Stupid Shit Men Believe

I’m going to skip the preamble this time. You either think men are stupid and are therefore eager to read the rest of this, or you’re already angry at me and hope I die in a fire.

I don’t care. Men are stupid. We really are. We do dumb things, we do stupid things, we do angry things. Just last week two of the richest and most powerful men in the world started slinging insults at each other on social media. Each of them had their own social media, I might add, and you’d think a person powerful enough to have their very own social media site would be above name-calling and insults, but you would be wronger than trickle-down economics. It was like watching full-grown toddlers in a slap fight, if toddlers had nukes, and satellites.

In light of that I think it’s ok to say I’ve seen men do the dumbest shit. I’ve seen men beat each other senseless over imagined insults. I’ve seen men get their asses up in the air over the slightest aggrievance.

A lot of the stupid shit men do is because of our perceived ideas of masculinity. It has to do with what we’ve come to believe. What we have been led to believe, and if you don’t understand the difference in those two sentences, take a moment. Our masculinity problem is because of what we have been led to believe—by pop culture, by marketing, by advertising, by TV and movies and T-shirts, by right-wing media. By all the ways we manage to blow everything out of proportion, capitalism-it, market it, manage it, make everyone in the world aware of it.

On the interwebs we can find thousands of examples of the stupid shit men do, like this Buzzfeed list in which People Are Sharing Stupid Things Men Did To "Prove" Their "Masculinity"

A few quick examples:

"I knew a dude who said 'Oven mitts are for p*ssies,' and then proceeded to grab a hot pizza tray out of the oven bare-handed."

"Refused to say the word 'selfie.' The dude called them 'selfos' because 'selfie' sounded too 'girly.'"

"About three years ago, an idiot that I know thought he was tough enough to stare at the solar eclipse."

And then there’s this, from Republicans. These are actual men who serve actual jobs in our government, who pass laws and decide which way to steer the nation: Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett thinks it’s effeminate to drink out of a straw.

Earlier this week, Burchett spoke with Fox News producer Johnny Belisario in the halls of the Capitol, sounding off on Fox host Jesse Watters’ running list of “rules for men,” which include warnings against behaviors like waving with both hands, waving at all, crossing their legs, not eating soup in public (what you do in the privacy of your own home with broth-based nutrition is between you and your manly god), and, yes, drinking from straws. “In public, or at all,” on this last one, to be clear. As Burchett confirmed to the Emily Post of Machismo, “I don’t drink out of a straw, brother,” Burchett said. “That’s what the women in my house do.”

A straw.

A freaking straw. Not because of the oceans or the environment or single-use plastic.

Because men don’t drink out of straws. Jesus wept, friends, this is masculinity gone amok. We’re off the fucking rails. We’ve lost the thread long ago, and these chucklefucks in charge are all pre-pubescent boys measuring their penises against one another. They’re 8^th grade men looking into the toilet to see who has shit the biggest turd. “Mine is bigger!” one will shout, and preen and prance around.

Fuck, I don’t know what these men are thinking. I really don’t. I’m just trying to make sense of it all.

Let’s look then at a bunch of ways men are stupid. This is not all-inclusive—there are many other ways us men are stupid as well.

I just don’t have that kind of time.

Masculinity

Too many men think locker rooms are masculine. They think muscles are masculine, weights are masculine, athletics is masculine. Football is masculine and drinking beer while watching football is masculine and betting on football is masculine.

UFC is masculine. That’s Ultimate Fighting Championship, for those of you not into the fighting sports, and it’s where two men hug each other on the ground while topless and sweaty.

Crushing your opponent is masculine. Destroying your opponent is masculine. Beating your opponent into submission is very masculine.

And too many men think marketing is masculine. They believe the image of themselves marketing shows them and so they think 4-wheelers and guns and hiking boots and tents are masculine because marketing has told them it is. They think the term military grade means something. They think outdoor equipment should have the word “bear” in the name.

Men think eating meat is masculine, and the more a man eats the more masculine he is. Giant, bloody steaks, harkening back to our hairy forebears. Overgrown hamburgers. Big-ass burritos. Hot dog eating contests in which we pretend gluttony is a sport.

Someone tell me how eating hot dogs is a sport and I’ll eat my computer. I’m tired of manly men, at least the way marketing tells us manly men should be. Where’s the dude getting his toenails painted by his daughters, and not only bearing it with stoic calm, but embracing the role? Picking the shade of pink? I see a dude with young daughters and pink toenails and I see a man who loves his daughters more than any bullshit idea of masculinity. I see a man doing what needs to be done, because daughters.

Can I get a hallelujah from the fathers in the audience?

We need to change the fucking narrative. I’m tired of hearing men say they’d protect their family from anything but won’t protect them from the things that are actually hurting them, and what is hurting them is masculinity. Patriarchy. The belief that we need to protect women from physical harm when the harm is always, always, coming from inside the house. It’s coming from the culture. It’s coming from conservative men who believe women should not have a voice. That men are the head of the household, because men are stronger. More masculine. Richer.

It’s time to educate men. To change the way we view masculinity. I’m tired of grunting, angry men, and I think the world is too. I’m tired of greedy men. Grifters. Liars and thieves and con-men and rapists and assholes who shit on gold toilets.

You know who is masculine? Tim Walz. Tim Walz is masculine. He is. He served honorably in the National Guard. He was a teacher. He advocates for women. He served his city and he served his state and he served his country. He is the type of man I thought we were supposed to be, the type of man I was told to be when I was a little kid in the 70s. Civic duty. Civic pride. Serving and giving back to others, not keeping everything for myself.

Yet Republicans ridiculed him. They mocked his autistic son for being proud of his dad. Read that fucking sentence again. They mocked his autistic son for being proud of his dad.

Republicans also mocked Barack Obama for working in his community. For helping people in his community, they mocked him.

My stepfather was masculine. He fucked up occasionally but tried not to, and he tried to fix it when he did. He didn’t pass blame. He didn’t fuck people over. He taught me that a man kept his word. That a handshake meant a fair deal. That you treated other people like you wanted them to treat you.

That makes me masculine then, writing this in the hopes we can tell a different story in the future. I’m trying to protect my daughters from real threats, not straws or selfies or oven mitts.

I’m trying to protect them from men who look like me.

Mansplaining

My younger daughter gets mansplained to at work. At the gym. At the grocery store.

She gets mansplained to even when the man is wrong in the mansplaining. When the man doesn’t know the answer and still he mansplains.

The man doing the mansplaining, she tells me, is often wrong. She has told me of occasions when the man was wrong but didn’t know it. She he has told me of occasions when the man knew that he was wrong—he acknowledged he did not know the correct answer—and yet still he mansplained.

She tells me this with her eyes slightly opened. Her eyebrows slightly lifted, as if she’s asking a question of me, a man, as to why men do this. She’s wondering what the hell is wrong with men. I can see it in her eyes.

She tells me, at least once a week, about another mansplaining incident. She brings them to me because—you guessed it—I’m the only man she knows who will listen to her, without trying to correct her on all the ways she’s wrong.

Big Trucks with Brass Balls

Everywhere I see men in big trucks. Massive trucks, with high cabs and big bright headlights. Some of them have dual tires. Some of them have a set of brass balls swinging from the trailer hitch.

These men often drive aggressively, unless the truck is a true farm truck, and then the driver is lollygagging around with his arm half out the window, waving at passersby with a farmer nod and a finger raised.

It’s the aggressive ones that annoy me. They often have a “Fuck your Feelings” bumper sticker, and drive that way. They have stickers that say “Warning: Does Not Play Well with Liberals.” That say “White Straight Conservative Christian.” That say “Come and Take Them” or “Molon Labe,” which means the same thing.

I could talk about how all this ties together—money and conquest and self-image and feeling bigger than those around you, how some men will do anything in the world to feel better about themselves. Important. Tough. Isolated and insulated, above it all in the big ole truck. I could say it’s all the same thing. It’s all the same fear, it’s all the same reaction, it’s always the same beginning—a small person trying to make themselves feel more bigly because the world makes us feel small, and unimportant.

I just wish we used less gas while coming to this conclusion.

Men also like fast cars and motorcycles. Maybe there’s something about driving cars in a circle that appeals to their primitive selves.

I don’t know. I just know some men will modify any machine to make it go faster:

Go carts

Four wheelers

Lawn mowers

Boats

Snowmobiles

A reclining chair. I saw this on TV somewhere—some dude made his recliner mobile. He put an ice chest in it so he could drive it down the street drinking beer. He drove it to the bar, then back home. He drove it his friend’s house and all his friends took turns driving it up and down the street.

Still better than a big truck.

Money Makes the Man

When our two daughters were still small enough we could pick them up, my then-wife and I took them to a place called Little Gym where they learned dance routines and gymnastics. For an hour they walked on the balance beam and tumbled to jazz tunes. My wife and I watched through the big window, smiling and waving like goofballs, and afterward we walked a few doors down to a Cici’s pizza because our daughters liked the buffet.

On the day in question we had just finished eating and were standing in line to pay. The Cici’s sat in a strip mall in the middle of the city, and at 6:30pm the place was packed. I didn’t notice the guy in line in front of me take his wallet out. I didn’t notice what he was wearing or if his hair was nice or if his wallet was Italian leather. I didn’t notice shit about this dude or even realize he existed until he thrust his wallet toward me.

“You looking at this?” he said.

“Huh?” I said, articulately.

“You looking at my money?”

He caught my eyes and looked down toward his wallet, which he was holding open, showing me the bills inside. I guessed there were several thousand dollars, all hundreds. His face was pink. His collar was too tight, and the burst capillaries in his cheeks and nose told me he was a secret drinker who started with a whiskey after work and then got really going after the wife went to bed.

“Maybe someday you can have something like this, son.”

I was 32 or 33 at the time. He was maybe 45. Younger than I am now, and certainly old enough to know better than to say dumb shit like that in public.

And what I need rich people to know right now is that none of us are thinking about you until you stand in front of us waving your money in our faces. We are not thinking about you. We are not wondering how you live because we can see it reflected in the times and most of us do not much like what we see. We’d all like a little more pay and a little less bullshit, but what we see in the ultra-rich spaces of the world is just greed, and arrogance.

That dude in the Cici’s wasn’t happy just having his money—he had to show me. He had to interrupt my day—my family time—to act like an arrogant child, the kind who needs everyone to watch him, who throws a temper when he doesn’t get what he wants, who cries when he feels left out, who does whatever he can to consume whatever he can and take whatever he can and who still can’t understand why no one loves him.

There’s a hole inside some people, and they can’t ever fill it. It doesn’t matter how much money they have. How much alcohol they drink or how many drugs they do or how many times they show some unsuspecting citizen their wallet in a Cici’s pizza. It doesn’t matter how many people they rob or how much they rob from them because they’ll always come up empty inside where that hole is. They can shove the entire world in there and it will never be enough.

The truth is I’ve tried it. With drink. With anger. With wanting the world so badly you forget about everyone in it.

Which is why most mornings now I just write my little words in my modest but perfect house. I spend my time working to make things better instead of trying to make them worse. I wake next to the woman I love and we take long aimless walks around our neighborhood in the warm evenings of the world. And while we are walking, or waking, or writing early in the morning, we sometimes look around and realize this is enough—that the work we do and the words we write and the people we love are enough.

This right here, this life, is enough.

The difference is I’m not jealous, or covetous. I want the dude in Cici’s to have that too.

I’ll even help him find it, if he’ll just get his fucking wallet out of my face.

I want a new measure of success, one that doesn’t mean money. I want success to mean how many people you’ve reached. How many you’ve helped, how many you’ve lifted up, how you’ve made the world a better place, not how many houses you own or how big your fucking bank account is.

How sad is it that we measure success by who gathers the most resources? As children we were taught that was being an asshole.

Women Need Protection from Bears

We brushed up against this one earlier but women don’t need protection from bears, or other ferocious creatures. Not crocodiles or sharks or basilisks, although I do remember reading an essay long ago written by a guy whose wife was killed by a bear, so maybe she did need protection, but he was, unfortunately, not able to provide it, which, again, kinda kills the whole protection angle.

Women don’t need protection from tigers or lions or ligers.

They do need protection from rapists and predators and pedophiles, ah but already you begin to see the problem. As I said, we’ve brushed up against it before. We brush up against it all the time without ever really acknowledging it—well, women do, of course, but us men tend to look the other way, because the rapists and predators and pedophiles we’re desperate to protect our women-folk from are men who look just like us.

Most of the predators are men. They are bankers and teachers and preachers. Policemen and soldiers and chefs. Comedians and actors and accountants. Church-goers. Leaders in the community.

And look, I started to give you a bunch of statistics about how many women are sexually assaulted each year, or in their lifetimes, or how many women in college, how many young girls, and sometimes boys, but I shouldn’t have to give you the numbers, and I don’t need to tell you who’s doing the majority of it.

But if you for some reason don’t believe me, if you have, perhaps, been living under Kid Rock, go ask the closest woman in your life how often she scans her surroundings late at night. If she leaves her drink unattended at the bar. If she feels safe walking alone in a city. If she would feel safe broken down on the side of the road anywhere in the world.

No wonder so many women would rather take their chances with a bear.

Men Playing Women’s Sports Is a National Disaster

It’s not. Get a fucking grip. You’re telling me you really care about girl’s slow-pitch softball? About cross country track at Podunk High School in Podunk, Indiana?

I’ll tell you what: name 10 girl athletes.

Ok, name 5.

Well then name 5 girls sports. I’ve given you two.

Let me shout this again from the rooftops: this is a manufactured emergency. It’s a make-believe crisis. It’s a fantasy written by fascists.

It isn’t an emergency. It’s sports. Sports are not emergencies, no matter how badly you want your team to win the Superbowl. Trans people being murdered is an emergency. Who won the big game is not.

Quick lesson: Do you know why people started playing sports in the first place? Have you ever thought about the sense of community and competition sports gives us? How sports are supposed to bring us together? All throughout history men and women have competed against one another. They have come together in the spirit of sport, to celebrate our abilities of movement and speed and agility and dexterity and intelligence and even charisma, all those D&D stats, if you partake of that once-thought-evil tabletop game.

But, in typical American capitalist fashion, we have fucked up sports. We’ve made it about money. About winning at all costs.

And now the oligarchs are using that idea to make you think trans people are somehow “cheating.” They’re appealing to your general ignorance and bigotry to believe that trans people are somehow wrong.

If you need something to be mad about re: sports, might I suggest being mad at how much time and energy and resources we spend on sports in this country, or how much stadiums cost or how much tickets to the stadiums cost, how only the rich can afford to go?

Here’s one: let’s be mad at how many commercials Shaq is in. Look, I like the dude, but get a grip, Shaq. You don’t need to be on TV that much.

Also looking at you, Barkley.

Men having sex is effeminate

I don’t know how to explain that by all definitions of the word, two men pounding each other is the most masculine thing there is. Two hot, sweaty, naked men going at each other, smashing their bodies together is by definition very manly, very masculine, very tough.

The problem comes with who puts what where. See, men in this country have allowed themselves to believe that being submissive is bad. Therefore being penetrated is bad. Not masculine. Effeminate.

They’re conflating masculinity with submissiveness. Sex with subordination. They believe the one on top has the most power, the best position, the strongest alpha drive, or whatever metric they are measuring.

Which shows you, if you think about it, how much they must hate women.

Angry men everywhere

I was getting gas a few months ago when suddenly a man started yelling. He had come out of the gas station with his cell held up to his ear. He was a white guy wearing a trench coat against the cold Kansas wind. I heard him say “Yes.” Then he said “Yes” again. He was nodding his head and smiling and right when I thought he would say “Ok love you bye,” he held the phone in front of his mouth and shouted, veins standing out in his neck, “Then I’ll see you in court, Claire.”

He drew Claire’s name out. “Claaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiirrrrrreeeeee,” he said, trying to load as much anger and derision into the name as he could.

Claire was silent.

“Oh, you don’t have any fucking thing to say now, do you, you fucking cunt?”

Claire did not have anything to say.

“I cannot fucking believe you are doing this fucking shit, Claire,” the man said, voice changing for a second, softening, perhaps to see if Claire still really did want to do this. There was reconciliation in his voice, and the promise to do better.

For a moment I wanted to believe Claire and Trenchcoat Guy would get back together, even though all the evidence told me he was an angry, angry man.

But Claire must not have been thinking of anything except kicking Trenchcoat Guy to the curb. I don’t know what she said, but his voice rose several decibels. “Well then I’m going to take everything you own,” he said.

He was out by the street now, waving his arms as he walked, yelling that he was going to make life miserable for Clllllaaaaaiiiirrrrreeeeeee.

“So help me God,” he said, before I got back in my car. “You won’t have a fucking thing when I’m finished with you.”

---

I was on my way to an event for the Kansas Book Festival. A few weeks before I had done a panel in Topeka, and was heading to the Salina Public Library for a follow-up event with several other authors.

I was promoting my new book, Melt with Me, about the pop culture and Cold War of the 1980s.

The moderator had read all our books, and went around asking us questions.

“How does place play a role in your writing?”

“What are the common themes in your work?”

Late in the event the moderator asked me what parts of my book, which is about the past, speak to the present moment.

My book is about fear. How it gets into us. How we carry it with us, like DNA, through generations. We can feel it collectively, like the air has been fouled, like we’re all breathing something bad, and when I mentioned the atmosphere of the 80s—the Reagan administration’s response to HIV/AIDS, the fears of nuclear annihilation, the rise of the Religious Right and the Moral Majority and their attacks on the LGBTQ community—the audience remembered.

“Like we’re still carrying it around,” I would think, driving home that evening.

---

I don’t know what was going on with Claire. Maybe she really is a cunt, and did some nasty, uncalled for shit to poor Trenchcoat Guy.

But I suspect not. I suspect, from the way the man blamed Claire for all their troubles, that his anger is the real problem. I suspect the way he treats others, the way he sees the world, the way he has allowed anger, and unkindness, to get inside him—that’s the real problem. It always is.

I think about anger often now. How easy it is to find. How so many of us are so angry, so anxious, so afraid someone is going to take something from us that we begin living our lives protectively. Conservatively. How we begin to see others as the problem, when really it’s been us all along, our uncertainties and insecurities.

I left the library late, with a long drive ahead of me. Past Topeka the Kansas landscape turns to empty, rolling hills, and that night the stars were scattered brightly across the sky as I drove home.

I was rolling through a little bump on the road you might call a town when a truck almost hit me. We were coming up on a construction zone, and the truck cut me off to get there first, swerving last-second in front of me, causing me to swerve to keep from getting hit.

It was a big truck, not a semi, but a Ford F-350, the kind with running lights and dual-tires. There were no brass balls, but on one side of the truck’s bumper a sticker depicted three animals: a red elephant, a blue donkey, and a white lamb. The wording said, “I’m voting for the lamb.”

The sticker on the other side said, “Fuck your feelings.”

Conquest

Every locker room I’ve ever been in I’ve heard men bragging of their conquests. In middle school boys lied about everything from how many pieces of pizza they could eat to how many push-ups they could do, a constant measuring and maneuvering for position and power. Maybe it was our changing bodies that made us so competitive, but I’ve never been in a locker room where fights didn’t occur, so maybe it’s just our makeup.

In high school guys lied about how many girls they’d slept with. How many blowjobs they’d received, how many beers they could drink, how fast their shitty farm truck could go.

It gets worse the older we grow. In the business world we talk in terms of war: hostile takeover. Firings and taking flak. We want to make a killing in the market. We try to avoid potential economic minefields. We set our sights on something then lay low until it’s time to attack. Businesses try not to give up without a fight or lose ground. We take no prisoners while avoiding economic casualties.

But men will make anything about war: I’ve already mentioned sex. There’s also sports: our team needs to go all the way. To score. To manhandle the other team. It’s all very manly stuff. Mucho machismo.

Kind of like gay mansex.

Dick pics

I have it on very good authority that most women don’t really like looking at dicks. “They’re not attractive,” Jenn told me one evening when I asked her about the seemingly ubiquitous pee-pee pics roaming around in the wifi world. “They’re not for looking at, really.”

Or maybe she said, “They’re not for looking at. Really.”

Elaine Benes agreed in an episode of Seinfeld:

Jerry: Well, I was walking around naked in front of Melissa the other day—

Elaine: Whoa! Walking around naked? Ahh... that is not a good look for a man.

George: Why not? It's a good look for a woman.

Elaine: Well, the female body is a... work of art. The male body is utilitarian. It's for gettin' around, like a Jeep.

Jerry: So you don't think it's attractive?

Elaine: It's hideous. The hair, the... the lumpiness. It's simian.

George: Well, some women like it.

Elaine: Mmm. Sickies.

She’s right. We’re hairy and stinky and smelly, and penises are the most unattractive part.

So maybe you can send your partner a dp (that’s dick pic, for short) if you’re away from each other for a while and if they agree that they would indeed like to see a dp, but definitely do not send an unsolicited dp ever. To anyone. Just think “Jeep.” Think “not for looking at, really.”

I think men my age have gotten the idea that woman want to see dicks from 80s porn. See, in 80s porn, and, I’m guessing, almost all porn after the 80s, all a man had to do was whip out his schlong and some unfortunate woman, overcome by the power of the penis, would kneel down and suck it.

I’m not saying all men think that way. Or that all men watch porn.

I’m just saying all men who watch porn think that way.

It’s obvious they are not very smart. That’s why they’re sending dick pics.

Dick picks

Men are the head of the household

This is some Old Testament bullshit, but many in the evangelical community still believe that men are the head of the household. They preach it in church. I have heard this preached at me in church. At church camp when I was 12 years old. All through my early teens, those unfortunate years when I fell in with a band of Southern Baptists.

Men are the head of the household, and women better behave, they believed, and you could see it in the way they stood by their man, Tammy Wynette and country music being big in those years.

And look, that’s cool, I guess, if both of you agree to it, but it’s fucking weird to me that a man would not allow his partner—the person he has chosen to love and cherish, forsaking all others—to not be at least partially in charge.

Even besides the fact that you supposedly:

1. Love your woman

2. Respect your woman

I’m still not exactly understanding why you would even want to be the one in charge.

Let me put it this way: of course you should respect women and a relationship should be on equal terms and the Bible was written 2500 years ago and maybe we’ve moved past the beliefs of people who hadn’t even smelted iron and all those obvious arguments, but beyond that I’m still having trouble understanding why men would want to be followed all the time.

Who the hell wants to be in charge? Who wants to be the one everyone calls? The one everyone looks to when times get tough?

Who wants to be the one responsible?

And having to make all the decisions? How fucking awful would it be to have to make all the major decisions? I get exhausted trying to come up with dinner ideas every day. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. I can’t imagine how hard it would be trying to run everyone’s lives. Trying to tell everyone how to run things.

I don’t want to be in charge of shit. Dear Lord baby Jesus if Jennifer wasn’t around I would be lost in the Kansas City Costco, trying to find the high fiber cereal. I would be sitting on the end of a bar stool every day after work. I would be throwing things at the TV during sporting events.

Other options of how I would end without a strong, smart partner by my side, shoring me up and shouldering some of the heavy fucking load of living in a world that really doesn’t give a shit about us:

1. Alcoholic

2. Homeless

3. Dead

4. Prison

Because—and let’s be honest here—I am a mediocre white male. I’m a talking monkey who learned to string a few words together, and that’s it. That’s all I got. I need someone around to even me out. Remind me of shit I’ve forgotten. To tell me that my angers are temporary and love is eternal.

To forgive me when I won’t forgive myself.

To remind me to be kind to the world. That the angers of men can be overcome by a soft touch, a kind word, a calm voice.

I’d be lost without her. And yeah, we miscommunicate sometimes and get on each other’s nerves, but there’s also make-up sex.

And if I was the head of the household, the one in charge, the big kahuna, I‘d have to be on top, doing all the work.

Pic of me and Jenn

Trump

I don’t get it. I just don’t get how men believe Trump. Believe in Trump. I don’t understand how they can listen to him and not see that he’s lying through his big yellow teeth in his big orange mouth.

But I do, because it’s all the things we’ve been talking about. The dick pics. The big trucks. The valuing of money above all else. The belief that men should be in charge and women should be at home, spitting out babies or taking in dick.

It’s the enduring idea that men were told to be in charge by a higher power. It’s the existing structures that allow that line of thought to continue, and flourish even into Christian Nationalism, which is a perversion of Christ’s words and I’ll tell JD Vance that to his smug, couch-fucking face.

Can I get an amen from the orchestra?

Long before Trump ran for president I knew what he was. And this isn’t an attack on the office of the president, nor is it unpatriotic. It’s about character. Integrity. Worldview.

Republicans used to have that, at least a little, before Reagan. Then it all went to hell in a handbasket, starting with the rolling back of corporate tax rates. When they gave their souls up for greed.

And friends I wish I could somehow shout this from the rooftops of the Internet, along with my barbaric yawp—the fight is against the billionaires. The oligarchy. The rich corporations that keep raising the prices of everything so they can make more and more money.

They are the ones ruining the country, taking money from us hard-working Americans, us middle classers, us Midwesterners and Southerners and Easterners and West Coasters—they’re taking more than their fair share. They are taking it all. They want everything, and there is no end to their greed. Musk is already talking about exploiting Mars for the rich to live on.

As I’ve said before, we don’t want much. A little better pay and a little more time to enjoy it. That’s what they don’t want to give us—just a little bit. We just want things to get a little bit better and their answer is more tax breaks for them. Less Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security for us. Kids dying from preventable diseases. Growing wage gaps, more homeless veterans, more dead senior citizens who can no longer afford medications.

“Well, we’re all going to die,” says Senator Ernst of Iowa.

Which brings me back to why I don’t like Trump. Why I don’t want to be ruled by the rich.

Sometime in the 90s—that’s late 1900s for you people who were recently birthed—Trump appeared on one of the late-night talk shows. I think it was Letterman, but I’m not sure. I bet someone can find the clip.

Trump was talking about his first bankruptcy. Or his second. Or his third. I don’t remember. Point is, he told a story about declaring bankruptcy because he was 9 billion in the hole, or maybe it was 90 billion or whatever—it was a giant fucking number of dollars. Maybe it was 900 million. Let’s call it that.

Anyway, Trump has just declared his first or second or third or fourth or fifth bankruptcy, or maybe his sixth, anyway, he has just declared bankruptcy and—this was an actual thing he said—as he came out of some building he previously owned—maybe the one with the gold toilet, or maybe there are more than one gold toilets—as he came out of the building he saw a bum.

His words: “bum.”

Homeless person, sleeping on the street. And he said, Trump this is, Trump says this, as his driver I’m sure was holding the door to his limo for him, as he got in to go to his penthouse suite or his other office building or his golf course, because we all know he rebounded right back, because rich people look out for their own and because businessmen were willing to use Trump to meet their own agendas........

.......and so he got loans none of us would have gotten and deals none of us would have gotten because he had connections none of us have, not even if our house burned down or our baby got cancer or we got cancer or our partner died and our social security ran out.........

Trump says, looking at this homeless guy sleeping on the streets in the cold New York City winters, “That guy has 900 million more dollars than I do.”

I’m sure Trump shit on a gold toilet that night after eating a greasy cheeseburger and this guy was maybe a homeless vet who froze to death or committed suicide.

I don’t know. I just know that a lot of homeless people never recover, while a lot of rich people do.

I know that level of unawareness—of both the suffering of the world and the resources of the rich—does not hold with the values I have. Trump does not hold with the values I have.

That was in the 90s. I’ve seen nothing since to convince me he’s changed.

Nor have the men who follow him.