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In a recent piece in The New York Times Magazine about the Epstein case, Peter Baker writes that at long last, Democrats have a platform from which “they finally have an excuse to enjoy the kind of trollish goading-by-meme they’re more often on the receiving end of.”
Baker continues:
“For Democrats, all this must be a tempting change of pace from producing carefully phrased, self-serious and largely ineffectual scolding about constitutional order and the soul of the nation. It’s also surely easier than deciding on a political program to improve Americans’ lives and convincing voters that it will actually do so. But it’s hard, in the long run, to picture how learning this new rhetorical style benefits today’s Democrats.”
Admittedly, it feels good not to always be the ones being “owned.” It feels good to see someone else squirming in the crosshairs of a South Park barrage, like a puppy on the other end of a Kristi Noem volley.
It’s not as if people haven’t constantly made fun of MAGA figures like Noem and Trump, but most of the verbal snipers are late night comedians or parody writers - not Democratic politicians, who still seem to be living in the world of “When they go low, we go high.”
That sweet, innocent world of peace and love, if Baker is to be believed, is fading fast. Now, apparently, it’s time to go low-lower-lowest.
It’s easy to become indignant about the meanness that has been thrust upon us, particularly by the neo-fascists whose sole purpose in life seems to be to out-cruel Atilla the Hun.
And so, by all means, my fellow sane-ists turned sadists, mock, demean and “own” them to your heart’s content.
But we need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind us, so that, when the time comes and normalcy returns, somehow we will be able to grope our way through this interminable darkness back to civility.
For while it might feel good for battered libs to see a naked (and microscopically-endowed) Trump in bed next to Satan, mean-spiritedness just doesn’t come naturally to us, while it is the stuff that MAGA is made of - and they would proudly admit it. In fact, it is another way of being “owned,” by forcing us to become like them.
Or even to force us to speak in terms of “us” and “them.”
It reminds me of what former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once said - a line that has proved prescient on so many levels: “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.”
MAGA has forced meanness upon us. As Flip Wilson used to say, “The Devil made me do it!”
Trump has robbed us of so much. As if it wasn’t enough to pass a bill that takes health care away from millions, just for the fun of it, let’s take school lunches away too, gut schools, lobotomize law firms, neuter the most prestigious universities, occupy Washington D.C., militarize L.A., effectively euthanize the disabled community by denying them life-saving treatment through Medicaid and promoting eugenics and end scientific and medical research altogether.
And now he’s robbed us of kindness and civility too.
By every measure, cruelty is on the upswing. So how could we not hit back hard when MAGA just keeps going lower and lower?
And so, I’d like to order a heaping helping of Epstein.
Although hardly the greatest act of cruelty I’ve seen this year, this news story perfectly encapsulates how MAGA meanness has infected everything.
The opinion links to a news story from a Minnesota TV station back in 2017 when a group of women came together against hate after racist graffiti appeared at Maple Grove High School. Their signs read “All are Welcome Here.” The founders of the movement told reporters that their movement was about combating hate and was nonpartisan and secular.
The signs were popular at Minnesota schools, according to the story.
The idea of everyone being welcome in a classroom was deemed “too political” by the Idaho attorney general’s office, who banned the banner. The attorney general’s guidance said school employees cannot display flags or banners “that show opinions, emotions, beliefs or thoughts about politics, economics, society, faith or religion.”
Curiously, “In God We Trust” was not considered too religious to appear on school signage.
The guidance states:
“These signs are part of an ideological/social movement which started in Twin Cities, Minnesota following the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Since that time, the signs have been used by the Democratic party as a political statement. The Idaho Democratic Party even sells these signs as part of its fundraising efforts.”
I’ve long used a similar banner on my Facebook and X pages. It’s a lawn sign created by a group of nice people outside Chicago and I’ve seen them everywhere.
But it seems that in Trump-Bizarro-World, attempts to respond to hate with love are seen as some kind of subversive, partisan, plot. What kind of message does that send to the kids?
One would think that a heavily Christian state like Idaho would have heard of another political activist who tried to spread love in Nazareth a couple of thousand years ago.
But as angry as this story made me, I felt less “owned” and trolled than just plain sad. What was most offensive to them about that banner was less the words than the fact that that the hands drawn on it were multi-hued. Rather than welcoming diversity in the classroom, the racist powers-that-be in Idaho apparently wanted to send a bunch of those hands back where they came from.
This banner, made completely out of love, is, for MAGA, a Stephen Miller nightmare. Looking at it from a whote supremacist perspective, it looks like America is going to look like in a generation, if ICE doesn’t cruelly evict every brown person they can as fast as they can. .
But it’s still Bizzaro and still weird, to be so threatened by simple hospitality.
For while it might feel good for battered libs to see a naked (and microscopically-endowed) Trump in bed next to Satan, mean-spiritedness just doesn’t come naturally to us, while it is the stuff that MAGA is made of - and they would proudly admit it. In fact, it is another way of being “owned,” by forcing us to become like them.
In the Talmudic tractate Avot 3:1, Rabbi Akvaya gives perhaps the best Jewish comeback ever to the “go back where you came from” trolling:
“Reflect upon three things and you will not come to sin. Know from where you came and where you are going and before whom you are destined to give account and reckoning. From where have you come? —from a putrid drop. Where are you going? — to the place of dust, worm, and maggots. Before whom are you destined to give account and reckoning? — before the Holy One, blessed be God.”
The rabbis understood that we all come from humble biological beginnings, no matter how “great” our genes (and jeans) or fortuitous our hemisphere of birth, and we’ll all end up in the same maggot-infested place, six feet under. If you think Sydney Sweeney is Drop Dead Gorgeous now, click here to see how gorgeous she will appear just a few years after she actually drops dead (she should live to 120!).
Not even King Tut could pull off that look. Even gorgeous Sydney will someday be all skin and bones. Minus the skin (and she and her skin should live to 120!)
So if anyone ever has the insolence to tell you to go “back where you came from,” call ‘em a putrid drop. Or, if you want to sound really smart and troll-ish, a “teepa s’rucha in Hebrew.
But do it nicely.
It is humbling to see where we all end up, yet strangely liberating to know that in the end we are all the same. Even those with the best genes.
If differences are only superficial, why make such a big deal over the color of handprints on a banner?
They need to experience the something, pure, something divine, something nice something akin to what King Saul’s ICE-force experienced when they came to abduct David.
In I Samuel 19:20, we read:
“And Saul sent messengers to arrest David; and when they saw the company of the prophets prophesying, and Samuel standing over them, the spirit of God came upon the messengers of Saul, and they also prophesied.”
Saul’s messengers came to harm David, but they were so taken by the pure, tender faith displayed by Samuel that these thugs instantly were transformed into angels of mercy.
What we need is a full-scale regression from the meanness, a pullback from the cruelty, so that we can reach the point where there is no longer any cruelty to troll.
We need to combat hate with love. I’ve always said that.
But that hasn’t been working. It’s time to go low.
So for now, mockery (not outright cruelty) is the point. We’ll have to keep our DVRs tuned to South Park and trust that when the right time comes, and with God’s help it will, we’ll be able to follow the trail of breadcrumbs to find our way back to nice.
Trump and Satan, from this season’s opening South Park episode.
“They want to exterminate us.”
Those were the blunt words of Steve Way—a long time disability rights activist—to describe Donald Trump and the GOP’s multi-front war targeting the disability community. Way—who was born with Muscular Dystrophy—explained that the GOP’s cutting $1 trillion dollars from Medicaid, gutting of the Department of Education and rolling back of protections for the disability community are all intended to make them “undesirable.” He added in a very matter of fact way, “They want to get rid of us,” that is why, “we need to call this for what it is: It's eugenics.” (The Dean’s Report, by Dean Obeidallah)
Bullying is up:
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