MinnesotaSmith
Membership Revoked
Private Site
tsarfat.wordpress.com
From the comments:
Kristen
JANUARY 9, 2021 AT 5:37 PM
"Joe… a state-college educated, late-40-something guy, working for an engineering firm that designs after-market auto parts. Stuck in the bottom rung of middle management, Joe knows he’s far more capable than the incompetent “bitch” to whom he answers. He’s got an overweight wife and two public school educated kids, one with blue hair, the other sporting tats. When he thinks about his future, which he tries not to as it depresses him, he can’t find reason to hope.
There are no big breaks in the offing. No opportunities await him. Society is stacked against him. In an earlier era, he would have had opportunities thrown at him – yes, he’s that capable. But in today’s society, merit matters little. It’s all about the gonads, anti-Christianity, perversion and skin colour.
Every Sunday morning and Wednesday night Joe used to go to a dying Lutheran church. Three or four of the men at church he considered friends, sorta, but he never spoke to them about anything important, just Sunday chit-chat. He didn’t confide to anyone, in fact, even his wife. His Mormon neighbors occasionally invited him to events at their church, but he knew that Mormonism is a “cult” so always refused. Still, he intuited Mormon clannishness – their in-grouped sensibility — and wished his church had a bit more of it. He thought it would be nice to work among “his kind,” to send his feral kids to a school that represented his values and aspirations, to make deals with a proverbial “handshake,” you know, to live the way “real” Americans used to.
It would be nice, he thought, if a friend from church helped him replace the leaky faucet in his daughter’s bathroom – he’d do the same, if someone from church asked for his help. No one ever did.
It would be nice, he also thought, to go to the county park down the street, sit at a picnic table and not be embarrassed by the words carved into it, or the loud Mexican music from a boombox twenty feet away.
Four years ago, while nursing his evening beer, Joe watched a Trump rally on television. Then, he donated twenty dollars to Trump’s campaign – until Trump, he had never given money to any group other than the church, oh yea, he gave money to his wayward brother, but that’s it. The people at Trump rallies … seemed like him. Was he one of them? Was there still an American majority; a moral, silent majority? Where did these people come from anyway? He didn’t meet them at work. At church. In the park. At his kid’s school. But there they were. Millions of them. At a Trump rally.
Trump himself … seemed a bit bizarre: New York City gazillionaire, crude and materialistic, acted more like the Jews that surrounded him than the Protestant he claimed to be. Married three times. Definitely didn’t go to church. There was nothing in Joe’s life that paralleled Trump’s. Once Joe saw a picture of Trump’s house on an online news site and thought it looked like a child’s silly fantasy of wealth, but whatever … Trump seemed to parrot his mind, and he liked the guy. A lot.
Trump had a besieged, outsiderishness attitude, a take-no-prisoners anger toward society, Joe intuitively understood. It was a cry for a better America, when men were men and … well, you know. Trump had it in spades. That attitude. That ****-you attitude toward the pretentious class that kept Joe down. That’s it, he thought. It’s us against them … real Americans against fake, immigrant, anti-God, greedy perverts like Pelosi, the guy on ABC news, his own governor, the principal of his kid’s school, even the new Lutheran pastor assigned to his church by the powers-that-be on Riverside Drive.
It wasn’t about Trump, but about the people that supported Trump. That’s what was missing from his life. Commonality. Community. An extendedness toward others. A sense of solidarity. Oneness. Fraternizing at the Lion’s club, as his grandfather used to do. Church socials that were actually friendly and social, not obligatory. Fairness at work – getting ahead because he worked really hard and was better than the shlubs around him.
What cinched the deal, for Joe, was how Trump’s supporters were on television picking up garbage after the rally. The place was clean. Sparkling clean. Nothing was broken. No vandalizing. No crude language. No pushing ahead in line. And … no trash. This was how America used to be … how it should be, thought Joe. He remembered how, in Cub Scouts, his troop would go into the city and paint over graffiti. In his neighborhood, there had been no graffiti – it was only in dirty cities, those “wholly other” places where bad people slept on benches and gutters, where tiny empty bottles of booze littered streets, and where people didn’t say “hello” or make eye contact. Cities were where Democrats lived. Filthy, sick-minded Democrats.
When he grew up, those filthy Democrats came to HIS suburb, and ruined HIS job, and perverted HIS kid’s school, and put in THEIR man as the pastor of HIS church. Yes, THEY were ruining HIS life.
Only Trump promised to do something about it.
Well, not really. Trump didn’t exactly say he’d restore America to it’s pristine past, but he insinuated it, and everyone at his rallies seemed to think the same thing. They wanted an honest, fair, meritocratic, clean, and Christian America. Put God back in public school. Pray around the dinner table. Block parties. That sorta thing.
Joe had caught both a vision of what he wanted life to be like and who was keeping him from having the life he wanted. He knew his enemy were Democrats. Filthy, ugly, urban, godless, crude, arrogant bigots, all of them. Anti-Christian bigots. The only thing that stood between him and these people was … the church.
So, Joe began to pray. To read his Bible. In a rare moment of familial strength, he told his fat wife and feral kids they’d be going to a new church. From now on, they’d attend a non-denominational, evangelical church, where he met two people who had been at to a Trump rally. A men’s group met on Thursday mornings before work at this church. Joe attended. A women’s group met on Tuesday mornings at 10am, after the kids were dropped off at school. His fat wife attended it. The kids went to Awanas and hated it, but Joe didn’t listen to their whining. They went, too.
Three years later, Trump’s reelection was a done deal, Joe thought. But as he voted, he worried that the electronic machines had been rigged. There was no way to tell. No assurance. Joe didn’t feel good about voting – would those dirty, urban democrats steal the election? Could they? He didn’t know, but as he watched television news, and their portrayal of men like him, he experienced, for the first time, an emotion akin to hatred. Those bastards! Those arrogant, lying bastards! Piles of unearned money, a voice on the television news … they didn’t merit any of this. They were whores. Political whores. They were sucking him dry with regulations, the fake virus (his church met anyway, and Joe was so proud!), and now … a fraudulent election.
Joe knew Trump won. He just knew it.
And he wasn’t going to take it anymore.
My silly story ends here. I suppose you think, Ts, that Joe is just another roided-up idiot patriot. Fair enough. You have your opinion. I have mine. (Yours is wrong.) My make-believe Joe has tasted the sweetness of perceived fairness and honesty and just began to taste the power and joy of civil society, including church. He now knows what he’s missing..
You think he’ll go back to being the old pre-Trump Joe, right? I don’t. I think Joe has been permanently changed by Trump years. For the better, actually. 75 to 90 million Joes out there voted for Trump. (I didn’t vote, btw.) To a man, they feel shafted and lied to. They know the enemy. Can finger it.
Do you really think that the Joes won’t organize, not as white, but as Christians?
Come on,
Really?"