Dear Peace Diary,
Time to vote for our next president! Time to choose just the right person to lead our world’s most militarily advanced superpower. That’s why presidential elections should be nonviolent and fulfilling on a deep personal level! O whom, shall I choose? Let’s see…
Hillary Rodham Clinton: Democrat and fellow feminist. Speechifies against poverty, then talks privately to Wall Street about “open trade and open borders.” Almost never met a US military venture she didn’t like. On her website: “We should maintain the best-trained, best-equipped, and strongest military the world has ever known.” Feminism has never been bossier.
Gary Johnson: Libertarian Party. Nyet.
Donald Trump: Republican. Paralyzingly horrific to imagine this xenophobic, lunatic gasbag in the Oval Office. Interestingly, Trump’s promise to “make our Military so big, powerful, and strong that nobody will mess with us” resembles the armed-and-dangerous feminism of Clinton.
But is Trump self-destructing? Note how his leaked, private 2005 remarks on “pussy-grabbing” damage Trump’s image far more than his recent, public declaration that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists. Would his campaign be intact now if Trump had only been overheard talking about grabbing immigrant snatches?
Jill Stein: Green Party. Only people-over-profits candidate. Supports reparations for slavery, college loan forgiveness, would end military intervention, fight climate change. Jill urges us not to endorse “the politics of fear,” i.e., voting for the lesser evil. So I’ll vote JILL! Take THAT, politics of fear! Thank you, Peace Diary.
SNIDE LINES
Fuck you, Peace Diary,
Also fuck those politically correct progressive “realists” who yell at me for supporting Jill Stein. “Stein’s politics are cleaner, greener,” they say, “but not meaner. The Green Party is pathetic, Jill’s sure to lose, and you’ll end up voting for Trump.” These are people, Peace Diary, who once thought Bernie Sanders was too bougie. Now they’re afraid every state is a swing state and we can’t take chances. I hate them.
I especially hate the POLITICALLY CORRECT A-HOLE who called me “self-involved” on Facebook in answer to my post, “I could never vote for Hillary.”
Self-involved? So all the years I’ve demonstrated against US military bombings and invasions mean no more to me than my Facebook status? That the rending grief I feel for the millions of innocent lives obliterated in Iraq and Afghanistan and you-name-it by the USA makes me a narcissist? How politics-of-fear can you get?
Actually, I think we’re all probably right to be afraid. Not so much of Trump — it’s more the Americans supporting Trump who are the guys to fear. My guys; my people: Mostly working-to-lower-middle-class Caucasians who sense that the one ace-in-the-hole they ever held for a noble self-image — their whiteness — has been taken away from them by eight years of a black presidency.
To be honest, Peace Diary, the person I hate most is myself; I hate my powerlessness. So what if Stein talks a good line: If Trump remains viable, there may be wisdom in voting HRC. Yes, HRC: she whose vowels shall not be spoken. She whose strongest argument is that she’s not Donald Trump.
Dear Peace Diary,
More comparisons of Trump to Adolph Hitler; more pressure to vote Clinton. I get it; I’m afraid. The Nation magazine, which spent months supporting Bernie, just threw down for Hillary. And a NY Times review of a new Hitler bio outlines Hitler’s salient personality traits — devastatingly similar to Donald Trump’s:
often described as an egomaniac who “only loved himself”;
known for a “bottomless mendacity”;
fomented chaos by playing to crowds’ fears and resentments;
promised “to lead Germany to a new era of national greatness”; and
Hitler’s rise was not inevitable.
I get why this election matters. But I still can’t get how people who’ve spent a lifetime calling themselves progressives can think the answer is voting for Hillary. These are people who’ve wanted to “fight the power” and “overthrow the state.” If “revolutionary” Germans in the 1930s had known what was coming, don’t you think at least one of them would have talked about assassinating Hitler?
Dear Peace Diary, Why am I so afraid to talk about assassinating Donald Trump? Although it’s not a good idea to raise on Facebook, it definitely has its charms. I mean, it’s way more effective than voting for Hillary.
If I did the deed, surely there’d be some Nuremburg-type statute that would allow me to spend no more than 85 years in prison for this. Then, instead of Che Guevara on their T-shirts, those smug, PC thugs would have to wear me. HA HA! “Who are you calling self-involved now?,” I’d ask them.
Dear Peace Diary,
On second thought, I’ve decided not to assassinate Donald Trump. I hope, instead, to see the Donald and his crotch go down in flames. But whether I vote — or for whom — Clinton will still love corporations and the military more than she’ll ever love me, and the people who love Trump will still exist. I now fully ascribe to the politics of fear. And so should you.
But fear turns us into competitors, mudslingers, and sad, sad people. So here’s what I know for sure:
We’re all screwed;
We’re taking it out on each other; and
However this election turns out, we had better stop.
Because, for all our vast, mutually disgusting differences, we on the Left are all we’ve got left. Because ultimately, the survival plan we need goes way beyond this fucking election.
Susie Day is the author of “Snidelines: Talking Trash to Power,” published by Abingdon Square Publishing.
