Rigged Against Them?

I watched a little of Dave Chappelle’s SNL opening last night (Yeah, I know it’s “Saturday Night Live,” not “Sunday Streaming.”) and his remarks about his poor (not really), dumb (really), Republican-voting, Trump-loving Ohio rube neighbors struck me as totally clueless. I’ve been hearing whining rural and urban underachievers bitch about the “system” that is “rigged against me” since I was a kid 70 years ago. Out of every group of this pitiful group of losers will come several people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and have a whine-free life, blowing the hell out of the “rigged against them” argument.

Genetics are what are rigged against them. Like Larry McMurtry said

“He’s [Trump] is very loved. The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio have never seen somebody like him. He’s what I call an ‘honest liar’. . . That first debate, I’d never seen anything like it. I’d never seen a white male billionaire screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘This whole system is rigged,’ he said. And across the stage was a white woman, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama saying ‘No, it’s not.’” Of course, that is a fairly perverted observation of what happened in that debate and the resulting national argument about electing a con artist and known mobster to national office. “Another con artist,” would be more accurate, since the whole Republican establishment has gone over to the darkest of the dark side.

Chappelle’s political and social analysis is, of course, as goofy as most of Dave’s career of funny over-simplifications. Those “poor white people” in Ohio have seen hundreds of Trump-like “honest liars,” Trump was not only not the first but not even the 1,001^st. They see and hear them every Sunday in their fundamentalist churches and on television where they pour money into the pockets of televangelists in the equally insane and gullible hope that if they can’t make it in this world they’ll make it in the next by following their pennies and dollar bills into heaven. And, of course, Trump was lying (as always) about being a billionaire, but there has never been a shortage of bullshit artist millionaires and Ohio has more than a few of those characters.

But low brows like Chappelle’s neighbors (who “love” him because of his money and tolerate his color) and Dave himself conveniently neglect to mention the reason Republicans hate Hillary Clinton with a passion. She tried and failed (thanks to the people she was trying to help) to start a first step at a national health care system in 1993. She tried to start unravelling the worst part of our rigged system, 60% of US personal bankruptcies are due to medical expenses and a fairly conservative estimate means at least 650,000 medical bankruptcies occur every year which would mean about 18,000,000 personal bankruptcies are due to the Republican effort to squash national healthcare. Currently about 1 out of 6 Americans are carrying significant medical debt.

And they voted for that fucked-up system, repeatedly. You don’t get to bitch about a rigged system when you keep voting for the riggers. Worse, your whining rings false when you fall in love with a con artist who has failed at every business he’s started, even with an $800B head-start in life, left a long trail of ripped off customers, vendors, and business partners (including almost every major bank in the western world), and had an obvious conflict of interest with his Russian “business partners’ and the job of US President. That’s who you think is “telling the truth?”

The problem with Trump’s whining lovers isn’t that the system is rigged against them. The problem is that they are too dumb to know what “rigged” means. Start with this definition from Webster’s, “manipulated or controlled by deceptive or dishonest means." Trump’s fans manipulate themselves and purposely choose the people who obviously lie to them without restraint. When you are in the driver’s seat and you choose to drive off of a cliff, you are not being manipulated or controlled by anything but your own foolishness.