Before everything gets all crazy and nobody knows what’s real and what’s not anymore, this is the way I remember it all happening.
George W. Bush was such a stinking rotten President* that America actually elected a Black guy rather than electing another Republican.
This absolutely drove all the latent and blatant racists batshit crazy.
They just could not handle the idea of a Black person being President of the United States. And a lot of them weren’t saying “Black person” either.
Things were never the same after that.
I witnessed it personally, in the break rooms and in public spaces like the grocery store and the post office. More and more of them were watching Fox News religiously, and more and more of them did nothing but sit around all day and bitch about Obama. Day in and day out. The guy could not do anything right. They would swear up and down that it wasn’t because he was Black. Of course that had nothing to do with it. But I have never seen such open disdain and mockery and lack of respect for any other President before that, even though now it has become the norm for both sides.
But anyhow there were so many indignant racists, and so many people who hated Hillary Clinton and didn’t want her to be President either, that Donald Fucking Trump somehow managed to finally get himself elected President of the United States. And then the racists came out of the closet and out of the woodwork, and they went from being batshit crazy with anger and indignation to being even more batshit crazy with vengeance and wrath.
For awhile there it looked like we might actually escape our crazy racist dystopian nightmare atrocity-filled future, but they forgot to put down Old Yeller, and in the end he came back to bite us all in the ass and now America has got the rabies.
Or, another way to look at it for the movie and comic nerds out there is like when Silk Spectre almost got raped by The Comedian in Watchmen, and after getting rescued by her peers felt disappointed so she went back to him later so he could properly finish the job.
In this analogy America is Silk Spectre. You can figure out for yourself who The Comedian is.
I’m not even going to go on beyond that. The trauma is still too fresh. Not to mention ongoing.
*Who now, like Richard Nixon, suddenly doesn’t seem quite so bad in retrospect.
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