criticism — however warranted — is anti or un-American. But nothing is more Merican than five minutes of get rich quick, same-day delivery, all you can eat fame in the planned obsolescence of the fleeting spotlight!

Many things on the tv-internet news might be terrible for many people, but at least those tragedies get them their five minutes. Which is more than the rest of Texarkristiana can say. And sadly, we must admit perhaps also why school shooters inspire copycats.

Stop granting mass murderers mass media broadcast profiles; they deserve oblivion and to be quickly forgotten. Putting them on tv is exactly what they and every other degenerate gun-owner — consumed by self-importance and looking the other way from the obvious role guns play in gun violence — always wanted.

No more five minutes for sociopaths. We must deprive them of infamy the same way they deprive our children of freedom from fear.

Abel Cohen is a linguist and historian: abeljcohen@gmail.com