Trump's Win. The Pub Theory

Daughter number 2, who is delighted with Trump’s win, has been hugely entertained by the various meltdown videos that have been posted about the return of The Orange Cthulhu™. She told me of one video in which an upset black woman is crying, saying “I don’t want to go to sleep. I might wake up a motherfucking slave”.

Before the election we even saw mad matron Whoopsie Goldberg having a bit of a moment. I don’t know what comments of Trump she is referencing but she’s worried about black women in mixed marriages/partnerships.

I’m not sure I would entirely agree with Whoopsie’s understanding of what constitutes “out there”, but she’s definitely getting a bit worked up about it all.

But how can one really dislike someone who gave us this (3m 49s)?

Sister Act is a great, fun, movie and to top it all, it even has the wonderful Maggie Smith. The View, however, isn’t quite such an entertaining and elevating sister act.

These are just two examples of responses to Trump that, to me at least, have every appearance of being completely unhinged. By now we’ve all seen thousands of such responses over the years.

Now, Trump is either some great slithering orange monster from the lowest bowel of Hell with a touch of Hannibal Lecter on his days off, or these women have gotten something just a tad wrong.

Do they really believe what they are saying?

I don’t know - probably, maybe, who knows? I can only hope for their own sakes and for the sake of their sanity, they do not really believe it.

I have a theory. I’m no psychologist or even a particularly insightful person when it comes to understanding the behaviours of other humans. I’m not even all that good at understanding myself at times, but there is, I think, at least a thread which might be worth yanking at a bit to see what unravels.

You go to the pub with your mates. What happens? There’s often a good deal of bawdiness and ribaldry, lots of laughter, some heated debate, a great deal of piss-taking of everything and each other, and maybe one or two serious moments in between.

This is how I view Trump. He’s like your mate at the pub - the one who just opens his gob and all this stuff tumbles out. It’s fun, irreverent, entertaining, and it has a bite. But you know he doesn’t really mean everything he says and that in more serious moments his actual views are a good deal more nuanced and thoughtful.

Whether or not you think this is appropriate behaviour for a President is another question entirely.

But that’s what I think Trump does - he plays to an audience. He has some fun, and he’s not afraid at having a bit of a poke at some sacred cows. Catch him in private and I’ll bet you he’s really quite different. Not in his fundamental beliefs about what’s right and wrong, but in the way he’ll approach those topics.

I might be wrong in all that, but that’s why I don’t get too worked up about some of Trump’s public statements.

Now, what’s one of the main driving forces behind woke? At least the NPC version of ‘woke’ and not the calculating weaponization of it to bring about the downfall of ‘capitalism’ and install some largely unspecified Utopia in its place.

We can sum it up as “you mustn’t upset someone” and particularly not those who have been marginalized into the great box of marginalization demanded by the woke view of the world.

What has been the result of these years of endless micro-analysis of what we say? This endless poring over the details, the literal meanings, this obsessive hunt for offence?

I would maintain it has constrained everything and inculcated an attitude of over-seriousness into everything. There is a reason why it is a meme that the ‘left’ can’t meme. The more ideologically possessed you are, the less likely you’d be someone who’d be fun to be with at the pub.

I think that’s what we’re seeing (to some extent). A whole swathe of people have been conditioned by years of this woke shite to routinely check every thought and utterance for things like privilege, racism, whiteness, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, ableism, colonialism, white supremacy - oh fuck, the list just goes on and on and on and fucking on.

It’s so tiresome and such a joyless way to live one’s life.

So, when someone like Trump comes along and talks to you like he’s your mate in a bar, there’s a real visceral reaction because they don’t understand that’s what he’s doing. They can’t understand it because they’re stuck in this po-faced sanctimonious straitjacket that they’ve allowed themselves to be conditioned into.

There’s no forgiveness, no flexibility, no spirit of compassion for the ‘offender’, no attempt to ‘get behind’ the rhetoric. It’s an utterly demeaning and mean-spirited way to live that seeks to place people as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and not see them as the often wonderful, sometimes flawed, individuals that they are.

We are all a mix of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

We’re beginning to see the post-election analysis and some of it is, as expected, blaming over half of the American people for being some combination of racist, misogynist, low-intellect, white supremacist low-lifes. I don’t think they ever read the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.

In many ways I think the election result is, at least partly, a kind of push-back against this stultifying atmosphere we’ve been forced to endure over the last few years. It’s a whole bunch of people wanting to get back to a time when they could have fun at the pub.

That’s just my theory. I might try it out at the pub later on and see what reaction I get.