The President America Deserves

by ABEL COHEN

We finally got the president we deserve. A piece of trash truly representative of our trash culture. Land of the free at all costs and everyone else’s expense. And home of the fattest, meanest, most gleefully ignorant and ill-informed first world people on the planet.

Shooting each other all the time. Filling our days with nonstop sports and celebrities. And flooding global airwaves with poisonous, nauseating filth: the action hero, pornstar, and first person shooter.

Like George Carlin said: “They call it the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Our vacuous and vicarious cult of five-minute fame, popup clickbait ads, and rehab has finally reached its hideous, waking apogee in the election of a vacationing reality star.

Family values hypocrites eagerly and enthusiastically voted against their own self interest and decades of moralizing to elect a sneering, inimical philistine who makes retard jokes, misquotes the bible, and grabs chicks by the pussy.

But don’t misunderstand his stance on women. Unlike other demographics he so regularly victimizes, no one loves or respects the ladies more than him. He just happens to subscribe to the hardcore porn version of women’s rights. Because nasty women love it. And they’re asking for it. Dressed like that.

To paraphrase the president: “My daughter’s a great piece of ass. If I weren’t her father…” Anyone with a daughter they actually love who still voted for this lecherous old ghoul shall surely burn in the fires of magic hell they almost certainly also believe in. But if they think their daughter is a piece of property to be appraised, traded, and dowried, then party on.

Coarsening the culture

Don’t bother lamenting this perceived coarsening of the national debate. Because anyone who’s ever actually spent time in small town America knows how coarse it’s always been. And to be honest, the reincarnation of a leprous failed business magnate as this year’s victorious family values and business candidate is unsurprising. It’s been like this for one hundred years.

Nobody ever won the culture war, so we’ve become immunized and gotten used to it. We are now defined by what we are against: counterculture, antiwar, antiglobalist, antiracist, antigun, antigay, antiabortion, anti-Obamacare, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, etc., ad nauseam.

Nothing more need be said about this year’s crap candidates. We all know everything about them. Invoking their names only further plugs both unearned bullshit brands. Besides, we voters ourselves are a much more interesting lens through which to examine this democratic debacle.

Nonvoters

Critics accuse half of us for enabling the rise of bad candidates. But this is not true. Recent history has plainly shown that good candidates don’t stand a swiftboating chance.

Especially if they really are decorated war heroes, world peace and class equality visionaries, civil rights champions, or authentic christians. Low information voters who should share the values of the seldom few wholesome family men to emerge intact — like Carter or Obama — reflexively loathe them.

Henry Wallace, George McGovern, John Kerry. All, American heroes. But at their crucial moments in our history, small pluralities of us subjected the rest of the world to the military-industrial, Wall Street status quo. America opted to be Merica.

The land of irrepressible mass shootings, nonstop extreme hardcore, and unreconstructed, braindead consumer morons eagerly lapping up vapid dumpsterfire culture from the trough of mankind. Wallowing in our sty.

Astute observers have warned of this phenomenon for years, only to be met with countrymen’s scorn and derision: love it or leave it. Dismissive claims that any and all criticism, however warranted, is anti or unamerican.

For the tree of liberty can only truly be watered in an information vacuum. It seems like most voters and candidates miss the point of vigorous, vibrant, and informed debate. Which is exactly why almost half of us don’t bother.

The game is clearly rigged

Money and power stifle the will of the people and destroy any leaders who challenge it, but this is actually a constitutional principle of our founding fathers. Keep them the people from royally fucking it all up by suppressing robuster participation in the democratic process.

Politicians don’t care what we think, and this election’s 22 low quality gutter contenders proved it beyond any doubt. Because so few Americans vote, elected officials have little to fear. But why should we always unquestioningly vote? Our doom is foretold by the constitution.

This is a republic, not a democracy. We are not important and shouldn’t underestimate our own insignificance. The slaveholding aristocrats we innocuously call founding fathers actively sought to keep everyone who wasn’t just like them far away from the polls for almost two hundred years.

It’s one of the most antiestablishment periods in U.S. history, yet common sense and continued survival dictated that if one must vote, then one should vote for one of the most establishment candidates ever. Given this illusion of choice and agency, many of us didn’t want it.

Either an erstwhile Howard Stern guest incomprehensibly turned family values candidate, or a shameless corporate shill sucking fervidly at the toxic teat of the vampire squid, neolibercon, sack and loot establishment. No thanks. Not interested. We’ll pass.

It didn’t have to be this way. America’s storied democracy has had strong social justice and fairness candidates. Even though they were all white men. This election’s astonishingly low-quality candidates make the half-forgotten democrats of yesteryear look better and better in hindsight.

Nonvoters don’t enable the rise of bad candidates. The top-heavy and corrupt two-party duopoly that replaces them with corporate shills does. They are beholden solely to major donors. And unlimited, unaccountable corporate money floods their campaigns.

Worst election ever

Long before it ever began, this historic moment degenerated into a shameful spectacle of soulcrushing, skyhigh negatives. It was an unpopularity contest between two candidates with less than 9% initial support from their parties. Claims that someone stole the election used to be limited to the general, now start in the primaries, and are sadly and unquestionably true.

This election should have been something grander. A historic, landmark race between the first real female contender and a hateful misogynist dinosaur.

Committed to social justice and transparency, she would galvanize women, minorities, and youth. Her radioactive opponent merely a pale, racist replica of yesterday’s dying white tribe. Since they oppose everything and everyone else, it should have been a slam-dunk. But wasn’t.

Despite the grey lady’s fervent assertions we had nothing to fear, the orange lizard gave the for-rent revolving door a run for her money. And in the self-disenfranchised vacuum of informed voters, all sorts of unexpected opportunists joined poor, low information, rural whites in voting against their own self-interest.

The world watched with dismay as self-loathing Americans of color, women, and even some gays swaggered across stage and screen. Queening for a candidate and electorate that despise them. And they weren’t even tokens or paid actors. Our culture has become irredeemable. America, you’re fired.

Howard Stern Voters

Absurdist pop culture, reality tv catharsis. The repuglican candidates’ sensational campaign was a great leap backward in thinkfluence. Ungrateful rightwing sheeple — spiting the prevailing wisdom and defying the experts — turned out in droves to vote against their own convictions for a man they despised their entire lives until last year.

Talking heads and the chattering class spent a year reassuring us all that the philistine had no chance, but he did. Because Merica loves nothing more than come-from-behind and perhaps on her face, pussy-grabbin’ victories!

Let’s face it: this man is Merica. All of his most famous, offensive zingers are lines that could just as easily be delivered by embarrassing childhood friends in sleeveless NRA shirts, Carhartt jackets, and Fox Racing mesh caps. The ones avoided on holiday parachutings into the flyover country from whence many of us sprang.

Their faces at triumphant results parties were the spitting image of trailer park frat party locker room gangbangs: “Fuck yeah, we want hookers and blow! You don’t!? What’s wrong with you!? You queer, bro?!” There aren’t enough epithets, exclamation points, or pussies to grab in the world for these excitable neanderthals.

Fucking hypocrites.

Married several times. Kids all over the place. In church every Sunday.

No job. No education. No information. No prospects. Mexicans’ and Chinese’s fault.

It’s infuriating. A smirking sybarite laughingly repurposes the crudest stereotypes of primitive conservatives and christians to his own selfish ends, and the clueless yokels don’t get it at all.

Times used to be a high-falutin’ city boy like him would get one right in the kisser for taking advantage of wholesome country folk with condescending jokes like that. Times sure have changed.

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