"Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood"

“Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood”
by David Benjamin

“As members of the winning team, Trump supporters have no urgent need to understand the other side.”
— Amanda Hess, The New York Times

PARIS — Pundits — especially the sensitive, liberal ones — keep telling me how important it is to understand the complexities, anxieties and pain of the “angry” nihilists whose votes put Donald Trump in the Oval Office, in his bathrobe at 4 a.m., with the nuclear button an inch away from his twitchy little finger.

I’ve heard, ad nauseam, from experts on the op-ed page, trolls on Facebook and drunks in bars that I’m powerless to pierce the mystery that shrouds all those pissed-off white guys who think they’re somehow special for just being white, who barely passed high school (or didn’t), who can’t find a fulltime job and if they did they couldn’t hold it, and they haven’t read a book voluntarily since the onset of puberty.

Understand?

Why?

I have yet to meet a white nationalist who wants to understand me.

I’ve never encountered a machine operator, a loading-dock hand, or a cashier at Walgreen’s who wanted to plumb my psyche and peer into my soul.

In all the months I worked at Addison Steel in Orlando, not one of the welders, fitters, painters, truckers and rednecks there showed any interest in the range and depth of my burgeoning intellect.

My career at Beacon Auto Radiator flew by without an inkling of concern, from my fellow autoworkers, about my spiritual well-being or emotional needs. Nothing!

In my two summers at the cannery in Waunakee, I fielded not one single probing question from my blue-collar peers about my philosophy of life, my favorite poet, my preference between Miro and Picasso. They just didn’t seem to care.

This pattern seems to run pretty much the whole gamut of all the factories, car washes, warehouses, kitchens and farms where I worked, hauled, crawled and mopped to pay my way through, high school, college and alimony.

Is it me? Do I seem unapproachable? Did my erstwhile co-workers secretly ache to know, to understand me, but they were shy, tongue-tied, intimidated by my steely gaze, my Freudian beard and my 69 inches of stature? Or did they just not give a shit?

Perhaps they pity me. In recent encounters with these horny-handed sons of toil about politics or Trump, I always re-discover how naive and childlike I am, how unschooled, compared to them, in the ways of the “real world.” I’m soft, effeminate and cloistered, they explain. I have no grasp of reality. I’ve never had to fight for anything, never had to get my hands dirty, never looked into an empty pantry with two kids hungry and three days ’til payday.

I “don’t get it.”

Get what? What’s to get? And why is it so hard to get?

Over the years, often to keep my job, I’ve had to “get” some pretty hard stuff. I’ve had to to understand — and then explain to people even more ignorant than me — issues in the law, for example, or physics, education, polymer chemistry, beta blockers, electronics, assembly-line technology, finance, sports, journalism, ethics, religion, Jerusalem in the first century, food, travel, art, microwave radiation, pottery, computerized tomography, exercise physiology, photography, cellular telephony, just-in-time inventory control, Japanese gangsters, literature, poetry, music, the law of diminishing marginal returns, and the migration of ions through a semi-permeable membrane. I wrote a whole book about sumo.

So… as a lifelong know-it-all, I find particularly galling the charge that I cannot grasp the angst of a restive throng who wear their grievance on their bumpers, on t-shirts and on the front panel of their adjust-o-band baseball caps.

Besides, they’re wrong about me. I get it. I understand.

Most of us understand. It’s not rocket science to appreciate and empathize with the anguish of folks who’ve been denied, foreclosed, fired, demoted, red-lined, evicted, stopped, frisked or otherwise screwed by the system. After all, most of us — more than Trump’s true believers can possibly understand — have also been screwed by one system or another.

You live long enough, you’re gonna get screwed.

Just about everyone where I grew up in Tomah — neighbors, friends, family, classmates — got screwed somewhere along the way. The grownups all around me had worked hard, with their hands, on their knees, up ladders and down holes every day. For all this, they barely got by, squeezed every nickel, and never took a vacation longer than two weeks or farther than the back yard.

Every man I knew in my childhood was a white working class male, in a white working-class town in flyover, trailer-park America. My grandfathers were a plumber and a machinist. Neither had ever seen the inside of a high school. Dad was a bartender. Mom was a high-school dropout single parent who sold washer-dryers, waited on tables and cheated on the Welfare Department to keep food in the fridge.

All the women and men whom I knew, admired, loved and trusted — except my teachers — were undereducated. Most were underemployed, at jobs that insulted their innate intelligence. They sweated all their lives and ended it all with a pittance. All along, they knew they’d been handed the shitty end. They knew that the wealth earned by their work would mostly serve to enrich a handful of strangers living in towers in faroff places who didn’t give a rat’s ass who these people were and whether their jobs would give them cancer and kill them before their time.

They understood that the system, as Bernie and Trump revealed to no one’s surprise, is rigged. Always was. In the mantra of my grandfather, Archie: “Them what has, gets.”

Despite this fate, those forebears — my role models — fought it out. They kept struggling, set aside a few dollars and a lot of hope for their kids, and they survived. At times, they even thrived, because they chose not to let the system break their spirit. They never looked for someone to blame — at least not when they were sober. They never succumbed to self-pity.

Then, at some point after Vietnam, that spirit dissolved. America became a nation of victims. Battered by oil sheiks and ayatollahs, by housing bubbles and the Great Recession, by 9/11 — especially 9/11 — and egged on by demagogues waving the dark flag of fear, fear and fear itself, we accepted our national defeat.

There’s a familiar pathology to victimhood. Victims have few friends and many enemies, most of whom they’ve never met. They’re isolated, like the solitary lush at the end of the bar weeping into his Miller. Bring them together and they form not a team, but a mob. They chant, roar, curse, throw stuff and look for someone to beat up, lynch, stone, burn at the stake.

Victims don’t ask questions, don’t seek answers, don’t expect solutions. There are no solutions. They’ve given up. The best they can hope for is catharsis.

Donald Trump is a giant bladder swollen with catharsis. He articulates their self-pity, magnifies their paranoia and validates their bellyache. He’s a face on a t-shirt, with no answers longer than 140 characters. His followers will remain victims. Their only consolation will be a pack of lies direct from the White House. He’ll screw them and they’ll love him, as they blame others for their plight and feel oh, so sorry for themselves.

They say we should try to understand this.

We already do.

To hell with understanding.

For the sake of their children and our democracy, we have to rescue these ignorant yahoos from their abyss and welcome them back to the America they’ve forsaken.

The only way to do that is to beat them.