My White World Is Crumbling Down

So perhaps you've seen this funny albeit somewhat mean tumblr page, White People Mourning Romney, which, like it sez on the tin, features an assortment of photographs of Romney supporters looking morose, along with various gloom-and-doomy tweets and facebook statuses and the like.

Now…god knows I was distraught when Kerry lost (though in retrospect, Edwards was a walking time bomb, and had he won I rather doubt we'd have a Democrat in office now).  As you know, I'm deeply pessimistic about politics in this country, and that was a devastating blow for sure.  Still, in spite of this, and in spite of the fact that republican office-holders and office-seekers are almost invariably genuinely crazy, my reactions, and the reactions of the fellow-travelers of my acquaintance, were never anything remotely like these.

Valiantly leaving aside the obvious joke about the original definition of "nauseous," shit like this is common--lots of bemoaning of THE DEATH OF AMERICA.  Why didn't America die the FIRST time the Islamofascist Kenyan was elected?  Presumably because back then, no one could've known just how Islamofascist-y he was.  These days, there's no excuse.

The racial component here is obvious.  It's bad enough for someone as Other-y as Obama to get elected in the first place, but if he fails to win reelection, then we can just chalk it up as a momentary fluke, and in fact, our self-image is strengthened, since presidents who lose reelection become emblematic of failure.  But if he wins, fuck, dude, two-term president is the highest you can go politically in this country, so if a blah person is able to do that, then maybe the America you know really is dead--never mind that a country in which the negroes know their place is one that deserves to die horribly…

It's clearly more than that, though.  I mean really, even if you hate Obama with the force of ten thousand suns, how do you get from there to "Mitt Romney: too beautiful for this fallen world?"  Cripes.

Well, I'm not technically a Democrat, but I'm sure I'd be close enough for this person, so for the record, here is the projected look on my face when Obama "announces the end of America:"

As you can see, I am somewhat bemused by this unexpected turn of events.

The really bizarre thing is that there are multiple posts along these lines; ie, "I might as well drop out of school since now I have no chance of getting a good job."  At this point (assuming these kids aren't just using the election as a way to justify their shitty grades to their right-wing parents), people have abandoned modernity altogether and retreated to the mentality of medieval peasants: the Good Faerie Romney would've waved his magic wand and bestowed jobs on all, but alas, he was slain by the Wicked Witch Obama, who will use his evil sorcery to banish all jobs from the land.  The fact that people who, while surely not the brightest stars in the firmament, are nonetheless presumably capable of a baseline level of functionality in their day-to-day lives are capable of reverting to this kind of atavistic terror does not do much for one's faith in humanity.

You actually have to sorta kinda feel sorry for people like this.  They are frightened out of their minds for no good reason.  So one has to ask, why are you like this?  Who has filled you with this kind of insane terror?  Who has infected your mind with demons, and why?  Of course, the question answers itself: sundry components of the right-wing echo chamber have done it, and they have done it because you spending your entire life wandering around in a haze of terror is absolutely worth it to them if there's even a tiny chance that it might provide them with some electoral advantage.  Yeah, everyone from everywhere on the political spectrum tries to play on people's insecurities to some extent, but this is really on a qualitatively different level.  Whether or not they're consciously thinking along those lines, it is monstrous, and I don't know what can be done about it.

Incidentally, the title of this post is from a song by Andy Prieboy, a great musician you've probably never heard of.  He took over as singer/songwriter for Wall of Voodoo when Stan Ridgway left, and he's gone on to have an excellent if obscure solo career.  I was googling around, and found this mind-boggling write-up from a guy who claims to be "celebrating conservative thought" in art (yeah, you know that's gonna be a barrel o' laughs) who by all appearances seems to be taking the song totally at face value, which, as critical misfires go, is about equivalent to assuming Nabokov must've been a pedophile.  The song does surely capture the mindset of the people quoted above.  That's not a good thing.