Class War For Idiots / January 22, 2011
We, The Spiteful
By Mark Ames
http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/
super-retard.JPG
In the summer of 2004, I published an article in the New York Press
that answered Thomas Frank’s question “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”
The Bush-Kerry campaign was heating up, and it was clear to me that
the American left was going to make the same mistake it’s been making
for 30 years, and will continue making until it faces some unpleasant
truths about the rank, farcical psychology that drives American voting
habits. Why don’t they vote in their own economic interests? Why don’t
voters vote rationally, the way we were taught in grade school civics
classes? In a rational world, with rational voters voting in their
rational economic interests, Bush—who dragged America into two lost
wars before destroying the entire financial system—would’ve been
forced to resign before the first primary and exiled to Saudi Arabia;
rationally, rational voters would have elected anyone or anything,
John Kerry or a coconut crab, over that fuck-up of fuck-ups, George W.
Bush.
The answer came to me just I was just finishing my book Going Postal.
Researching and writing that book was a real mind-fuck: spending all
those isolated months sloshing through Middle American malice. I
realized something obvious when I pulled back from all that research
and looked at the Kerry-Bush race: malice and spite are as American as
baseball and apple pie. But it’s never admitted into our romantic,
naïve, sentimental understanding of who Americans really are, and what
their lives are really like.
If the left wants to understand American voters, it needs to once and
for all stop sentimentalizing them as inherently decent, well-meaning
people being duped by a tiny cabal of evil oligarchs—because the awful
truth is that they’re mean, spiteful jerks being duped by a tiny cabal
of evil oligarchs. The left’s naïve, sentimental, middle-class view of
“the people” blinds them to all of the malice and spite that is a
major premise of Middle American life. It’s the same middle-class
sentimentality that allowed the left to be duped into projecting
candidate Obama into the great progressive messiah, despite the fact
that Obama’s record offered little evidence besides skin pigment to
support that hope. (For the record, I called out the left’s gullible
Obamaphilia during the primary campaigns in early 2008—here in
Alternet, and here in The eXile.)
suckers1
Here we are, in 2011—and although 2004 seems like a different world
from today, separated by more events than we can make sense of, the
left still hasn’t come around to answering that big Kansas mystery
about Americans’ farcical voting habits. So the left was left baffled
once again when, in 2009, millions of Americans volunteered as
foot-soldiers to fight for a second-rate TV personality named Rick
Santelli and his rich speculator friends at the Chicago Exchange, who
called for a revolution to protect their money from “losers” because
Santelli and his speculator buddies didn’t want to “subsidize losers’
mortgages.” Next thing you know, these same losers took to the streets
to defend the semi-celebrity Santelli, his rich speculator pals, and
the Koch brothers from… losers.
That is, they revolted against themselves.
The whole thing was absurd, of course—when Yasha Levine and I first
broke the story in February, 2009 that the Tea Party was an Astroturf
campaign funded by the (then little-known) Koch brothers and
FreedomWorks, no one was more surprised by it all than we were.
It took a long time for the left to get behind our story, largely
because it was just too damn depressing for the left to accept. But by
then, the Tea Party story got even more absurd: what began as a
tightly-coordinated PR campaign quickly exploded into a genuine mass
protest movement. And why not? If Kansas had spent two decades voting
against its rational interests in the polling booth, why wouldn’t
Kansas take the next logical step and hit the streets for an
anti-self-interest revolution?
And they weren’t just revolting against their own rational economic
self-interest—they also rebelled against their health and longevity,
storming town hall meetings with guns threatening any lawmaker who
dared offer them cheaper, better health care of the sort enjoyed in
every other First World country, where people live longer healthier
lives than we do, at half the cost. Fueled by spite, these protesters
proved to the world that Americans would rather die in misery and
bankruptcy than live longer healthier lives. Thanks to them, Obama,
who was never thrilled about offering us cheaper health care in the
first place, made sure that whatever happened, we’d get the very worst
health care reform possible, one that left everyone bitter except the
health care plutocrats. A victory for the spite-ists, in other words.
Like the Grumpy Old Man character, Americans are miserable and we like
it! We love it! Hallelujah!
Just as in 2004, today, in 2011, the left can’t make sense of it all.
So the only way they can frame this contemporary American insanity is
either by blaming it all on the oligarchs who exploit this latent
spite, as if taking the oligarch funding out of the equation would
solve it all…or, when getting too close to facing the awful
possibility that maybe a lot of Americans are just contemptible jerks
in dead-ender lives, the left retreats into the safe, comforting irony
of Jon Stewart, where it’s stored away as just another zinger that
requires no serious thought, no painful analysis.
Here is my article that tries to get the left to finally face the
truth about American voters as they really are—to consider the
possibility that maybe a huge bloc of American voters are worse than
merely “irrational.” What if there’s not much to like about them at
all? Or more importantly, why the hell do we need to like them; why is
“likable” even a factor?
My longtime Alternet editor and friend, Jan Frel, has been pestering
me to rework and republish this article. So here it is. I’ve edited it
from the original, which can be found here.
* * *
Spite the Vote
BY MARK AMES
June 15,2004
New York Press
It came on suddenly and without warning. Fuck the Democrats. Fuck the
liberals. I hope Bush wins. I hope Bush steals another election and
urinates into everyone’s wounds…
This interior rant lasted for a good five minutes before I snapped out
of it. The realization that some pro-Republican sentiment lurks inside
of me was enough to make me want to stick my head in the oven. Or
throw myself out the window like the possessed priest at the end of
The Exorcist.
What inspired this crazed outburst wasn’t any love for Bush. It was an
instinctual reaction to a tonal shift I’ve detected among the American
left. They’re losing that brave, cornered, hysterical tone that I’ve
identified with, a tone that came from years of increasing
marginalization combined with a sense that the whole country had gone
completely insane.
For the first time in almost 30 years, the left has a chance to occupy
the reality vacuum that opened up after the big barbecue in Fallujah.
The left can sense that their time may have finally arrived, and
they’re prematurely settling into their new role as saviors of the
national soul, with their former hysteria already reverting to a smug,
nurturing tone. The once-vicious humor, born of desperation and
hatred, is again becoming nauseatingly didactic and responsible. This
is a disaster. The left seems to be buying into the high school civics
teacher’s idiotic lie that “you can’t just be de-structive, you have
to be con-structive as well.” Yeah, and did you know that girls prefer
shy, sensitive boys?
What’s worse is that the new smug tone is being accompanied by
high-profile outbursts of fake rage. Yesterday’s genuine fury has been
hijacked and reified by painted-up frauds like Al Gore and Nancy
Pelosi, who look about as comfortable feigning rage as Rumsfeld looked
when he tried to squirt a few tears before Congress over Abu Ghraib.
Some people say that the Democrats are actually getting bolder and
more vicious. I don’t buy it. What Gore and Pelosi and the others on
their bandwagon are really trying to do is snuff out the real rage
before it spreads and threatens their fake opposition. It’s a classic
strategy in big politics: Co-opt the opposition, suck the life out of
it and dump its dried-out shell on the side of the freeway, where it
can never bother you again.
This is America, not Denmark. In this country, tens of millions of
people choose to watch FoxNews not simply because Americans are
credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal,
but because average Americans respect viciousness. They are attracted
to viciousness for a lot of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their
bosses, whom they secretly adore. Americans hate themselves for the
way they behave in public, always smiling and nodding their heads with
accompanying really?s and uh-huhs to show that they’re listening to
the other person, never having the guts to say what they really feel.
So they vicariously scream and bully others into submission through
right-wing surrogate-brutes. Spending time watching Sean Hannity is
enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly than
he really is.
The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a
beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the
Truth.”
But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth?
What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the
chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest,
dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people?
The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible
possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle
America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The
Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s
not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the
dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it
repeated.
And this leads to another truth that the left still has trouble
understanding: Millions of Americans, particularly white males, don’t
vote for what’s in their so-called best interests. Thomas Frank
recently attacked this riddle in his new book What’s the Matter with
Kansas? but he fails to answer his own question. He can’t, in fact,
because his is a flawed premise. Frank, who is at his best when he’s
vicious, makes the same old error of falling back on the comforting
lie that Middle Americans are actually innocent victims in all this,
duped by an evil corporate-political machine that subtly but
masterfully manipulates the psychological levers of cultural backlash,
implying that if average Americans were left to their own devices,
they would somehow make entirely rational, enlightened choices and
elect sensible New Deal Democrats every time.
This puts Frank in a logical bind he never quite gets out of. Like all
lefties, he is incapable of taking his ruthless analysis beyond a
certain point—a point that considers the most obvious question no one
has the guts to ask: “What if Americans don’t want to be enlightened?
What if they’re a bunch of mean, miserable hicks as hostile to
enlightened thinking as they are to the possibility of free, quality
health care?”
The reason he can’t go there is simple: the entire left-progressive
edifice, built on a Spielbergian caricature of decent honest
Americana, collapses once they’re humanized.
The underlying major premise of humanist-leftist ideology assumes that
people are intrinsically sympathetic, reasonable and fair, and are
only spoiled by nefarious outside influences. But if you allow that
tens of millions of Americans are defiantly mean and craven and
defiantly ignorant, the humanist-left construct loses its purpose and
self-destructs. “Why the fuck should I bother fighting for Middle
Americans,” they ask, “if they’re just as loathsome, in their own
petty way, as their exploiters, with whom they actively collaborate?”
Rather than grapple with that dilemma, the left pretends it doesn’t
exist. The people are good—if only the people were enlightened and
freed up to think for themselves, they’d behave differently, better,
more earnestly and decently.
This giant flaw in the left-progressive construct, and their refusal
to even begin grappling with it, is what keeps the left chasing its
tail over the great Kansas mystery, and never getting any closer to
answering their question: Why do so many working- and middle-class
white males vote against what is obviously their own best interests?
I can tell you why. They do so out of spite. Put your ear to the
ground in this country, and you’ll hear the toxic spite churning. It’s
partly the result of commercial propaganda and sexual desperation–a
desperation far more common than is admitted. If you didn’t know
anything about how America’s propaganda worked, you’d think that every
citizen here experienced four-dimensional multiple orgasms with
beautiful, creative, equally satisfied partners, morning, noon and
night. So-called “Reality TV” makes life seem so much more interesting
and epic and dramatic than it really is for the overwhelming
majority—whose misery and malice only grow worse when they compare
their own lonely, boner-killing reality to the “reality” on their TVs.
“No wonder my reality has never been filmed—I’m not even real in this
culture.” From that follows a nagging fear that others might discover
just how unfilmable their reality worlds are–and spite towards anyone
whose reality is filmable.
The flat truth however is that despite all of our desperate attempts
to convince ourselves otherwise, America is an erogenous no man’s
land. Most white males here (at least the straight ones) have either
dismal sex lives or no sex lives at all. No sex, no dates worth
remembering, no romance worth reliving—even though a majority of
Americans experience this barrenness on a daily basis, officially,
consciously, it doesn’t exist. As bad as this hurts, the pain is
compounded every time you expose yourself to the cultural lies that
await you at every turn–that is, every waking hour and during deep REM
sleep, when the subliminal messages kick in. This wretchedness leads
to a desire for vengeance, to externalize the inner famine–it leads
directly to the Republican camp.
Spite-voters also lack the sense that they have a stake in America’s
future. That’s another area that separates the spite-bloc’s way of
thinking from the progressive-left that wants to help them. There is
something proprietary implied in all of the didacticism and concern
found in the left’s tone—and they do all have that grating, caring
tone, it’s built into the foundations of their whole structure. But
consider this: The left struggles to understand why so many
non-millionaire Americans vote Republican, and yet they rarely ask
themselves why so many millionaires, particularly the most beautiful
and privileged millionaires in Manhattan and Los Angeles, vote for the
Democrats.
I can answer both. Rich, beautiful, coastal types are liberal
precisely because their lives are so wonderful. They want to preserve
their lives exactly as they are. If I were a rich movie star, I’d vote
for peace and poverty relief. War and domestic insurrection are the
greatest threats to their already-perfect lives–why mess with it? This
rational fear of the peasantry is frequently misinterpreted as rich
guilt, but that’s not the case. They just want to pay off all the
have-nots to keep them from storming their manors and impaling them on
stakes.
Republican elites don’t set off the spite glands in the same way, and
it’s not only because of a sinister right-wing propaganda machine.
Take a look at a photo of the late billionaire Sam Walton, a dried-out
Calvinist in a baseball cap and business suit, and you’ll see why. If
Republican billionaires enjoy their wealth, they sure as hell hide it
well. As far as one can tell, Republican billionaires genuinely like
working 18-hour days in offices, and attending dreary charity dinners.
More importantly, it’s hard for us to imagine that these stuffy
gray-haired plutocrats have interesting sex lives—nothing inspires
murderous envy more than someone else’s great sex life, which is why a
celebrity is so much more viscerally hateful than the richest, meanest
plutocrat. These right-wing billionaires’ idea of having fun is a day
on the golf green (a game as slow and frustrating as a day in the
office) or attending conferences with other sleazy, cheerless
Calvinist billionaires. If that’s what all their wealth got them, let
‘em have it–so says the spite bloc. This explains why the Republican
elite–the only true and all-powerful elite in America today–is not
considered an “elitist” class in the spleens of the white male
have-nots. Elitism as defined today is a synonym for “happy,” not
“rich” or “powerful.” Happiness is the scarcest resource of all, not
money. And the happy supply has been cornered by the beautiful, famous
and wealthy coastal elite, the ones who never age, and who are just so
damned concerned for the have-nots’ well-being. In that sense, you can
see how the Republicans were able to successfully manipulate the
meaning of “elitism” to suit their needs. They weren’t just selling
dogshit to the credulous masses; they were selling pancreatic balm to
the needy.
At the other end of the economic spectrum, non-millionaires who vote
Republican know all-too-well that the country is not theirs. They are
mere wage-slave fodder, so their only hope is to vote for someone who
makes the very happiest people’s lives a little less happy. If I’m an
obese 40-something white male living in Ohio or Nevada, locked into a
permanent struggle with foreclosure, child support payments and
diabetes, then I’m going to vote for the guy who delivers a big greasy
portion of misery to the Sarandon-Robbins dining room table, then
brags about it on FoxNews. Even if it means hurting myself in the
process.
This explains the mystery of why Bush still has a chance of winning in
November, even though most Americans acknowledge that his presidency
is little more than a series of slapstick fuck-ups with apocalyptic
consequences. Inspector Clouseau meets the Book of Revelations. Close
to half of this country will support Bush simply to spite that part of
America that it sees as most threatened by the Iraq debacle. If the
empire ends up collapsing into that filthy, sizzling hellhole in the
desert, if more terrorists are created to help set off dirty bombs in
Manhattan or Los Angeles, our spiteful voter has a real chance of
finally achieving some empowerment.
It’s simple mathematics: Bring down the coastal elite and the single
40-something Ohio salesman might actually matter. And if they’re not
brought down, at the very least bad right-wing policies make happy
coastal elites’ lives a little less perfect, a little less enviable—at
least they’re suffering from indigestion and palpitations over the
possibility that insane right-wing policies could ruin them at any
time. And in a world of so little possibility and so much petty
malice, that’s better than nothing.
This is why all the talk about “personal interests” is a sham, a
delusion that the left needs to get over. Spite voters don’t care
solely about their own rational economic interests, nor are they
bothered by how “the left talks as if they know what everyone’s best
interests are,” an argument you often hear from the whiney right. What
bothers the Spite-ists is that the left really does know what’s in
their interests. If you’re miserable, you don’t want to be told what’s
best for you by someone who’s correct–it’s sort of like being occupied
by a foreign army with good intentions. You’d rather fuck things up on
your own, something you’re quite good at, and bring others down with
you—than live with the shame of having been helped by someone more
decent and talented than you.
Spite voting is mostly a white male phenomenon, which is why a
majority of white males vote Republican. It comes from a toxic mix of
thwarted expectations, cowardice, shame, and a particular strain of
anomie that is unique to the white American male experience.
Spite voting is not just an American problem; it’s a flaw in
democracies everywhere. When I lived in Kosovo in the late summer of
2000, I asked my Serb friends there if they thought Milosevic was
going to win the upcoming Serbian presidential elections. Most were
pessimistic. They told me of friends, young people even, who voted for
Milosevic “just out of spite.” The Serbian spite voters believed that
if the opposition got their way and Serbia became as tame and
civilized as Luxembourg, all those college-educated Otpor protestors
and pro-Western intellectuals would simply take the privileges enjoyed
by Milosevic’s cronies for themselves. They didn’t want caste-based
happiness and its accompanying propaganda, so they voted for Milosevic
precisely because he was wrong, because he was a vote against hope.
Under Milosevic, nearly every Serb was fucked equally, and that suited
some people, particularly some Serbian males, just fine. But if you’re
a failure under two completely different regimes, then the inescapable
conclusion would be that it’s your own damn fault. Better to keep the
villain in, and the young ambitious go-getters out.
George W. Bush and Milosevic have a lot in common. Before Milosevic,
the Serbs were loved by everyone in the West. But as their third-way
socialist economy crumbled and they perceived a threat from local
Muslim populations, Milosevic pandered to the people’s darkest fears.
He dragged them into what we call “wars of choice” and turned the
international community against them, to the point where Serbia was
the most reviled nation in Europe. He attacked the U.N. and the West
as anti-Serb, and kept the country in a permanent state of war and
fear and isolation. Like Bush, Milosevic destroyed his little empire
almost as quickly as he assumed control of it. It took a decade and
massive covert and overt Western efforts to finally get Milosevic out
of power and into the dock. For many a spiteful Serb male, those years
of decline, hatred and isolation were glorious years indeed.
Sadly, the chances of the international community putting their blue
helmets where their whingeing mouths are to overthrow Bush, liberating
us from our own bad judgment, are nil to negative-nil.
But all’s not lost. There is still a chance to get the spite-ists vote
to defect. Kerry might be the right candidate to blunt some of Bush’s
natural spite-support.
One look at Bush and you’ll see why: Bush is the privileged
frat-boy/jock asshole that every spiteful male recognizes from his
school days. Spiteful males may have supported him in the past, but
only because Bush’s cartoonish stupidity gave a daily dose of stomach
cramps to the responsible, concerned Americans who voted for Gore. And
really, what white male in his spiteful mind could possibly have voted
for Al Gore, with that obsequious “Am I pleasing you?” smile he beamed
at you? Spiteful white males don’t want to be pleased, for fuck’s
sake–they want other people to be dis-pleased.
Kerry, on the other hand, has that long mortician’s face, and a dull,
forgetful delivery that puts you to sleep, making it hard for the
spiteful voter to work up a hate-sweat just on pure knee-jerk
instinct. With Kerry, the spleen just daydreams about other things.
If there were one perfect spite-ist president, it was Richard Nixon.
He looked mean, spoke mean and stomped on the hippies who were having
too many orgasms, the last real orgasms this country ever witnessed.
Kerry shares some of the same repulsive physical qualities as Nixon,
repulsive in the sense that he doesn’t look like a tv anchor–which is
a good thing. And while Kerry may not stomp on hippies, it’s hard to
imagine that he ever enjoyed a single minute of his life. There is
nothing about Kerry to make a man envious, even if he is rich and
famous. You get the sense that Kerry’s greatest joy in life is sitting
alone in his office at the end of a long day, thumbing through his
fresh collection of business cards and coveting the connections that
each one brings. When it comes to the spite intangibles, Kerry is the
closest thing to Nixon that the Democrats have ever fielded.
Kerry won’t draw the spite vote, but his creepy face, along with
Bush’s jock glow, just might neutralize it–out of spite. All the left
has to do is not stir up the wrong bile. That means keeping the focus
on Bush’s corporate-jock clique, and keeping it mean. Just don’t let
us know how responsible and concerned you are. Don’t let us know that
you care about us, and the election is all yours.
* * *
Addendum, January 20, 2011: Clearly, Kerry didn’t read my piece.
But even if he had, he wouldn’t have known how to save himself. Rove
and the Republicans know their spite, and know how to harness that
spite and focus it on a target, no matter how inoffensive that target
might seem—even if the target was a house plant with hair like John
Kerry.
That’s why the Republicans focused on Kerry’s war hero record.
Everyone was shocked by this strategy: “Why would the Republicans go
after Kerry’s war record when Bush and Cheney were deserters?” The
answer was obvious if you understood how spite works. Kerry’s war
heroism secretly pissed off untold millions of American males,
especially middle-aged white American males, who identified with the
cowardice and loud-mouthed hypocrisy of the Republican war deserters,
because most white middle-class American males were war deserters too.
It’s like the homophobe closet-case phenomenon: most boomers who
deserted the Vietnam War resent that stain on their past, so naturally
they’re for the rankest, basest draft-dodging hypocrites like Rush
Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich, who dignify draft-dodging as machismo, and
turn that private stain into a purple heart.
Compare the shame of the average white male American’s Vietnam record
to Kerry’s war record: He saw real combat and faced real danger and
killed real living people, rather than just yapping about killing in
the comments section of Pajamas Media like most white males, or
shouting about it on FoxNews with all the draft-dodging warmongers
there…Then there’s Kerry’s far braver turn to anti-war activism after
he returned home, a defiance that none of these spiteful voters ever
had the courage to show in public, for fear of getting yelled at by
their bosses. And most offensive of all, Kerry’s cinematic Swift Boat
that he rode up the Mekong, clutching his M-16 like some fucking
action hero movie star. He lived the life every dead-ender American
wishes he had lived, daydreaming about courage in his wretched
cubicle.
No shit Kerry’s war record would set off all that envy and malice
among middle-aged white Americans—and draw them closer to the side of
the shameless war deserters– the side with Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh and
the rest of them.
On top of being an action hero, Kerry spoke French. That meant he had
sex. And his rich wife spoke foreign languages with ease, whereas most
spiteful American males can’t even read a fucking Taco Bell menu.
The final death blow was releasing the photo of Kerry wind-surfing
like some happy coastal Californian celebrity…Add all that up, and
what you get is the picture of a man who has had an interesting,
enviable sex life. The very picture of hate to the millions of
Americans stuck in eventless, dreary, unfilmable lives.
Clearly a guy like this could not be allowed into the White House.
The elections in 2006 and 2008 showed that the only way that the
“left” (such as it is) can sneak into power is when the right
self-destructs and creates a void, setting the spite bloc adrift.
That’s what happened in 2006—that and revelations that nearly every
single Republican homophobe was a closeted cock-addict. Spite almost
made a big comeback in the 2008 elections—people forget this but
McCain-Palin pulled ahead over Obama in September 2008, and their lead
expanded to 5% points in a New York Times poll by the middle of the
month…and then the financial markets collapsed, and the Republican
rats melted into the hills, leaving the Spiteists high and dry.
This Gallup graphic captures that sudden absence of malice, or what
Gallup calls a lack of “enthusiasm”:
gallup enthusiasm1
But not for long. All it took to get America’s spite on again was a
few weeks of watching a successful, suave black guy who overcame
prejudice and a broken home to make it to the top—and that was it: the
spite floodgates were unleashed. At least if you’re led by privileged
dumbshits like Bush, it means there’s no meritocracy to speak of in
this country, and that means it’s not your fault that your life didn’t
turn out the way you hoped it would. If you never had a chance in the
first place, that at least is some comfort—Obama ruined that excuse,
and suggested that we might, after all, live in something like a
meritocracy, the scariest thought of all for the spiteists.
That’s where we are now. And it’ll continue to get worse than anyone
thought imaginable because only one side is exploiting America’s
spite. It’s like the one-sided class war that Warren Buffet spoke
about:
“There’s class warfare, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s
making war, and we’re winning.”
Another way of saying that could be, “There’s spite and envy all
right, but it’s my enviable class, the billionaires, that’s harnessing
that spite and using against the left, which doesn’t want to
acknowledge how spiteful Americans can be– and that’s why we’re
winning.”
But the left should see this as an opportunity. It doesn’t take a
rocket scientist—or even a marketing whiz– to imagine how the left
could tap into all that spite, envy, and petty malice. It’s right
there in front of all of our faces. We can use spite to reform this
wrecked country! After all, the spite we want to arouse is absolutely
legit, totally justified and in fact way overdue! Why is the left so
wobbly-kneed about bringing up the obvious? It’s about time the
American people started to feel the anger and bitterness they should
be feeling toward the people who’ve robbed and suckered them all these
years!
All we have to do is drive home the obvious to Americans:
There’s a class war going on, like Warren Buffett says, and they’re
kicking your asses every time and laughing all the way to the
bailed-out bank—just in time for the bank to foreclose on your house!
Americans don’t have tea parties, we have bar-b-ques for fuck’s sake,
and we drink Coke or beer. “Tea Party”—what’s next, the “Vienna Ball”
protest movement? Hundreds of thousands of “Viennaballers” in Mozart
costumes hitting the streets demanding hereditary titles for our
billionaires? Suck up to them all you want to, they’ll still despise
you. They have yachts and airplanes and mansions all over the world
and children who will never see a bill or worry about a single thing
beyond remembering their servants’ names– and it’s all thanks to
robbing you and your family blind. No shit you’re angry! You have
every reason to be angry!
Wake up and smell the spite—or choke on it. There’s no other choice.
It’s not going away.
Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion
from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.
Click the cover & buy the book!
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80 Comments
Add your own
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1. Congrats! | January 22nd, 2011 at 8:20 am
I’m going to pretend that I’m not offended by your article and
say something faggy like “oh that’s obvious” or “I wasn’t offended, I
was bored.” Why would I do that? because I’m a sad troll. The spiteful
fag you’re writing about. And you’re an elite liberal New York TV hero
joo.
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2. Brer Rabbit | January 22nd, 2011 at 8:21 am
Spot on, man, though I’d like to correct a small oversight if I
may. You should spend more time here in the deep south where you would
find that our college- and middle-aged white women are usually just as
grasping, venal, and petty in all the same ways and for all the same
reasons (which they will happily outline for you) as their cowardly
cracker-man counterparts. On second thought, just take my word for it.
I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
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