When The Zone is Already Flooded: Part I

Some years ago,over the course of one night, we lost a car, some furniture and half the books I brought with me when I moved to Springfield.

It was a dark and stormy night.  

Big downpour, but we were used to big rains flooding the street in front of our house, sometimes all the way up to the curb.  So when a neighbor called and said my car was underwater I thought she was exaggerating.  Nope.  The water was halfway up our driveway and my street-parkes car was flooded halfway up the door.  Then I "did a dumb" as we say in my family: as lightning flashing continuously, I charged into the knee-deep water, jumped into my car, miraculously got it started and pulled it as up the driveway as it would go.

But the damage was done.   The electrical systems were soaked, and the insurance people declared it a total loss. 

On top of that, basements all over the neighborhood, including ours were flooding because the water had no place else to go except back up the drains.  It turned out that a sewer pipe had collapsed a block away, and most drains in most of the basements in our neighborhood had no cutoff valves.  And that was the worst part: knowing that the water in the street and in our homes was just going to go right on doing what water does until the rain stopped.  That there was nothing we could do to stop it.

Which brings me to this article from the Bloomington–Normal Pantagraph (h/t Steve) entitled:

The brand is so toxic': Democrats fear extinction in rural America.

It's about how Hating The Left has become so much the default setting in much of rural America that..

Some Democrats here in rural Pennsylvania are afraid to tell you they're Democrats.

The party's brand is so toxic in the small towns 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that some liberals have removed bumper stickers and yard signs and refuse to acknowledge their party affiliation publicly. These Democrats are used to being outnumbered by the local Republican majority, but as their numbers continue to dwindle, the few that remain are feeling increasingly isolated and unwelcome in their own communities.

"The hatred for Democrats is just unbelievable," said Tim Holohan, an accountant based in rural McKean County who recently encouraged his daughter to get rid of a pro-Joe Biden bumper sticker. "I feel like we're on the run."

The climate across rural Pennsylvania is symptomatic of a larger political problem threatening the Democratic Party ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Beyond losing votes in virtually every election since 2008, Democrats have been effectively ostracized from many parts of rural America, leaving party leaders with few options to reverse a cultural trend that is redefining the nation's political landscape.

There are Democrats who are trying to push back against this mudslide of rage and paranoia, but it's an incredibly daunting task that's only getting harder: 

[Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is now running for the Senate] described himself as a champion for "the forgotten, the marginalized and the left-behind places" as he addressed roughly 100 people inside a bingo hall in McKean County, a place Trump carried with 72% of the vote in 2020.

"These are the kind of places that matter just as much as any other place," Fetterman said as the crowd cheered.

...

Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, who recently announced he would not seek reelection to Congress this fall, warns that the party is facing extinction in small-town America. "It's hard to sink lower than we are right now. You're almost automatically a pariah in rural areas if you have a D after your name," Cooper told The Associated Press.

So how did this happen?  Let's ask Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota is now heading the One Country Project, which is focused on engaging rural voters (emphasis added)

She criticized her party's go-to strategy for reaching rural voters: focusing on farmers and vowing to improve high-speed internet. At the same time, she said Democrats are hurting themselves by not speaking out more forcefully against far-left positions that alienate rural voters, such as the push to "defund the police."

And this is where we have to tap the brakes, coast to a stop and ask ourselves whether a handful of activist shouting "Defund the Police" is the problem or just a symptom of the problem.  Because as a proud Liberal living in the Middle of Middle America, I am dead sure that a substantial number of these "people of the land" --

-- who believe that defunding the police is part of the Democratic Party platform also believed that Hillary Clinton ate babies, that Barack Obama was a Secret Kenyan Communist, that the Affordable Care Act had secret provisions for murdering their sainted grannies, that COVID is a hoax, that Bill Clinton was a drug dealer who had Vince Foster assassinated, that Fred Hampton shot first and that the wrong side won The War of Northern Aggression.

So since we know for a fact that the Right always has another round of hysteria-inducing bullshit loaded up and ready-to-fire --

-- whenever the latest barrage of lies begins to fade --

 Jesse Watters spins facts beyond recognition with claims Hillary Clinton paid to hack, frame Trump

-- the real question is not, "Why aren't Democrats speaking out more forcefully against far-left positions?" 

The real question is, "Why do these same meatheads continue to fall for such arrant bullshit year after year after year?"

And wouldn't you know it, the Pantagraph answers that exact question in the very next paragraph (emphasis added):

 

While only a handful of Democrats in Congress support stripping such money from police departments, for example, conservative media popular in rural communities — particularly Fox News — amplifies such positions.

 So perhaps the real headline of this story should be?

Inbred Rural Halfwits Continue To Believe Whatever Tucker Carlson Shits Into Their Skulls 

Ah well.  Let us return now to Senator Heitkamp, and pay special attention to the language she uses to both absolve the aforementioned inbred rural halfwits for any responsibility for what they say and do and think, and handwave away the blunt fact Republicans have a multi-billion dollar delivery system through which they can deliver their poison into the homes of the aforementioned inbred rural halfwits and Democrats have nothing remotely similar with which to deliver an antidote: 

"We're letting Republicans use the language of the far left to define the Democratic Party, and we can't do that," Heitkamp said. "The trend lines in rural America are very, very bad. ... Now, the brand is so toxic that people who are Democrats, the ones left, aren't fighting for the party."

By saying "We're letting Republicans use the language of the far left..." Senator Heitkamp is implying that Republicans are our pets or our naughty children.  As if we are ultimately responsible for the madness that Fox News is sowing, and that rural voters continuing to gobble up. That these people have no agency, and that the failure is ours because we didn't train them not to poop on the carpet or  vote for fascists. 

And like an overflowing sewer, the worst part of it is that, while we can clearly identify the source of the problem (it's been an open secret for decades) and we can clearly see the the terrible damage it's doing to our democracy, there is no practical way to stop it.

There is no feasible way to stop Conservative media from feeding their lies to the +70M meatheads who crave them and there appears to be no feasible way to compel the mainstream media to stop normalizing the madness of the Right by continuing to pretend that that Both Sides are somehow equally to blame for the trouble we are in.

It's just us kids.

And the rain shows no signs of letting up anytime soon.

Part II here.

No Half Measures