Mental Illness Theater

I’m very, VERY busy alphabetizing my dryer lint in order of who has the cutest boyfriend tonight, so I’ll be understandably unable to watch Derp Fuhrer waddle through the indignities of end-stage syphilis as his collective stink of ineptitude, racism and borschtburders wafts across the House chamber like the frothy spittle of married siblings pulled from their confederate bedsheets and forced to think about gays eating cake in the harsh light of day.

But have fun holding down your dinner if for some reason you find value in sitting through the STFU. Or however you spell it.

#BeBest, Melanie

Remember this photo?

It circulated on social media two years ago toward the end of trump's campaign. I wrote about how disturbing it was at the time--disturbing for its vulgarity, disturbing for its public invitation to apparently consensual rape, disturbing for the Zeitgeist of near-normalized, something-to-be-seen-as-humorous sexual assault that it represented.

It popped up in my Facebook memories this morning ... just as we as a country are being newly assaulted by avalanches of revelations about institutionalized, systemic, cavalierly-dismissed-male-privilege sexual assault wrought by Brett Kavanaugh and his ilk. The coincidence that this Facebook memory appeared now is odd in itself for its almost-years-to-the-date timing, but it's also horrifyingly disturbing for the fact that trump's 2016 pussy-grabbing braggadocio has been buried--albeit under two full years of his almost daily acts of catastrophic, psychopathic incompetence--to the point that we as a society have almost forgotten about it ... or at least become numbly inured to it.

Many of the facts of what I wrote two years ago have changed--I am now among the legions of people who have all but permanently ended relationships with trump-defending friends and trump-apologist newsfeeds, and I cringed as I saw that in this post I'd tempered my outrage over this picture and what it represented by mentioning cat videos and me looking at pictures of men in speedos--but my underlying incredulity, repulse and outrage have only grown in the last year.

Here is what I wrote, without being edited to reframe the snapshot of my mindframe and emotion a year ago. Re-reading it has both shown me how I've evolved in my white-male-privilege-I'm-never-going-to-do-it-and-it's-never-going-to-happen-to-me subconscious attitudes on the issue in the last 12 months and alerted me to the fact that I'm still not done purging those subconscious attitudes:

I subscribe to both liberal and conservative newsfeeds on Facebook and I have thoughtful, principled friends and acquaintances on here from multiple locations across the political continuum. As such, when I scroll through my personal Facebook feed, I see about 3% share-if-you-love-your-sister memes, 4% I-bet-you're-not-smart-enough-to-pass-this-egregiously-stupid-quiz clickholes, 9% adorable cat videos, 17% pictures of hot guys in speedos, and 943% political memes, forwards, rants and breathlessly dire warnings about the future of our very galaxy if X or Y becomes president. Aside from the occasional legitimate news article or mini essay from a thoughtful friend, most of what's on my feed is just noise between adorable cat videos. But it's still noise I pay attention to.

It's no secret that I have a visceral loathing for everything related to Donald Trump, from his willful ignorance to his inability to form a coherent sentence to his national isolationism to the sense of legitimacy he gives to racists, misogynists, homophobes and proud low-information voters. I realize there are deplorables on both sides of the aisle--along with gotcha pictures and footage documenting their collective stupidity--and I'm inured enough that I'm able to ignore the extremes in an attempt to form what I admit is a highly biased but still open-eared personal knowledge base as a citizen and voter.

But.

This picture of a Trump supporter in her hand-lettered shirt has appeared from multiple sources in my feed. At first I just scrolled past it like it was so much extremist noise. But it kept appearing, as more and more sexual-assault accusations piled up against Trump. It kept appearing as Trump dismissed some of his accusers as not hot enough for his tastes. It kept appearing as the idea of consent was thoroughly parsed by everyone from Morning Joe to Rush Limbaugh.

And this picture ... this gleeful woman giving pretty explicit consent for Donald Trump to sexually assault her ... this overweight woman presumably knowing full well that her body is nowhere near Donald Trump's beauty-pageant-level standards of attractiveness ... this judgment-impaired woman who not only found nothing wrong with wearing her message of consent with an arrow pointing to her vagina in public but who happily let herself be photographed in it by someone who obviously let it go viral on the Internet ... this picture thoroughly sickened me.

This woman willingly lowered herself to Donald Trump's lowest form of low. She let herself be mocked and vilified and humiliated on the world stage. And for what? Did she change anyone's vote? Did she elevate the national dialogue? Did she impress her family and friends? Did she advance her cause?

Was it worth it? Did she get her wish?

THE UNDERLYING ROOT OF MY FURY ABOUT TRUMP AND HIS UNCHECKED, UNFETTERED, IRREPARABLE DESTRUCTION OF THE NOBLE AND HERETOFORE INCREASINGLY SUCCESSFUL AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

I can't believe that in the entire Democratic party's top leadership, we can't find one person to define a unified brand and a clear message and a single-concept campaign of voter-ready talking points and sound bites and kick what is an easily, EASILY kickable collective trump-party ass.

Do Democratic leaders have NO competent marketing consultants on their speed dials? Do they have NO concept of how every successful company and organization and big celebrity and small-time social-media sensation and trumpian cancer packages and sells itself in the consumer marketplace?

Never even mind the eventual filleting of the electorate into deep-dive targeted marketing; Democrats don't even have a rudimentary umbrella concept to sell to and fire up and unify frustrated, horrified, furious, and NOW MORE THAN EVER EASY TO SELL TO AND FIRE UP AND UNIFY American voters.

In my 30 years of dealing with more inept, incompetent, road-blocking advertising clients than I can count, I've NEVER seen one so disorganized and aimless and market-averse and pathetically unable to grasp even the lowest of low-hanging fruit.

Trump and his laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank sycophantic orbit have figured it out; they discovered they could fire up legions of low-information, emotionally inarticulate, festering-in-xenophobia voters with overly simplistic, lost-in-the-bombast irrational, who-cares-if-it's-blaringly-hypocritical-to-the-point-of-being-blatantly-untrue promises of dropping-magically-out-of-the-sky JOBS and ten-dollars-a-month TAX SAVINGS and dangerously aimless NATIONALISM and hush-hush racism and IF THIS FUCKING MORON CAN SOMEHOW GET RICH AND BECOME PRESIDENT THEN THERE'S HOPE AND PROMISE FOR ALL OF YOU FUCKING MORONS TOO HERE BUY THIS SHITTY MAGA HAT THAT WAS MADE IN CHINA.

Jesus, Democratic leaders. I have tons upon tons of experience in successfully developing and accomplishing this essential marketing strategy for big and small clients in multiple countries. I've never done it in the political sector, but how hard can it be giving how less-than-low you've set the bar? I'm just a small-potatoes writer in an only-four-Representatives state whose ideas you'd never even look down on from your top-of-the-national-party level, but at least I can recognize the foundational problem here. And I and every other competent marketing professional--clearly more than you--know exactly what you need to do to fix it. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

OMG

This stabble genus musta missed Spelling Day at Trump University:

Her hand clenching a sweat-stained burner cell phone and her neck limber and fully rotational as she scours her habitat searching for black people exhibiting the brazen audacity to exist in the suffocating mire of her personal magasphere, she crunches her face in a bitter rictus and brays in her deafening shriek about her white-shaming victimization. Even though she’s not actually capable of making it all the way through five-syllable words like victimization.

Make Aducation Great Again!

If we locked guns in cages would we get the same lack of #MAGA anger and uproar?

My Attorney’s Getting Arrested. MAGA!

LiDur oV tHu fRie WurLd

Dotard’s bringing “Sad!” back!

Dipshitych

85. Year. Old.

"85 year old" is the most meaningful, relevant compound adjective you could come up with to describe a racist convicted criminal in a tweet you send just as the biggest, potentially most deadly hurricane to hit American soil in over a decade makes landfall?

#PieceOfShit

Too far? Not far enough?

What if he doesn't even use white golf tees? Gosh, I hope I haven't confused him or made him look silly.

When your head's just not in the game at the gym ...

Redirect your energies toward poking an illiterate circus bear with a tweet stick.

It worked! I don't have an opioid addiction! Praise #MAGA!

Don't worry, guys. You can always get jobs in China making #MAGA hats.

Eventually

It's a shame he had to downgrade his Make America Great Again slogan, especially after he put it on all those Chinese hats. #ThisNewSloganIsABigFatLieToo

#DesperateDistractionWeek

Is #MadeInAmericaWeek the same lie as #InfrastructureWeek except with physical proof that it's go-nowhere propaganda to manipulate man-boy's gullible moron base?

At least the flag is still there

Happy early July 4 from me and Bitch Kitty, who hissed at me and scampered off to no doubt make pro-Putin posters and buy more MAGA hats from China before my camera had time to auto-focus for our patriotic selfie portrait. So the key takeaways here are 1) Bitch Kitty is eliminating your insurance before she bites you, 2) my disco-fantasy mustache makes me positively irresistible even when I sit next to the empty spot where my heartless kitty humiliatingly abandoned me for our patriotic selfie portrait, 3) my Snoopy shirt has a red collar and blue sleeves but Bitch Kitty ran away and killed my patriotic spirit before I got my blue sleeves in the frame and we're all gonna die anyway so why bother, 4) isn't our needlepoint flag pillow super-cute? 5) Mom is stuffed full of pain pills and tucked cozily into her blanket-draped recliner for the first night of her predicted eight weeks of shoulder-surgery recovery while I'm climbing under a blanket on the couch next to her so I can re-pill her every three hours and it feels really good that I'm here to take care of her, 6) she's still hoarse from her nerve block so she has one of my marathon cowbells at her side in case she needs to wake me between pills, 7) she might lose a hand if she actually rings that damn bell while I'm sleeping, 8) she's wearing my pajama bottoms for reasons she describes as because they're much too big for her so they're easier to get on and off with one hand but we all know it's because the hospital vending machine was out of Diet Coke today so I had a real Coke, 9) is it bad to hope that everyone setting off fireworks right now plus all the legislators who gave them unfettered access to all those fireworks lose vital organs in incendiary ways tonight? asking for a friend, 10) seriously -- how super-cute is our needlepoint throw pillow?