The title of this post is a little misleading because Magic Ruralism never really went
away. In case you are unfamiliar, here's my definition from 2018:
Noun: a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of political fantasy.
Back in 2018 when I conjured up the term, I figured once Trump had been driven
from office in, say, 2020, the genre would wither and be replaced with by...
... a new genre of fiction which I predict will breathlessly cover the rise of "The Radical Civility Movement" (tm) -- a brand-new, Middle American, grass-roots, sensible Centrist Party-over-Country thingie which will be massively well-finance and composed entirely of Always-Wrong Beltway Conservatives like Bill Kristol, Joe Scarborough, David Brooks, Matthew Dowd and millions of "Independents" who will swear to God they have never even heard of Donald Trump no matter what their lawn signs and Facebook pages say.
I'm still going to give myself a B- for that.
My prediction hinged on my belief that the legacy media's fascination
with the mewlings of MAGA bigots and imbeciles would have dried up had Trump
been dealt with as he should have been dealt with: impeached, removed
from office, barred from ever running again and prosecuted.
But Running Dog
Republicans wouldn't have it. Instead they did the thing every jump-scare
movie ever made taught us all not to do: never walk away from the monster thinking
it's finally dead and buried without checking to be absolutely positive.
Because sure as shit...
And because it all went down the way it did instead of the way it shoulda, and because now MAGA trolls and orcs and hobgoblins are in control of every branch of the federal government, the accursed genre of Magic Ruralism is back.
The "Ohio diner" is once again on the front face of the Opinion section of The New York Times.
These 11 Republican Trump Voters Love the Venezuela Action, but Greenland …
Note: Given all the time and effort we put into putting together every episode of the Professional Left podcast, it occurs to me that it is madness just to let our show notes disappear into the ether. From time to time, why not use all the stuff we'd already researched and structured into a long for audio essay and reuse it for a... long form written essay! I know. I can be kind of slow.
Anyway, the word of the day today is “effective”. Read it, learn it, use it in a
sentence!
So let’s talk about what it means to be “effective”.
First, you gotta figure out what is it you want to accomplish? So let’s
start there, armed with the foreknowledge the place we'll inevitably end up
will not be as satisfying as you would like. But we’ll have some
rueful laughs along the way.
What does "effective" mean? And as long as we’re doing this, lets also
ask what its antonym, “ineffective”. mean?
Here's an example of "ineffective" from 20 years ago. From
The New York Times,
March 31, 2005:
Editor Hit With Pie
William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and former chief of staff
to Vice President Dan Quayle, was splattered by a pie thrown by a student
during a speech on Tuesday about foreign policy at Earlham College.
Members of the audience jeered the student, then applauded as Mr. Kristol
wiped the pie from his face and said, "Just let me finish this
point."
The pie incident went on to make headlines in the
Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, NPR and
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Was it satisfying to the person who threw the pie? Definitely. Was
it satisfying those of us who loathe Kristol? Sure. A little bit.
But did pie-ing Bill Kristol 20 years ago slow down the Iraq War or derail his
career or undo the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush? No. Like
Haldeman in the early days of Watergate, when Woodward and Bernstein screwed up, it actually ended up making him
more sympathetic to his audience.
That was ineffective!
Did you know that Rupert Murdoch got hit in the face with a pie in July
2011? It's true, and yet Fox News remains. Westboro Baptist Church’s
hatemongering scumbag Fred Phelps took one in the face in May, 2003.
Phyllis Schlafly, April 1977. Tom Friedman, April 2008.
Milton Friedman, October 1998. Ann Coulter, but she ducked in
time. Bill Buckley. Anita Bryant. Dozens of others.
You might also remember that on May 17, 2011, Nick Espinosa threw a box of
glitter over Gingrich and his wife, Callista, at a book-signing event in
Minneapolis. Espinosa, a gay rights activist, shouted, "Feel the
rainbow, Newt! Stop the hate! Stop anti-gay politics!". And yet,
Gingrich abides.
Remember David Vitter? The senator from Louisiana who may or may not
have had a thing about diapers?
At Netroots Nation there was a movement afoot to send dirty diapers or
something to Vitter which got eyerolls from professional comedians, who went
on to explain why this was a dumb idea.
Do you remember the consistent refrain from the Mark Rylance character in
Bridge of Spies? Every time Tom Hanks asked him why he wasn't alarmed or
afraid he replied,
"Would it help?"
Good question. And if you are interested in saving our democracy, this
is the question you should always be asking yourself: Will what I plan
to do help? Will it be "effective"? So let's move on to defining
what "effective" looks like within the context of what we want to have
happen.
Here's an example of something that worked. That was effective. The
grapefruit ladies of Ireland.
During the Civil Rights movement, in places like Birmingham and Selma, the
mere fact of the stark contrast between the protesters' peaceful discipline
and the violent, segregationist thugs with police dogs and fire hoses was
not enough to force the system to change. It was the fact that it made the national news. That people outside the Jim Crow South got an unsparing first-hand
look at how the South really was. This shocked the public and
helped build the political pressure needed for the federal government to take
action.
The difference between then and now is that thugs with jackboots and tear gas
are there because the White House put them there. The difference between
then and now is that the president of the United States is orchestrating and
applauding state violence, shopping for a race riot, not trying to stop it.
In our bones we know this is all horribly wrong, because in our bones we know
what "fairness" should look like. It's all over our popular
culture. Jack Reacher. Justified. The Black List.
Hell, Superman. Ideally, when we are treated unfairly, we as
Americans believe we should have recourse to someone, somewhere who will make
it right. Beat up the bully. Put the crook in prison. Some
higher authority.
We're sure most of you remember that, in June of 1963, the segregationist
governor of Alabama -- George Wallace -- planted himself in the schoolhouse
doorway of the Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to block
two African American students -- Vivian Malone and James Hood -- from
entering
Malone and Hood had done everything by the book -- signed in early at the
courthouse, picked their classes, and filled out their papers. But when it
came time to actually walk into Foster Auditorium and finish registering,
President John Kennedy's folks knew things could get very ugly very quickly,
because Wallace was itching for a confrontation. He was shopping for a
race riot. So Attorney General Bobby Kennedy basically said, fine, let
the asshole put on his little show -- better that he preen for the cameras
than spark a riot. The feds kept the students in the car so it wouldn’t turn
into some ugly face-off between a segregationist governor and two Black
students. They wanted it clear: this was the federal government versus one
stubborn governor, not Black versus white.
So there’s Wallace, literally standing in a schoolhouse door, putting on his
show for the press. Deputy AG Katzenbach steps up with marshals and tells him
to move. Wallace filibusters with some bullshit about states rights, so
Katzenbach calls President Kennedy, and that's when Kennedy finally lost his
patience and federalized the Alabama National Guard.
Hours later, a Guard general ordered Wallace to move. Wallace rants a
bit more, then steps aside. And then, without fanfare, Malone and Hood walk in
and register.
Wallace was the racist thug. Malone and Hood were the victims. And
President Kennedy was the higher authority which could be appealed to for
justice.
In the here-and-now, you may have noticed that there is now a whole cottage
industry of centrist goofs and social media complainers who spend day and
night carping that Democrats are not fighting hard enough, or doing enough, or
swearing enough. But when you push against that even a little bit and
ask what, specifically, should Democrats be doing.
Remember the word of the day? "Effective".
What should Democrats be doing that will be effective? No answer. You get a lot of handwaving about stuff that is
never going to happen or is structurally impossible without a Democrat in the
White House and a supermajority in the Senate. Something something
Citizens United or Fairness Doctrine or pack the Supreme Court or DC
statehood. They just know that, damnit,
somebody oughta do something!
Because in the here-and-now, what we have lost, possibly forever, is a deeply
ingrained, American sense that out there, somewhere, there should be some
corrective mechanism to which we can appeal for justice.
But thanks to all the millions of Republican voters who voted for this, and
the millions more who stayed home or pissed away their vote because voting for
the smart black lady would have made them feel icky, the fascists who
are now in charge are in the process of smashing those corrective mechanisms
or are turning them against the rest of us
Because now, thanks to decades of work and billions of dollars spent building
a relentless Conservative propaganda machine, the whole
Wallace-in-the-schoolhouse-door dynamic is backwards.
Now the racist thug is in the White House, and runs the Congress and the
Supreme Court by proxy. Now state power -- a federalized national guard
and the United States military -- is in the hands of monsters
because Republican voters wanted it that way.
Now the innocent victims are ... anybody Trump and Stephen Miller want to
harass and destroy. Parents snatched off the street.
Innocent kids, zip-tied and dragged off naked in the middle of the
night. FBI agents fired for honoring George Floyd. James Comey
being indicted for ... nothing.
Now the schoolhouse doors are the cities of Portland, Los Angeles and Chicago,
where brave citizens are working hard to try to find ways to block the
fascists who Republicans have put in power.
In case you didn't know it, this dynamic where the whole idea of the
Apocalypse and the End Times originally came from.
Hong tight because we're going to take a quick jump back in time almost 2,200
years. During the 160 BC's. For centuries, the foundation of most Jewish
thought rested on the biblical idea that if Israel obeyed God's covenant, God
would bless them in this world with peace, land, and prosperity.
And while the American Dream elides the presence of God in that equation, the
ideals behind it are remarkably similar: if you work hard and play by the
rules, you will succeed and prosper.
In 200 BC, the Seleucids beat the Egyptians at the Battle of Panium and took
control of Judea, and for 40 years or so things went along fairly
smoothly. Then under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes,
things took a hard right turn.
Antiochus IV decided to make it his mission to suppress and destroy Jewish
religious practices. He installed a pagan altar on the sacred altar of
the Jerusalem Temple and slaughtered pigs there as an intentional insult to
the God of Israel. Circumcision, Sabbath observance, and Torah study
were all outlawed. Mothers who circumcised their sons were
executed, sometimes with their infants killed alongside them. Possession of
Torah scrolls became a capital offense. These weren’t political laws—they were
aimed at erasing Jewish identity.
This all led to what became known as the Maccabean Revolt, which radically
reshaped Jewish thought because it wasn’t just a national uprising. It
was an existential crisis. A spiritual crisis.
Under Seleucid persecutions, the most righteous and faithful suffered the
worst precisely because they were righteous and faithful. So where was God's covenant in all of this? What happens when
God’s people do everything right and are made to suffer for it?
And because these deeply religious people could not give up on the idea that
God existed, that God was just and God honored his contract they ... invented
the idea of the End of History. That at some point in the future God
would intervene in history and clean all this shit up. God became like
the divine cable installer: please be in your homes obeying the law between
the hours of Right Now and Forever, and eventually God’ll show up and get you
all straightened out.
The Jewish sects that you might be familiar with that grew out of this belief
in the End Times were the Pharisees -- with whom Jesus has a huge beef in the
New Testament -- and the Essenes, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. As
part of their End Times theology, they invented the ideas of the resurrection
of the dead, the coming of a Messiah, and the divine judgment of the
wicked.
And psychologically we are right about where the Maccabees were before they
took up arms against the Seleucids.
We might still pray, but as a practical matter we don't look to God to save
our democracy: our democracy has always rested uneasily on the foundation of
"Vox populi, vox Dei". The voice of the people is the voice of
God. And the voice of the people has deserted us, which is why this is a
spiritual crisis and not just a political one.
What are we to do with the fact that, on three separate occasions, nearly half
the people who bothered to show up for elections voted for Donald Trump?
That the first time it wasn't a fluke? That our neighbors and colleagues
are now actively siding against democracy, and have knowingly put the
instruments of government into the hands of fascists and sadists, and
lunatics? That many of those institutions that we supposed would protect
us, are run by cowards and bean counters for whom protecting their corporate
mergers is much more important than protecting democracy.
And very much as it was in 167 BC under the Seleucids, so it is right now
under the Trump regime: those who are the most vocal in speaking up for
democracy and defending our constitution are some of those who are targeted
most aggressively by the regime.
This is White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt
...on September 25, President Donald Trump issued a National Security
Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and
Organized Political Violence,” essentially adding them to an ever-growing
list of what he calls the “enemy within.”
Civil society nonprofits and activists thus join segments of academia, the
legal profession, public health professionals and scientists, and so many
others President Trump sees as his political opponents and critics.
A typical academic year for Mark Bray, an assistant teaching professor of
history at Rutgers University, turned into a nightmare after President
Trump signed an executive order to designate antifa as a terrorist
group.
Soon after the order, conservative activists targeted Bray, who wrote
“Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” and he began to receive death
threats. Once his home address was posted online, he knew it was time to
act.
With the support of Rutgers, Bray and his family fled to Spain, where he
will remain at least through the end of the school year as he fights what
he calls false allegations regarding his beliefs and work...
The further irony is that, on an emotional level, the source of their anger is
very similar to ours. MAGA meatheads believe the system has failed them,
and from their point of view, it has. We also believe the system has
failed us, and from our point of view, it also has. Each side believes
their government has failed to deliver what they wanted it to do, and what
they thought they had been voting for, for decades.
The problem is, our goals are diametrically opposed to one another.
Broadly speaking, we want clean air and clean water for everybody. Good,
safe schools for everybody. Enough to eat for everybody.
Affordable health care for everybody. Affordable housing for
everybody. A decent standard of living for everybody. We want
women to have control over their own bodies.
We want all the things, and all of that horrifies MAGA.
Modernity and change terrify them and have left a lot of them confused and
angry, because they want the 1950s back. They firmly believe their
straight, white, conservative, Christian, male privilege was stolen from them
by George Soros and us dirty, commie Liberals, and they want it back by any
means necessary.
Which is why they are immune to Democrat persuasion. Because while
Democrats keep trying to talk about policies which would materially improve
the lives of the working class and the poor -- as flawed and imperfect as
Democrats may be -- demagogues on the right, who never gave a shit about the
poor or the working class, continue offering their base something much more
emotionally satisfying.
Scapegoats!
Back in 1981, when Reagan told his supporters that their government was the
problem, the Republican Party had already begun its long march down the road
to Donald Trump. To the Republican base, Reagan offered up black and
brown people as the scapegoats for all their fears and troubles.
43 years later, when Democrats were proposing to help the poor and the working
class by doing what used to be bipartisan things like extending the child tax
credit, and more progressive things like offering serious, detailed plans to
lower the cost of housing, Republicans countered with this.
Trump: Can you imagine you're a parent and your son leaves the house and
you say, Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school and your
son comes back with a brutal operation.
pic.twitter.com/ChmwpavFAH
As you can hear, the propaganda is the same. It’s just gotten so much
stupider, because the Republican base has gotten so much stupider.
The Republican base don’t see themselves as villains, and they never
will. They see themselves as patriots, who have been cruelly forced by
decadent Liberal culture to endure gay and interracial couples on commercials
for Tide or Cheerios --
-- or just knowing that out there, somewhere, there is a thing called
“Ru Paul’s Drag Race”.
From their point of view, our mere existence and our insistence on diversity
and tolerance and treating people humanely might as well be Antiochus IV defiling the temple. Monstrous! Intolerable! And,
most importantly, the mystical reason why their lives suck.
Over and
over again, they have been told that we -- you and I -- hijacked their
American dream, drowned it in soy milk, wrapped it in a Rainbow Flag, and
buried it in Benghazi, while Obama and Hillary and Kamala and Joe Biden and
George Soros watched it all on closed-circuit TV and laughed and
laughed. Solar panels and windmills are the graven images of our
blasphemous modern god, and Trump is the anointed one who will smash
them. So through the power of “Vox Populi”, they have raised up their own
god based on a new covenant: a promise to smite their enemies and make
Liberals cry
The problem is that the Right has a 40-year propaganda head-start
on us, which is why we’re stuck in this kind of asymmetrical warfare.
Where, through the power of massive fascist propaganda, Fox News can just make
up a story about how “The Entire Democratic Party Is Giving Away YOUR Health
Care to lazy bums and illegals who are also stealing your job!!!” and have it
turn into something which Democrats are obliged to carefully debunk over and
over again.
It’s the same with the ICE goons who are terrorizing American cities.
All the violence and criminality and thuggery is on one side, but let one
person coldcock some anonymous masked brownshirt beating up a kid and
everyone knows, through the power of massive fascist propaganda,
within the hour the headline from the White House all the way down to your
MAGA neighbor will be “Out of control Antifa terrorists attack innocent police
trying to protect your Freedom and your grade school son’s junk”
To repeat, this is not a Trump problem or a Mike Johnson problem, this is a
voter problem. A Vox Populi problem.
Through lies and conspiracies and direct appeals to racism, homophobia,
xenophobia and some good, old fashioned bribery, Republicans convinced enough
people to hate the imaginary Democratic boogeyman under their bed enough to
install a dictator in the White House. Twice. And so, with
appeals to God not an option, and appeals to the government a lost cause
since, at last, Reagan is right – the government is the problem – the only
alternative left is an appeal to the people.
So, back to the word “effective”
No Kings marches are a good start since it clearly scares the hell out of the
Trump regime. October 18, 2025 was too big to ignore, which is the
point. Record numbers. Millions of peaceful, loud patriots in the streets. Catnip for the media. And the next one will probably be even bigger.
And those patriots in frog and unicorn costumes are also using an excellent
strategy. No one is hitting anyone in the face with a pie.
Instead, the ICE goons and their paymasters are being made to look
ridiculous.
And the devil cannot abide laughter. As Thomas More said, the
devil…that proud spirit… "cannot endure to be mocked".
Also kudos to Nancy Pelosi for wheeling around and going straight
after the blond whore from My Pillow TV. Here’s a pro-tip: do not meet any MAGA person on the ground of their
choosing. Do not accept any premises of their arguments. Instead,
be like Nancy. Tell them to shut up and, for good measure, call them
liars and whores.
Also be prepared to deal with the reality that, at some point, some decent citizen may very well find themselves so shocked and indignant at
the way some ICE thug is treating a child or a senior citizen or a pregnant
woman that they will rise in defense of them against Trump’s gestapo and kick
the that ICE goon's ass.
Be prepared for the fact that some "allies" have so completely internalized the asymmetry of this war that they take it as gospel that all Democrats at all times, everywhere must never lose their
cool no matter how brutally they’re provoked. They believe this so
strongly that they’ll be pissed off at the citizen who aggressively got
between the fascist in the mask and the person the fascist was clubbing,
because now Trump has an excuse to escalate.
I don’t buy that. If none of Trump's dickless Cossacks are ever coldcocked by
a righteous citizen… then fascist propagandists will just make some shit up, just like they’re
making up reasons to murder people on the high seas.
*Noun: a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of political fantasy.
Of course that's not exactly true.
Magic Ruralism never left.
I drafted and then abandoned a post in April of 2021, working title "Magic Ruralism: Epilogue", but before I wasted that time I should have heeded driftglass circa November, 2020 when I posted "Magic Ruralism (tm) is Forever."
What can I say. I contain multitudes.
For those of us who actually live in Middle America and who have been actively yelling for decades about the monster factory the GOP has been building, watching the single-minded obsession with which The New York Times and The Washington Post have been seeking out lumpen Midwest idiots to plumb their depths has been as ludicrous as it has been toxic. To those of us on the Left who live among the meatheads, it has always been perfectly obvious that, to quote Sherlock Holmes from a different context:
It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
Magic Ruralism will never have an epilogue because it will never end.
Noun: a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of political fantasy.
For those of us who actually live in Middle America and who have been actively yelling for decades about the monster factory the GOP has been building, watching the single-minded obsession with which The New York Times and The Washington Post have been seeking out lumpen Midwest idiots to plumb their depths has been as ludicrous as it has been toxic. To those of us on the Left who live among the meatheads, it has always been perfectly obvious that, to quote Sherlock Holmes from a different context:
It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
But for the wealthy city folk who live a million social and economic miles from the actual Middle America the Post and the Times reportage amounts to nothing more or less than thrilling tales of pity and terror taking place far, far away. And as long the mainstream media continues to look upon the Land Beyond The Hudson And Potomac as a land as alien to them as the far side of the Moon, the the genre I call Magic Ruralism will never die.
...just as Thrilling Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly were in the business of cranking out hard-boiled crime genre fiction for the titillation of their readers, so have The New York Times and the Washington Post gone into the business of cranking out True Tales Of Rust-Belt Trump Murricans! for the titillation of their readers.
From a land where The New York Times, can magically turn the misfortune of a meathead Nebraska Republican (in this case, his tractor burned) into a front page story about a mini Reichstag Fire:
He Already Saw the Election as Good vs. Evil. Then His Tractor Burned.
In Nebraska, President Trump’s supporters hope he wins a second term, and that they get four more years of feeling like the country’s leader understands and defends them.
And when our coastal elites have gotten their fill of reading hair-raising stories of "Rubes along the Monongahela" or "The Economically Distressed Madmen of Mercer County" they can cool themselves off by turning the page and wallowing in the latest iteration David Brooks' ongoing opium dream of a Magical Both Siderist Third Party that will wipe every tear from their eyes and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain and no more crazy socialist monsters getting any ideas about making college or health care more affordable and available by, say, raising Mr. Brooks' taxes.
Magic Ruralism (tm) noun: a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of political fantasy.
As I have mentioned before, the Beltway media's hot new genre is something I call Magic Ruralism.
...just as Thrilling Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly were in the business of cranking out hard-boiled crime genre fiction for the titillation of their readers, so have The New York Times and the Washington Post gone into the business of cranking out True Tales Of Rust-Belt Trump Murricans! for the titillation of their readers.
And I wasn't kidding. As someone who probably still has a 1997 paper copy of the Dustbook Guide Little Magazines & Small Presses moldering away in the basement and could, at one time, tell you what the submission policies and pay scale were for every science fiction market from Playboy and Omni (serious money) to the Windycon writer's contest (a gold coin and approbation) I tell you that in all the animal kingdom there is no species that seeks out sustenance and communicates it's location back to the hive more efficiently than hungry writers hustling after a buck.
And that is exactly what is happening at The New York Times.
He’s a G.O.P. Immigration Hard-Liner. So Why Is He Trailing in Trump Country?
The two-story house, painted like an American flag and with a giant Trump lawn sign, was a semifamous roadside attraction in 2016. Hundreds of people detoured an hour outside Pittsburgh to take pictures there, and Donald Trump himself tweeted an image of the “Trump House.”
Writers don't invent markets. If they did, this Liberal blogger would have long ago socked away enough dough buy a sweet little Route 66 motel and convert it into a fully-funded artist and writer colony. No, paying markets remain paying markets only so as long as there are enough people with enough money to make it viable for writers to cast their nets into those waters.
Across the street, three factory workers on a lunch break last week said they had not even heard of Mr. Barletta, who forged his political identity as the mayor of a small city at the other end of the state that he vowed to make “one of the toughest places in the United States” for illegal immigrants. A few blocks down Latrobe Street at the Tin Lizzy Tap Room, Bob Lihan, a retired brewery worker, said that though he thought Mr. Trump was “doing great,” he planned to vote for Mr. Barletta’s Democratic opponent, Senator Bob Casey Jr., in the fall — that is, if he votes at all...
And at this moment, The New York Times and the Washington Post have almost singlehandedly invented a brand-new, paying market for thrilling tales of Economic Anxiety out on the wild frontier.
A tour of Westmoreland County last week found that dozens of Trump supporters there are only vaguely aware of Mr. Barletta.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about, really,” said Fred Tomlinson, a retired machinist.
Of course, for us Liberal inhabitants of Middle America who have been actively yelling for decades about the monster factory the GOP has been building, this is equal parts horrifying and hilarious.
Mr. Porterfield, 58, was having breakfast at Dick’s Diner in Murrysville during a visit home from State College, where he now lives. He recalled an uncle who had lost a steel mill job in the 1970s and wound up working as a short-order cook at Dick’s, the same job he had had as a teenager.
Honestly, if i'd known the Times and the Post were going to invent an entire Magic Ruralism (tm) genre of hair-raising True Tales From Trump Country --
On a hot July evening, a parking lot on Route 22 was filled with American muscle cars of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Barracudas, Mustangs and Thunderbirds in glistening paint jobs sat displayed with their hoods open to show off spotless engines.
-- for the titillation of an elite readership who live a million social miles distance from the Republican madness running amok in my back yard --
The owners sat in camp chairs on the surrounding lawn, in sight of a pro-Barletta billboard across the highway showing an empty suit and saying “Bob Casey: 12 Years of Nothing.”
-- as a freelance writer who lives perpetually on the edge of financial ruin I would have positioned myself better.
Bill Adams, owner of a black 1965 Cobra, said he was unfamiliar with Mr. Barletta, but would vote for him out of support for Mr. Trump, to “keep the good times rolling.”
I'd have gotten myself an agent and, in my Carhart jacket and plumber's jeans from Big "R", taken the New York writer's scene by storm as a savage from the brooding, bitter Interior.
I'd have ensorcelling the Very Serious People With Very Large Checkbooks with tales of Midwestern pity and terror gleaned from eating at D&J Cafe, getting shorn at The Hair of the Dog barbershop and over beers at Boone's Saloon.
QAnon: Meet a real-life believer in the online, pro-Trump conspiracy theory that’s bursting into view
...
The son of a civil engineer for the Navy, Burton grew up all over the country but completed most of his schooling in Southern California. He studied finance at San Diego State University. He liked to sing when he was young.
He said his father, now 88, was a “Southern Democrat,” a supporter of conservative white Democrats in the South, who became a “Reagan Democrat,” part of a massive defection of white voters from the Democratic Party that helped realign the two groupings in the second half of the 20th century.
“I grew up in the glow of the [Ronald] Reagan presidency,” said Burton, who was a registered independent for much of his life but declared himself a Republican 10 or 15 years ago. Part of what accelerated his drift to the right, he said, was the rise of the Clintons’ “corrupt empire,” as he put it, which he said was documented in “Clinton Cash,” a 2015 book by Peter Schweizer, a collaborator of Stephen K. Bannon, who was then head of Breitbart News and later became, briefly, Trump’s chief strategist.
The Clintons, he said, “subverted” Barack Obama, whose presidency, according to QAnon, caused mounting dissatisfaction in the military, where Burton has been led to believe the seed of “Q” was planted.
“Apparently military brass in the Pentagon got sick and tired of it, and they found a candidate that they could discuss everything with,” Burton said. “And apparently they went to Trump and asked Trump to run.”
Hell, at no additional charge I'd have happily pissed in New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger's fireplace to make my legend complete.
