Not a Sanitation Worker, a Garbage Man
My phone was abuzz over the weekend with texts from friends who stutter, emails to stuttering lists that I’m on, and posts to social media because Donald Trump had apparently mocked Joe Biden’s stuttering. Again. I don’t really have much new to say that I didn’t say the last time this happened. At a certain point, I kinda run out of words for it. I think it’s important, though, not to get numb to it — but it’s a struggle. One of Trump’s biggest assets is sheer exhaustion. He’s often bragged that he just whines and complains until he gets what he wants; he just wears people down. Similarly, his wearying schmuckitude is why many Trump supporters have given up trying to maintain the belief that “Donald Trump is repugnant, but…” During the 2016 campaign, Trump-supporting [or Trump-curious] erstwhile Republicans would couch their support in language like “He’s a lecherous scoundrel, but…” Supreme Court justices, moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, whatever. The problem is that it’s too much cognitive dissonance to maintain. Plus, I think there’s some sort of human need to view our leaders as decent people. So rather than maintain the pose that Donald Trump is a despicable human being who achieves political ends that they prefer, people simply started professing that Donald Trump is good, actually — ordained by God, a Christian and a patriot. [Y’know, real bananas stuff like that.] All that to say, he’s just such a perpetual schmuck that it’s difficult to maintain the requisite level of disdain, but I’m gonna give it the ol’ college try.
Trump made his remarks at a rally in Rome, Georgia, which is in the district of Trump sycophant and genuinely terrible person Marjorie Taylor-Greene. That raised my eyebrows a bit because that means there’s a non-zero chance I had relatives at the rally, and it makes me curious what they’d thinking about it. [Honestly I’d rather not know, because I suspect the answer would be disappointing.] The New York Times wrote a story on it that quotes multiple people I know through the National Stuttering Association [and have even danced with at NSA banquets a million years ago!], but the headline makes me roll my eyes a little. I know complaining about headlines is one of the lowest forms of media criticism — headlines, as I understand it, are usually written by low-level editors who likely only skimmed a story and are looking to drive engagement — but it’s worth clarifying. I’m not “upset” that Donald Trump mocked Joe Biden’s stuttering. Again. I don’t take it personally — after more than a decade of fairly intensive therapy, I’ve gotten to a pretty good place with my speech. I don’t hear Trump’s mockery and feel bad about myself. If I’m angry, it’s on behalf of the people out there who haven’t spent multiple years in therapy, who haven’t started their stuttering journey, or are still working through it. The people who hear the presidential candidate of a major party mocking the way they talk, and have it reinforce their own negative feelings, embarrassment, or shame about their speech. As I’ve said before, I liken the journey to self acceptance to Andy Dufresne crawling through the sewer tunnel to escape Shawshank — it’s a lot of crawling through shit in the dark. Having a once-and-possibly-future president mocking stuttering to a national audience is a profound disrespect to anyone still in their personal tunnel, and it’s yet another reminder that, in addition to all of his other myriad shortcomings, Donald Trump also has the emotional development of a 6th grade bully who never grew out of it.
I get that it’s kinda small potatoes to complain about Donald Trump mocking a speech disorder, especially given his long and well-documented catalogue of repugnant behavior. I mean, if you’re fine with the infidelity, the porn star fornicating, the serial dishonesty, the business fraud, the sexual assault, the petty corruption, the nepotism, the conspiracy mongering, the affinity for authoritarians and despots, the criminal indictments, the impeachments, the attempted autogolpe, and the fomented attack on the Capitol, you’re not gonna abandon him because he makes fun of stuttering. But I nevertheless feel compelled to point it out, y’know? Not because I think it’s going to change Donald Trump’s behavior, but to at least hold up a mirror to the sort of people who might laugh along and applaud such a thing.
I grew up in a heavily Baptist part of Georgia, and I had a classmate in high school who was doing his best to “walk the walk,” as it were. [This was a guy whose senior quote was “Forgive them father, for they know not what they do,” to give you an idea.] And one day after school, some friends and I were having some bawdy conversation about whatever high school boys talked about in the 90s, and this guy was within earshot and took exception. So he comes over to us and says, [quoting from memory] “I’m a Christian, so I believe that God is everywhere. And if God is in this room right now, how do you think He would feel about what you’re saying?” And fair enough, y’know? I’m not well-versed enough to comment on the theological basis of the idea, but I took his point. [I also imagine it’s easier to adhere to a religion if you believe that the Lord is standing in the corner scowling at you disapprovingly.] It kind of reminds me of an ethics training I took when I became part of the Deep State: the trainer told us that we should make every decision as if our grandmother was looking over one of our shoulders and a Washington Post reporter was looking over the other. [Which always struck me as incredibly effective; I’d much rather disappoint the Almighty than have Grandma think I wasn’t her special boy.]
I think about that high school classmate sort of a lot these days. For reasons that continue to elude me, Donald Trump enjoys more devoted support from self-identified evangelical Christians than any president in history — including George W. Bush, who himself was a self-identified evangelical Christian. And if these people believe that God is everywhere, how do they think He might feel about Trump’s petty mean-spiritedness? That’s what it comes down to for me — I understand that negative polarization has reached hazardous levels in this country, to the extent that a good many people see their political opponents as honest-to-God [so to speak] enemies of America. You can excuse quite a lot when you believe the other side is a literal threat to the country. But it mostly just leads to people behaving in pretty gross ways. Far be it for me to dictate to anyone else how to embody their professed faith, I’ll just say that I don’t sense “the movement of the spirit,” as they say, in the type of person that mocks neurological conditions. But maybe that’s just because the air is so thin up here, upon my high horse.
Oh I’ll Answer This Short Survey Alright
No second item today because I was on the line with Google support for three hours last night trying to troubleshoot one of my Google Home products that had stopped working.
I’m fairly tech-savvy, so if I’m contacting support it’s because I’ve exhausted all of the Tier I troubleshooting procedures. But I was deleting and reinstalling apps, factory-resetting multiple pieces of hardware, sending them various error codes, sharing my phone screen to verify that I was following the steps in the right order — and then three hours in I realize the Help Desk guy didn’t have the nuance to explain that I was holding down the button for too long in one of the steps. Wasted an entire night when it could’ve been solved by saying “let go when it goes beep-beep, if it goes beep-beep-beep, that’s too many beeps.”
I was so angry I might started using Edge and Bing just out of spite.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: [I forgot to give one, but it was taxonomy]
Clue: Kangaroos belong to the taxonomical family macropodidae, which include marsupials with this body feature.
Large Feet
Today’s clue:
Category: Literary Characters
Clue: Col. Sebastian Moran was the evil sidekick of this Sherlock Holmes nemesis.
Dispatches from the Homefront
We thought our dryer needed its vent tube cleaned, and since it’s a tight space and our older daughter is in that phase where she always wants to help, we dropped her behind the dryer with the business end of the vacuum cleaner. Turns out that wasn’t the problem — I later looked up the serial number and learned the damn thing was almost enough enough to drive — but she seemed to enjoy herself. So much so that she told our dog trainer the next day “Daddy put me behind the dryer to clean it!”
…well now hang on, there’s some important context to that…