Don’t Blame Me

A local shanty in one of our old, more run-down neighborhoods proudly displays a buttload of ignorance and lack of responsibility in his (I assume) front yard: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for TRUMP.” He also has a cute piece of “art” depicting President Biden as the Wizard of Oz Scarecrow. I guess that’s what passes for humor among the humor-deprived fascists these days. Not enough people falling down stairs, being shot by cops, or suffocating in a pandemic to keep them entertained?

1,000,000 Americans dead from Covid, thanks to this nitwit’s irresponsible politics, but he’s convinced it’s “not my fault” and “you can’t blame me.” They put our political system on the edge of collapse and chaos thanks to Der Orange Führer’s inciting an insurrection and civil unrest among the well-armed right wing crazies and their favorite fake news sources getting their marching orders from Vladimir Putin. Trump’s incompetent handling of the beginning of the pandemic put a spotlight on the supply chain problems, but dependent industries, like automotive and robotics,  began to see delays in semiconductor and chip deliveries a year before that. Trump’s uneducated and unintelligent and barely-employable white power extremists have been set loose to vent their frustrations and demand their entitlements. Police believed they were going to deal out racist violence and corruption, backed by a President who wanted the country to return “to the good old days” when cops had no more responsibility than street thugs. Trump voters blithely ignore their responsibility in creating this national disaster, but they are wrong. We can and we do blame them.

You can’t blame me, sure the killer was my son,
but I didn’t teach him to pull the trigger of the gun.
It’s the killing on his TV screen.
You can’t blame me, it’s those images he’s seen.

“Cookie Jar,” Jack Johnson

This small, semi-rural Minnesota town is like most of rural America, more than half-stupid. 50.3% of my county voted for Trump in 2020 and 54.6% voted for that moron in 2016. If you were a glass-half-full kind of person, you might take some solace from that slim margin and the tiny improvement between 2016 and 2020. I’m not. As my wife says, “Every other person here is a fascist.” 

When half of a population is proudly below average intelligence and education, I think the area is headed downhill with little-to-no chance of improvement. I have immense faith in the power of down-breeding. If, for example, the character proudly posting those two idiot statements in his yard reproduced, I’d bet the offspring are even dumber. It’s not like the odds are good that a substantially more intelligent person would breed with an idiot, even by accident.

From here, it’s hard to see a way back to sanity in the country. Trump and the white power idiots have started a fire that was had to be extinguished with a Civil War the last time something similar happened in North America. We’ve jumped well past “the tipping point of stupid” and, for many, it appears that they can not risk having to admit defeat, incompetence, or anything resembling a personal intellectual failure. They would rather die or live in a authoritarian shit hole than be wrong and drag the rest of us into it with them. As Mark Leibovich described them, “the former president has mainstreamed an authentic collection of cranks, bozos, and racists.” As part of the fatally flawed 2020 census, my area fell out of District 2, which included a bit of the Twin Cities, and was swept into one of the dumbest US congresscritter districts, a solid-red District 1 where all of our Republican candidates are election-results-denying, pro welfare-for-rich-farmers and screw everyone else, under-achieving, uneducated half-wits who are no more capable of contributing anything useful to the state or nation than is their timid Maralardo “fearless leader.” If it weren’t for the Rochester bright spot, District 1 would be a train wreck of dropouts, Proud Boys still living with Mom, single moms on welfare, and “farmers” completely dependent on their federal support checks growing crops no one needs or wants.

We had barely been in our retirement home for a year when most of our neighbors were overwhelmingly and foolishly lead by their noses to vote for Trump in 2016. We’d left an area of St. Paul where 85% of our neighbors were not complete fools. Mrs. Day immediately wanted to pull up stakes and move back to civilization. The fact that almost half of our neighbors were not fascists and fools was not a convincing argument. Outside of Rochester, Minnesota’s District 1 is home to many of the state’s dumbest cities, which is pretty amazing since most of the “cities” in our district are vanishing into ghost towns (under 5,000 population).  Worthington is proudly the state’s undisputed dumbest state for a collection of reasons including the fact that 3 out of 10 residents couldn’t manage to finish high school. As a friend said before the 2016 election, “Half of every population is below average intelligence and half have below average education. They are not the same group and they amount to more than 50% of the population. They are all voting for Trump.” (If they manage to vote at all, that is.)

Like many of the people in Minnesota’s District 2, we’re old. We retired and moved here, which mostly means we moved here to die. Lots of young people are here dying, too. The most common story I hear from people who grew up here is “I moved to the Cities when I graduated and failed miserably there. I moved back in with my parents (usually to “take care of my Mom”) and haven’t left.” 10% of the district live below the poverty line. The district’s average income is about 90% of the state’s average. 80% of the district drives 20 minutes to get to work, mostly in the Cities or Rochester. The district’s property values are about 3/4 of the state average. College graduates are about 80% of the state’s average. The district’s veteran population (poverty draft) is about 10% above the state’s average. If Rochester weren’t in the district and the Twin Cities weren’t in moderate commuting distance, none of those numbers would be anything but dramatically more dismal. In almost every way, Minnesota’s District 2 resembles Lauren Bobert’s Colorado District 3, except they are less educated, poorer, older, and more likely to be veterans and US native-born.

The odds are good that we’ll end up being misrepresented by Brad Finstad (who won the interim election earlier this year against a far more qualified Democratic candidate). In his short time in the House, Finstad has voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, opposed the president’s student loan debt forgiveness plans, . blamed Democrats for inflation and for the spike in crime that began in the middle of Trump’s term. Like most of the current Republican herd, Finstad was anti-Trump until the wind blew in another direction. Other than being a “famous local (small town) baseball player” and a mediocre state Representative and a Trump appointee to the Department of Education, Finstad is what you’d expect from a rural Republican candidate, exceptionally unqualified, uneducated, and uninspiring. Weirdly, Finstad is so uninteresting that even the wingnuts don’t know what to think of him. Of course, they think Tim Pawlenty is “radical left,” so “think” is probably not the right word for describing their garbage spewing.

Whatever happens, I suspect Mrs. Day will become more adamant in her desire to move someplace less stupid and nuts. As a life-long Midwesterner who wishes he wasn’t, it will be a one-sided debate.