Ocelot II
Ocelot II's JournalThings aren't just bad; they're *weird.*
I'm old. I've lived through - and remember well - Nixon, Reagan and Bush. They were bad presidents and many members of their administrations were bad; some even went to prison. These administrations were bad because they were dishonest, dumb and dangerous. At various times they lied to the public, implemented domestic and foreign policies that were harmful; some benefited corruptly and personally. But they were regular, normal bad, not weird bad. I couldn't stand Nixon, Reagan and Bush and their various loathsome minions because they were nasty, corrupt, dishonest and harmful, as politicians sometimes are and always have been, from time to time. But I never thought any of them were actually crazy. I never thought what was going on then was weird, the sort of weird that makes you go, How the fuck can this actually be happening?
And none of those administrations and presidents, as bad as they were, caused millions of people to go completely nuts, join a personality cult and start believing demonstrably mad things. Some believed stupid, unprovable things, like Saddam Hussein had WMDs, because they were lied to. But believing that thing was nothing like believing the government puts chemicals in the water that makes people turn gay or that Hillary Clinton was running a child abuse ring from the basement of a pizza parlor. There have always been goofy conspiracy theories but not ones that millions and millions of people actually believed. And TFG himself is a very weird guy, just apart from also being a very bad guy. Maybe it's the effect of social media, but I don't remember a time when bad was also really, really weird. Where did all this pathology come from?
Yup. There's not a damn thing we can do about the Supreme Court right now,
so all the wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of clothing about their revanchist decisions is for naught. None of them will be impeached and it's doubtful that their ethical transgressions will be adequately dealt with. Elect Democrats at all levels and be sure there's one occupying the White House when the two oldest and worst of the not-so-Supremes finally go to their eternal reward. Elect Democratic dogcatchers, park board members, state representatives and senators; some of the most heinous fuckery arises at the local level, where any numpty wearing a beanie with a propeller can get elected to a school board or a city council by claiming that chemtrails and fluoride are polluting their precious bodily fluids and causing children to grow up to be communist drag queens. Best to spray for them while they are still larvae.
Pretty much. It's a lot harder to get away with really obvious racial bigotry any more;
you can't say "N-----" in public and you can't admit to hating Black people or Jews or members of non-white/non-Christian groups in polite company. So they had to find a new, more powerless minority to pick on, and why not LGBTQ people? They're "different" (just being different makes a person a potential target for hate no matter what the difference might be), and there's a sexual component that makes the haters uncomfortable. We can't have that, can we? And just think of the children! If a child reads a book about two boy penguins taking care of a chick, the child might turn out to be gay! If a child figures out that they are more comfortable living as the gender that they weren't born with and dressing accordingly, that's weird and it really means they are pretending to be girls so they can do icky things to the "real" girls in their school's bathrooms. Have I got that right?
What I think is really going on wrt trans-phobia is that RWingers, especially the fake Christians, have a very rigid view of gender (and everything else). You are either male or female, and between the two genders there's a vast chasm of behavior and appearance and roles. But gender is actually pretty fluid, and the hairy he-men of the GOP are horrified to think it might be possible for a person to consider themselves to be different from the God-created gender they were born with. For some reason this is terribly threatening. And drag is really scary because there are people who are actually men with actual penises who are dressing up as women, which is bad because women are weak and inferior and why would a man pretend to be one, even as a night club act? And if they read to children, those children will immediately start wearing false eyelashes and feather boas, and then what?
We're all performing our own drag, aren't we? We dress and behave in the way society expects us to. As a straight cis woman I don't have to wear makeup or earrings but I do because that's what we do. Drag bends expectations and that scares some people.
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