The whole fucking world is made up of con men and their marks. Everyone is someone else's sucker and American history in my lifetime has been made up of rotten motherfuckers using up someone else to get ahead or be cooler than thou. It's so fucking tiring. I just poured my guts out that I felt betrayed by Thomas Frank in all his work during this campaign season, tearing down the Democratic Party and helping open the door for fascism. Do you know what it's like to be on the front line under fire while the coddled officers kick back in the rear. Who fucking cares? Nobody. Frank has apparently spent too much time away from the front. After you realize nobody gives a warm squirt of piss about you except your mother and your buddy in the foxhole with you, you are liberated. It's no longer a question of the glorious cause we're fighting for. You push forward when it's time to attack because YOU FUCKING HATE THE OTHER GUYS! You know a word that didn't get mentioned in Listen, Liberal? Extremism. The right-wing variety. The kind that are running the show now. Blue falcons get themselves 'fragged when the shit hits the fan! The guys that couldn't be bothered to show up when it counted ought to be the ones on the front line now because I give up.
Let's backtrack. I wanted to put up my impressions of the book and what Frank has done since the election without outside influence. Since I started looking up other reviews of the book I came across one that was very interesting. It's why I started with the everyone is someone else's sucker part. If Thomas Frank abruptly left the good fight to climb on the "Hillary sucks" bandwagon of "cooler than thou" leftist hipsters, then John Halle of an anarchist bi-monthly called Current Affairs was already on that particular wagon to kick him in the nuts. I don't feel sorry for any asshole out there who didn't give 100% to stop the ultimate con man from putting outright fascism in power. However, if these new-age wailers could confine their purity/dick measuring contests out of earshot of those of us who have to live among the "fashies" you know, that would be nice.
What I got from Mr. Halle was that I discovered Thomas Frank too late, he had already hit the "Black album" phase and lost his edge. Apparently what the cool kids do is bash the Democratic Party and it's sellout ways. Once you turn around and pick on the republicans, you know, go on a "voyeuristic tour of carnival freaks and holy rollers from the flyover states, and the sleazy Washington operatives who manipulate their trust," you lose your 'cred with the left hipsters. The way Halle tells the story, Frank was the coolest of the cool when helming the Baffler magazine during the Clinton years and ripping Bubba a new asshole on a regular basis. But then that carnival freak Dubya hit the beltway and it was off to success on the pop charts for Thomas Frank. All of us who worked for a living then got the long knives but Frank became a respectable pundit for What's the matter with Kansas. Celebrity status for one of the cool kids. Hell I had even heard of him then and yeah, reading that book was like listening to the Black album when I was 12, mind-blowing. What Metallica did for angry kids from flyover country, Thomas Frank did for the equivalent young adults first becoming politically aware.
He kept up the act all through the tea party days, I really thought we were fighting on the same team. Or at least could agree that the time to fix that team was after the battle was won. I wanted to see what would happen if a Democrat could succeed another Democrat, we were robbed of that experiment in 2000 but I guess Frank and all the other too cool kids who were now hitting middle age had decided the "only way to fix it is to flush it all away" as brother Maynard once sang.
All that I really know is that I'm sick of getting taken for a ride by those I respected. Trust is a pretty big component of hope. I'm fresh out. Not to mix battle metaphors too much but the reason you send a knight into battle is because they have armor, if they fall then they usually survive. The infantry just get killed. I wanted Hillary Clinton to be that knight, swinging at the extremists and carnival freaks so the rest of us could try and fix things on the grassroots level. Now the flawed Barack Obama, so cozy with the bankers and well-graduated professionals is gone, no one is out front anymore. Hillary will be enjoying a long vacation, she's gonna be glad to be rid of us. We're on our own, cannon fodder, without hope. Nothing to believe in.
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