Okay–this is the true story of my first actual moment of political awareness.
FTR, I was an idiot.
Way way back, before dirt, dust, and dinosaurs, Rush Limbaugh was a small time radio talk show host in California, and he did a tour of California colleges including my teeny tiny junior college, Sierra Community.
One day, I was crossing the quad, hopped up on Vivarin, Hostess Cherry Pies, and about two hours of sleep total for the whole day, and there was this asshole pontificating in the quad.
I was trying to make my way around the crowd, when I heard him say, “Ladies, why are you even talking to me? We all know you’re here to get your M.R.S. degrees, leave the talking to the men!”
“Jesus Christ, you asshole, shut the fuck up!” It did not occur to me that this was an actual speaking engagement, or that he was doing this on purpose. He was an asshole. He needed to shut the fuck up. And I needed to get to my next class before I passed out on my feet or had an aneurism. Priorities, people, college students has em.
“Oh, mind your language, little girl,” he condescended, and by this time I was near the front row. (And dammit, I was trying to get PAST all this bullshit!)
“Why, am I going to offend your virgin ears?” I sneered.
“Oh, honey. Don’t talk to me about virginity,” he came back.
And I froze. Deer in the headlights.
“I am a virgin,” I said, a little lost. “Are you?”
And he found something else to talk about, because he really had tried to call me a whore, and I really was a virgin, and he had to find something else to be an assclown about.
I need to remember this, when Drumpf opens his mouth and I want to throat punch him through his uvula and then laugh as he dies in bloody vomit. (Yes, that was a violent image. I’m sorry. I’m really done with politics this week. The whole purpose of the governing body is to NOT let things like the tragedy in Orlando happen, and Drumpf keeps talking about arming teachers. I want to kick him so hard in the balls they pop out of his nose.)
Anyway–back to my point about Rush. Besides being a terrible human being and a poster child for hypocrisy, he should have been my first lesson in what shock-politicians do. They say horrible things to distract you from the knowledge that they have nothing else to say. Nothing of substance. Hitler said, “The only way to win is to hate! Hate! Hate!” Does it mean anything? Well, sure. It means that millions of people are going to die unless this evil is stopped.
Drumpf says–oh hell. Any of the things he’s said in the last three days. Starting with the fact that he can’t seem to get the details of the Orlando shooting right if they walk up, lick his nose and bite him in the balls dangling from his nostrils–and we need to remember real lessons.
Rush couldn’t deal with a real virgin when he’d just called her a whore–because his whole schtick was predicated something that wasn’t real.
Same with Hitler. He couldn’t find a real reason to win, or a real strategy (because a two front war? Dudes.) So he had to shout “Hate hate hate!” until people forgot there wasn’t anything real behind his evil. Just evil. Empty as a black paper sack.
And Drumpf doesn’t really know what he’s doing so basically doing the same thing. “I don’t really hate people, but if you hate them for me, you won’t notice I’m an assclown who can’t remember a fucking fact!”
It seems simple and obvious. But as I finally pushed my way through that crowd and got the fuck out of there to my next class, Rush Limbaugh was saying something nasty about my retreat and how sure, sure I was a virgin, and the crowd laughed. They couldn’t see through him then, and he had a long and industrious career of making women feel like shit about themselves, so the crowd obviously kept on laughing.
Watching politics thirty years later, not much has changed.
