The Triumph of the Yahoos

This is a book.

Recently read a long piece by the chief political analyst for The New York Times. In it he reviews all the data that is finally all in from the last election. I’ll summarize: she would have lost even if everyone who didn’t vote had voted. You know the refrain: “We show up, we win” etc.? All the versions of “Just VOTE!”? Turns out that’s not true anymore. Not this time. We didn’t just lose. He won. Put that the other way ‘round because it is worse, he would have won not despite the numbers but because. Because we chose him. Not just those people, not just the red hats and necks: people of color, white suburban women, Pennsylvanians, Lithuanians and philatelists and dishwashers and Star Bellied Sneetches— you name ‘em, we picked him. Turns out we were wrong this time about the whole “just show up” idea of the liberal majority. Even when we didn’t vote for other Republicans? We voted for him. Even if every registered whatever had shown up? He won. Because we like him. The majority of voters, the majority of Americans genuinely like the vibe. White people mostly, overwhelmingly, but not exclusively plus, you know, Cubans. We dig the WTF of it all. We love Trump. 

Who now?! Who does?! How?! Who could look at him, at this gibbering, yam-tittied, moron and think, “Yeah, gimme some more o’ that! Four more years, daddy!”?

Be honest, you know who.

Not talking about his faithful. Not MAGA, or not just MAGA. This is not just about them, just as this time it isn’t only about the religious right, the isolationists, or the defense hawks. It’s not just about the billionaires and the tax cheats, or that ghastly crowd at Bezos’ rented Venice nuptials, where Popeye the human thumb got hitched to a flotation device.

This isn’t just about the racists, and the fanatics,  or corrupt elites or the power mad or the greedy or the cruel. Like they themselves so cynically say of the poor, the genuinely evil are indeed always with us, but it’s not always about the villains even when it is clearly nothing to do with heroes.

Nope. We know the bad guys here. No secret. They are all black hat, guns blazing, maniacal laughter in front of helpless captives — they are the enemy we know. Right? They hate us, we hate them, supposedly there’s an equilibrium. We support X they support Y. Blah blah blah. As a species we progress and regress. Blah blah blah. Maybe we don’t blow it all up. Fingers crossed. Pendulum swings and balance and the drift of history? Blah blah blah.

No more.

Remember, not just those people this time. The majority, and again by a pretty long chalk.

I know it wasn’t me, or you if you’re reading this, so who was it then?

Who? Who was it? Whose fault is this?

You know. Be honest. Don’t play dumb.

It’s simple. It’s so simple it’s stupid. It’s STUPID, people. 

It is stupid people.

Turns out it is not the economy, not the price of eggs, not those pesky agendas; gay, liberal, reactionary, religious, or the control of the courts or borders or women’s bodies or trans rights. It’s not the failure of the Democratic coalition or the success of conservative media. 

Now admittedly, you listen to Joe Rogan or Theo Von, you are fucking stupid. Not just wrong, ill -informed, or naughty, fucking stupid. Every bit as stupid as your grandma forest-bathing in Fox News, volume all the way up,  24/7. Because who does that?!

You know. Just admit it.

It’s stupid people. 

Stupidity is what’s wrong with us. Who knew?!

Not us, evidently. Or we would rather not say. We were raised better. Maybe that’s the problem. We don’t want to act like that. They go low, we go disdainfully quiet. (That’ll show ‘em. The fascists have always had such an ear for irony.)

And we don’t want to say that word, “stupid.” It ain’t nice. It’s judgmental and archaic and historically misapplied to populations educationally disadvantaged, misdiagnosed, oppressed. Besides, what does it help, calling people a word like that? 

Yes, people make what we consider stupid choices, we make stupid choices. Stupidity is one of the great levelers, yes?

But my oh my, my dears there is a lot of it about these days, isn’t there? So very much more stupidity than is normally expected, wouldn’t you say? And so bold! Shameless. For heaven’s sake it is all over the map, isn’t it? All over the airwaves and the internet, painted and proudly displayed on every available surface from the town square both virtual and real, to brimming over in the White House, and Congress, pouring out of the State Houses, spreading across the lawn, out in these streets, and up the creek. Stupidity in the amen corner, stupidity all over the floor. Right next door, don’t you know. Hell, the call may be coming from inside the house.

Shocking. That’s the word for it. Embarrassing. Like I said, we are all capable, culpable. No wonder we hesitate to call it out. 

But there it is. There they are, are they not? So maybe it’s time to stop calling shovels potentially dangerous if otherwise useful, usually large hand tools for breaking and moving earth, no? Spade-a-spade-time.

Because it turns out there are a lot of stupid people who made this colossally stupid choice willingly, proudly, publicly, and with or without hesitation fucked us all not in any good way.

Margaret Atwood said, “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” The results are in and it is really bad, ain’t it? Yeah.

Kind of a breakthrough. One of those historical pivot points, almost a revolution in stupidity.

I mean here we are, finally moving beyond the traditional definitions of left and right, rural and urban, crossing educational levels, and religious and secular differences, and even — at last — the question of race! Yeah! Because if you didn’t notice, despite the constant stream of regret clips, and profiles of deported Trump voters, and follow-ups on his Arab supports in Detroit, etc., there are stupid humans, stupid Americans of every race, creed, and color. Huzzah!

That’s right, Right. We have finally achieved the fantasy of a colorblind, absolutely equal society — if only in this one complete fucked up way. 

The single most well represented population in the last election, the majority whose will is now being expressed by every shitty, greedy, short-sighted, destructive, arbitrary and false move of this corrupt and venal new regime? The stupid.

You thought they would only arrest the “bad” immigrants? No, you weren’t so much misled as you are just fucking stupid. 

You didn’t think that after they destroy transgender rights that they’d come after marriage equality? Why would you think that? Oh, that’s right, stupid and gay! Could happen to anyone, gurl.

You didn’t think the Trump-rigged majority on the Supreme Court would actually let them dismantle the media, congressional oversight, separation of church and state? What’s left of the Voting Rights Act? Oh I see the problem. You’re fucking stupid.

You didn’t think they’d actually cancel your health coverage and kick your disabled son off Medicaid? That they were only going to go after fraud and cheaters? Yeah, you thought that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary because you’re fucking stupid. 

The federal government was just wasteful and full of lazy bureaucrats and — of, fuck it, you’re just fucking stupid. 

This isn’t an ideological debate. Nobody’s winning here. If you’re posting videos dancing in your flag panties and cheering for ICE, you’re contemptible. If you can’t stop saying you didn’t think it would go so far so fast, well you’re every bit as stupid as those Yahoos. In fact, you’re worse in a way, because we don’t expect much from my people of origin, the rednecks and the dentally challenged, them gals still sporting curly perms and them fellers in bibs. (Look at me. If you’re unfamiliar, bibs, beard, missing teeth… without the glasses I’d pass for a Trump-lovin’ beer-soaked corn hole player, without books, I look just exactly like my fellow Saltine Americans.) 

If you voted for him, you are no better than that hooty trash on TikTok. Simple. Don’t flatter yourselves that your boots and hands are clean. You voted for Trump, you’re trash, you stupid motherfucker. (And yeah, we talk like this everywhere but church and car shows.) Welcome to the Yahoos.

Who are the Yahoos, you ask? Gulliver’s Travels? Jonathan Swift?

Spoiler alert: the Yahoos are us. 

They are not in the cartoons and animation and the adaptations for children, the Yahoos. Lilliput and Brobdingnag — the little people and the large — that’s as far as most adaptations go, as far as most of us remember. Nowhere near the whole story, and the story, remember, isn’t the point, (or shouldn’t be after nine or ten.) Satirist, Swift, not a children’s author. (Remember his suggestion of what to do with all those hungry babies? Eat ‘em. Again, with all the stupidity around, I’d better mention: satire.)

The author didn’t really kick all our asses until after Gulliver goes to Japan. (That’s right, he goes to Japan. Also not in the classic comics I should think.) Swift saves a good part of his shot until we meet the beautiful, articulate, philosophical horses, the Houyhnhnms, and the two-footed beasts who serve and plague them.

Traditionally the illustrators of Swift’s immortal classic have tended not just to the literal but to the frankly racist when it’s come to drawing the Yahoos. When Lemuel Gulliver is confronted by them in the Fourth Book, the Yahoos are naked, hairy, filthy, violent. They fight over shiny stones. They bite.

 So… us. Us, unwashed, uncombed, naked, howling — reality tv us, monster truck rally us, Trump rally us, angry mob, warring, thieving, raping, us — without pants, dentistry, deodorant, shame.

The Yahoos could not provide a greater contrast to the truly noble Houyhnhnms:

“I know not whether it may be worth observing that the Houyhnhnms have no word in their language to express anything that is evil, except what they borrow from the deformities or ill qualities of the Yahoos.”

That’s the point of them, the Yahoos, if anyone’s missed it, that contrast, that supposedly absurd inversion. 

“For who can read of the virtues I have mentioned in the glorious Houyhnhnms, without being ashamed of his own vices, when he considers himself as the reasoning, governing animal of his country?”

Reasoning? Governing? Indeed, not so much anymore. Unfashionable. One might say, un-American, anti-Yahoo.

Swift, an Irish clergyman, had been in the very center of politics, power, and literary London, but when the government he supported fell, he returned to Ireland, an exile in his own country, a bitter, disappointed man. Such he was when he wrote his masterpiece: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. 

It is one of the highest achievements in English comic writing and an absolute abattoir of human pretensions, and nowhere does the bald, bitter Dean of St. Patrick’s wield his wit with deadlier brutality than in his portrait of the Yahoos.

Reminder: us.

And should it still need saying, he knew whereof he wrote: 

“Therefore since money alone was able to perform all these feats, our Yahoos thought they could never have enough of it to spend or to save, as they found themselves inclined from their natural bent either to profusion or avarice. That the rich man enjoyed the fruit of the poor man’s labour, and the latter were a thousand to one in proportion to the former. That the bulk of our people were forced to live miserably, by labouring every day for small wages, to make a few live plentifully.”

And here:

“… they were usually the most ignorant and stupid generation among us, the most despicable in common conversation, avowed enemies to all knowledge and learning; and equally disposed to pervert the general reason of mankind, in every other subject of discourse as in that of their own profession.”

Us. 

Fellow Yahoos, you will I hope forgive me for mixing my satires when I say, while all animals are equal, some are indeed more equal than others, and we are at this moment witnessing yet again the Triumph of the Yahoos.

The worst of us have won, not for want of resistance, but because it would seem too many of us are simply too stupid to notice any difference, or care about consequences, or because we genuinely enjoy being bestial and cruel.

I think it time we stop insisting that somewhere there is some sense of the noble Houyhnhnms in even the most obvious, grubby, ignorant asses all around us; some lingering, redeemable humanity in even the worst Yahoos. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. 

Time though we called a spade a spade, and hit these Yahoos with it right in their smug, ugly faces, at least metaphorically. 

When that pumpkin spice would-be dictator lies and babbles and talks like just exactly the Yahoo he is, time the media and the rest of us stop trying to make sense of his word salads. He’s stupid. He says stupid shit. All there is to it.

My neighbor who thought illegal immigration was just “getting out of hand,” presumably right here in almost perfectly lily white West Seattle? Well, that’s stupid. Shut up, Karl, you’re embarrassing yourself. You sound like a Yahoo.

If you voted for Trump because “something needed to change”? shut the fuck up, Yahoo. You are too stupid to express an opinion in public. Your people, if they aren’t all as fucking stupid as you are, need to take you back inside and keep you there.

Grandma thinks “the transsexuals” are — doesn’t matter what she thinks or why. Shut the fuck up, old Yahoo. Whatever you were going to say was going to be hateful, and stupid. Nobody wants to hear that shit. Sit your old ass down and shut your slack mouth.

Your priest said what?!

Yahoo. Fuck ‘im.

Your Dad said what?

Yahoo. Tell him to shut the fuck up.

That dude said what in your Uber?!

Yahoo. Let him walk.

If this doesn’t seem much of a solution, perhaps it isn’t meant to be. So, what is this? This is a refusal, not self-reflection. Fuck self reflection. Not in a meditative mood. Could be studying the example of better animals, but right now?

I want to bite someone. 

I want to howl. 

Yahooooooooo!!!!!

You