Mad as hell and still taking it

by David Benjamin 

““ … Trump has energized a segment of America whose values and traditions are mocked as bigoted, backward or too religious. The world is hurtling past them at breakneck speed. Their belief that Trump is their last, best hope to avoid being left in the dust is partly disturbing, partly endearing and partly heartbreaking…”” 

—Gary Abernathy, The Washington Post

MADISON, Wis.—Conservative Gary Abernathy recently joined a chorus of liberals who, for nine years, have been straining mightily to plumb the psyche of a violent cult that regards a horny Tony Soprano wannabe from Queens as a haloed messiah entitled to the divine right of kings.

This exercise springs from a delusion that if well-meaning people like us can come to “understand” the zealots who hate us, we can reason with them. Just in the last week, I’ve seen dissections of Trumpism by Abernathy, David French and other deep thinkers. This blend of alarm and empathy actually dates back decades to sociopathologists like Richard Hofstadter, Eric Hoffer and Thomas Frank. 

Unlike Hofstadter and Frank, however, contemporary analysts seem to be stumped—or at least puzzled—by the paradox of free citizens in the world’s fundamental democracy who have fallen madly in love with an orange-faced comb-over with the political aspirations of Benito Mussolini.

To this confusion, my conscience compels me to quote one of my intellectual paragons, Michael Irvin: “C’mon, man!”

It’s generally agreed that the unifying principle among these folks, the quality that they share with their dear leader, is that they’re pissed off. 

There’s no mystery here. I know these folks. They’re not complicated. I grew up among them in the rural America that has been idealized into a sort of run-down Eden. These people were my family and neighbors. They sat along the bars where my dad poured drinks and Mom waited on tables. I went to school with them. For one reason or another, from time to time, depending on circumstances and money, they—no, we—were all pissed off. 

My dad, specifically, was pissed—over offenses done to him, over self-inflicted screwups. But there he stood at the TeePee bar, as cool as a martini, kidding, charming and healing a nightly clientele of pissed-off drinkers. Although occasionally stricken by a nameless rage, Dad came to somehow understand that frustration is a fuse. He set his own anger alight often, too often. He scared me. But he always pinched off the fuse before the explosion. Dad was pissed off. He had a right. But he never hurt anyone, and he talked a lot of people down.

I’m not immune. I’ve been pissed off most of my life. I’ve been shafted a thousand times by petty tyrants, by “little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” I’ve been delayed, denied, hobbled and screwed by banks and bill collectors, by bosses, publishers and editors, by busybodies, popinjays and back-stabbers, by HR and the DMV, the IRS and the SSA. I live in perpetual fear of a vindictive nebbish with a police badge pulling in behind and flashing his dome lights. 

From my first day in school, when I discovered bullies and felt ashamed about by raggedy clothes, I’ve been ripshit and spoiling for revenge. But how do I get it?

How did, for example, Howard Beale get his? In the film, Network, the fictional newscaster turned prophet, sent America to their windows, to stick their heads out and scream, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

Howard Beale, starring in a realty-TV show eerily predictive of a Trump rally, gushed an endless flow of gobbledegook and grievance. But—at bottom—the breadth and depth of his ideology consisted solely of that “mad as hell” mantra. 

Trump is the live incarnation of Howard Beale. He’s the medium’s message,  an air shaft echoing with fury, signifying nothing. But the phenomenon that Paddy Chayevsky, screenwriter of Network, did not foresee was that Trump has convinced those window-hangers cursing the darkness that each one is specially, uniquely screwed. Trump has atomized the angry and been reborn as the sucking vortex of all grievance, the messiah of the pissed-off. 

If Americans have a defining virtue, it is our power to defy victimhood. At some point in life, we’ve all stopped in our tracks, looked around and said, “Jesus Christ! I really am screwed.” But then—maybe before, maybe after, maybe at that very moment of ultimate screwedness—we also recognize that, well, Dad got screwed back then, Mom got screwed even worse. They were never alone in their miseries. Nor am I alone, nor are all my chronically pissed-off friends. There is something essentially American in understanding that we may be screwed but we’re all screwed together. 

The secret of Trump’s success is not only his ability to convince his believers that their victimhood is different from and profounder than the identical misfortunes and anxieties felt by all of us. He has also exiled his enemies to a wilderness where his faithful dare not tread. We of the non-Trump faith occupy an imaginary post-Apocalyptic wasteland where black folks and reporters, feminists and communists, drag queens, witch-hunters, Jews, migrants and Hunter Biden mingle indiscriminately, dining on barbecued white infants atop Satanic altars. 

Those of us whom Trump has demonized are just like his people. But he has warned them not fraternize, lest they be damned.

All my life, I’ve striven to understand the motives, inclinations and prejudices of the sort of folks drawn to spellbinders like Trump. But I have yet to encounter any effort on the part of those people to understand people like me.

Why don’t they want to know why I cherish, deeply, the independence of, say, the Federal Communications Commission. Why don’t they ask why I loved LBJ in 1965 and hated his guts in ’69, and felt heartbroken for him yesterday? 

Why don’t they ask why I’m so blasé about transvestites and so sympathetic toward transgender teens? Why don’t they ask me about fair housing, redlining and racial covenants? Why don’t they ask me what’s so damn good about Bessie Smith, Taj Mahal and Miles Davis?

If asked, I could explain how someone can be naive enough keep faith in a democracy that allowed a ninety-year national policy of Jim Crow, that embraced the cruelty and indecency of Joe McCarthy, that waged a twenty-year war in Asia with no motive other than a technocratic Cold War ideology and killed 60,000 young men who should have been left alone, should have gone to school, got married, had kids, paid mortgages and played slow-pitch softball instead of being turned to hamburger in swamps and jungles 8,000 miles away from their mothers.

I could even try to explain how a nation inspired by the values of the Enlightenment could elect as one of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln’s successors a vulgarian as vapid and benighted as Donald Trump.

Yes, I’m pissed off. But I’ve never gotten so angry at America’s sins and blunders to give up on the dream of justice for everyone, on the promise of equality, on my nation as a refuge for huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

If there’s anything I don’t understand about Trump’s band of flag-bedecked nihilists is why they’ve given up on an America that has made all of us mad as hell but protected our freedom to yell out the window about it. I’d like someone to explain why so many of my neighbors, family and lifelong friends have forsaken me to hide in bunkers full of rage, ignorance and MAGA merchandise, to fall on their knees and worship the phoniest man on earth. 

I await someone in that fortress of denial and despair to face people like me and try to understand why we—although just as angry about many of the same things—refuse to give up.

I’m not holding my breath.