This is all they have

The party of fear talks to us from a kitchen table.

It was only a few minutes into the brunette woman earnestly talking to me through my TV screen when the turn happened. She was smiley and whispery and poised and then her eyes darkened as she took the turn to tell America that everything wasn’t as good as she was describing, and the main reason why it wasn’t that good was because of people coming across the border. Then she went into a graphic description of repeated rape and sexual torture suffered by a woman who had been abducted by Mexican drug cartels. Some people tell me that I have a negative outlook on things and that liberals are generally angry, sad people but if you listen carefully you’ll realize that’s not the case, because we’re not the ones choosing to graphically describe the dirty mattress on which a woman was raped on a Thursday night following a speech by the president of the United States. This is what passes for Republican policy now — glorified snuff camouflaged as good, old fashioned fear-mongering that not only has no basis in the reality of everyday American life but also comes with no succinctly-stated solution other than “deport everyone I don’t like.”

I didn’t plan to write anything about last night and didn’t even watch the first half of the State of the Union because I was playing hockey, which is one of the things I do to get my mind off all this madness and enjoy my life. But even there I can’t seem to escape it. Two weeks back, at the end of a particularly hard-fought game, a guy on the other team who very much does not like my playing style decided to share some words with me as the buzzer sounded. I shared some unkind words back which I probably shouldn’t have but, hey, it’s hockey, and he responded with “Go Trump.” I’m friends with some guys in the league on Facebook so I assume he got the information that I’m a liberal journalist from that locker room intelligence report but it was still weird and jarring to hear someone say that on the ice like it was something that was going to hurt me. It didn’t but that’s beside the point. The point is that politics is everything now, and all politics is national politics because it’s easier to get people riled up about the big things instead of the hard work of governing and solving problems at the local level. It is much easier to raise money by telling people Mexican drug cartels might rape their daughters then to talk about how good of a job you did as a city councilman making sure streets got plowed during a winter snowstorm. And once you’ve decided what team you’re on then everything you do — every decision you make, every item of clothing you wear and sticker you put on your car, every alcoholic beverage you drink, every show you watch, every influencer in your feed and every piece of content you consume — fits into that category of the team you’ve chosen. Many Americans quite literally wear their colors on their sleeves every time they leave the house and are ready, at a moment’s notice, to get down to business by defending their cause or attacking on behalf of it. That’s why, when things got heated on the ice and my opponent was running out of options, he fired what amounts to a slur in America 2024. He told me what side he was on by saying fuck my side: “Go Trump.”

Anyway, I came home and turned on the State of the Union and then watched the Republican response, which consisted of the earnest woman who the party thought would best be positioned to address America from her kitchen table and who, at times, appeared on the verge of tears or rage over what she was describing. The un-subtle context was that all the bad things she was describing could end up at your kitchen table — that means inside your house, dummy — if you aren’t careful, so you better be careful and vote for the people who are going to keep you safe. That means Trump.