When This Blows Over

…The saving grace of the right used to be that it was too stupid to rule.
Politically defeated liberals secretly believed that in a moment of crisis,
the country would have to be turned over to people who didn’t
think hurricanes were punishment for gay sex and weren’t frightened to
enter a room with a topless statue…
…Unfortunately, a growing quantity of opposite-number lunacies – from
a chess site temporarily shut down by YouTube because of its “white
against black” rhetoric, to an art gallery director forced to resign for
saying he would still “collect white artists” – is mostly off-limits. If we
can’t laugh at time is a white supremacist construct,
what can we laugh at?
Republicans were once despised because they were anti-intellectuals and
hopeless neurotics. Trained to disbelieve in peaceful coexistence with
the liberal enemy, the average Rush Limbaugh fan couldn’t make it
through a dinner without interrogating you about your political
inclinations.
If you tried to laugh it off, that didn’t work; if you tried to engage, what
came back was a list of talking points. When all else failed and you
offered what you thought would be an olive branch of blunt truth, i.e.
“Honestly, I just don’t give that much of a shit,” that was the worst
insult of all, because they thought you were being condescending. (You
were, but that’s beside the point). The defining quality of this personality
was the inability to let things go. Families broke apart over these
situations. It was a serious and tragic thing.
Now that same inconsolable paranoiac comes at you with left politics,
and isn’t content with ruining the odd holiday dinner, blind date, or
shared cab. He or she does this infuriating interrogating at the office, in
school, and in government agencies, in places where you can’t fake a
headache and quietly leave the table…
- Matt Taibbi