Hispanic Fanatic

I’m taking another holiday break this week, and I will likely not post anything until the new year.

But before I sign off on 2024 (which if we’re being honest, was a pretty sucky year), let me leave you with this fact.

The Voyager spacecrafts are the only man-made objects that have left our solar system. They are hurtling through the interstellar void, destination unknown. 

It’s possible that billions of years from now, after travelling an unfathomable distance, one of the Voyagers may finally encounter an advanced alien civilization. These beings, impossible to imagine, haul in this relic of humanity, which has long ago gone extinct. They marvel at this last remanent of homo sapiens. 

The Voyager spacecraft will be the only proof that humans were ever here.

Or something unforeseen happens way out there, and Voyager plummets into a distant sun, obliterating any proof that people ever existed.

Happy holidays!

America has strange taste in folk heroes. For example, let’s say some random guy shoots a businessman in the back. We might call this first-degree homicide.

Or we might rejoice in this killing because the victim was an oligarch. Hell, we might sell merch that celebrates the assassination. 

Some leftists might call this the first shot in a revolution. Others might find the killer’s smile charming.

And yet others (ok, just about every American) might point out that the victim was emblematic of a diabolical, soul-crushing, life-endangering, shockingly corrupt, highly destructive, and straight-up evil scheme called the health care system.

So I guess that makes it ok to kill him, right?

Of course, it’s a good thing you told me the shooter was a hero. Otherwise, I might think that this nutjob was yet another white guy raised in extreme privilege who encountered some pain in his life and therefore felt entitled to unleash suffering on those he felt were responsible.

I might think how odd it is that a black man who is being a nuisance can get choked to death on the subway, and we say he had it coming. But a good-looking white guy can literally murder someone in the street, and we’re all like, “Hell, yeah!” 

I might think it’s bizarre that we are so inured to gun violence that we shrug at bullets slicing through the air of America’s largest city in broad daylight, with the assumption that “another day, another shooting” has become our national mantra.

Finally, I might think the Trumpian era has so warped everyone’s minds that even liberals are deliriously happy about political violence, and thousands of people revel in murder over social media, and hypocrisy mixed with sociopathic disdain has become a mindset to be admired rather than rejected.

I might think all that, but what do I know?

I’m not even a folk hero.

In the wake of the right-wing takeover of America, we have learned from astute members of the media that voters hate wokeness, despise the Democratic Party, and demand that liberals listen — for just one goddamn minute! — to real Americans and their concerns.

All of this is grimly hilarious, in that these media figures are being paid real-life dollars to hammer out think pieces that regurgitate each other’s lazy ideas and baseless assumptions.

If Kamala Harris had persuaded an additional 1% of the electorate to vote for her, she would have won the popular vote, possibly won the electoral college, and earned the respect of these same pundits who would be praising her for bringing Beyonce on stage instead of snarling that progressives live in blue bubbles.

The fact is that “the overwhelming evidence we have from years of pre-election polling, issue priority surveys, international trends, and focus groups is that the Democrats, like incumbents across the democratic world, lost the trust of voters on the economy, mostly due to inflation.”

The idea that Americans were so enraged by DEI that they voted for Trump is based on “a fictional account of the past, a handful of indefensible analytic leaps, and easily debunked scapegoating.”

Of course, there were definitely Americans who voted for Trump based on his hatred for anyone or anything that doesn’t place the white Christian straight male at the center of the universe, and I will write about those types of voters next week.

But the thesis that the Democrats would have won if only they were more like Republicans is highly suspect. And while I am no expert on campaigning or political strategy, I have to wonder if it is the wisest approach for Democrats to sell out their few remaining principles and become more like the GOP in a futile attempt to convince white blue-collar men to not hate them, when in truth, Harris lost swing voters because of the motherfucking price of eggs and not because trans people can pick their own bathrooms in certain states.

One could argue that Democrats should double down “on what produced such significant political gains for the party,” which are college-educated voters and young people who haven’t completely given up on the future. In fact, given that the last four presidential elections “have gone Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican — which hasn’t happened in America since the late 19th century — maybe they should just wait for an inevitable anti-Trump backlash.”

Yeah, maybe it’s best to chill on throwing the progressive base under the bus, which wouldn’t be the electoral bonanza that the Democratic establishment imagines.

One final thought: Studies have shown that our sense of morality shifts with the seasons. People are more likely to align with conservative ideals during the spring and fall, which is when anxiety levels peak. During these times, people “tend to be more distrustful, more xenophobic and more likely to conform,” all of which are traits of the Trumpian mindset.

So that explains it. We just need to move our elections to July.