It was December of 2015 and I was in a cab to my car, and I did what I like to do, which is to pick a cabbie’s brain. There’s something about cabbies, like they speak a truth from a world within our world. They seem decent to me and almost all of them are interesting, and you get the feeling most have been through some of life’s rough patches. So I asked him, who are you voting for? And he said, “I like what Donald Trump’s saying.” It didn’t surprise me, but the way he put it, “I like what he’s saying”, stuck with me. I said something like, “Despite the nasty part”, and he blew that off as non-significant.
Here’s another one. In the ER where I work, in rural Kentucky, the night before the election there was a patient’s husband, a preacher at 80 with his white hair a little too long, and I asked him the same thing, and he says, “If Hillary gets in, I’ll know these are end times for sure then”. And he leaned toward me a bit when he said it, and I believed he meant it. I thought about how different he was from that cabbie, but here was something they had in common.
And neither of them are remotely deplorable people. And the staff, the nurses, they were all voting for Trump. I drove by the abundant “Trump/Pence” signs, right there next to the Rebel Flag, I knew he had a chance. Honestly, I had to go to the dictionary to look up Hillary’s word “deplorable”, and it was even harsher than I expected. And it’s an adjective and not a noun, as she used it. But all the negative connotations you can think of, and they fit. So to describe an entire cohort like that, the “basket”, who could have known she was that on it? That line remains the defining term of that historic election.
Remember this, after every “explanation” of the outcome of this election you can just tag on the line, “Oh, and Hillary Clinton was the worst possible candidate in history”. But I keep looking at the unit out there that came together to ignore some very troubling warning signs from Mr. Trump and give him their vote, and live his reality gig. What were they thinking? Was it just Hillary’s election to lose, and she lost it with all her might? Or can we say something about them and ourselves because of the results?
I have something I call “the country music rule”. Country music is popular because most people are real simple, and like simple melodies and simple lyrics they can hear and understand. For years if not decades, the great American Capitalism machine has jumped in their heads and twisted with the wiring so much and in so many ways that many people have just gone numb and dumb to it all. From 9/11 to school shootings to ISIS and LGBTs and Putin and Great Recessions and GMOs and Global Warming, how much do you want them to take?
Trump himself is a very rare creature, and there will be no heir apparent. His rallies became gripe sessions for the cohort. Here he can say all these things, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to hold him to it. But the mood is set and that will do. To the rest of us, the ones of us who couldn’t look at him and see anything resembling Abe Lincoln for example, we enjoyed a fancier song, and admitted somewhere deep inside we weren’t really over the events of September 11th, and maybe we don’t like the ATM box asking if we want the thing to go Spanish. But not enough to live the dysfunction of a narcissistic tycoon with a bad comb-over. And some really bad body english.
I am fascinated by group behaviors. Mobs form for any number of reasons, and once coalesced, particularly in large numbers, some members of the unit will surely push some envelope somewhere as far as it can , until it falls off the table. Trodden under foot, the cleanup crew will next find it as the remnant of the party that was until it wasn’t, when the flames they fanned blew up and out, and the mob disbanded, and the story was again told and re-told.
So as this coalescence of fractured and quasi-mature identities has found themselves through the supercomputer in their pockets, they have found strength in their deploribus unum. They have shouted absurdities and obscenities, brandished their pieces, threatened pillars of society, and plundered institutions in their best efforts to cut off their noses to spite their faces. And as we fight to keep the ship afloat we can all agree that if you’re in that club, something must have happened to you. And made you a deplorable. You can’t apologize, and we all can’t help but be sorry. All of us.