July 4, 2025: I’m not really into B&D and S&M,* but apparently a large part of the American electorate is. I’m trying to learn, but it’s a long, slow road, having spent most of my life as a Lefty.
Yesterday was one of the darkest days this country has experienced—I’m writing this while looking out the window and noting that the 4 o’clock sky on the Fourth of July is black—thunderstorms are predicted for this evening. It’s too bad we aren’t more primitive and believe in storms as evidence of the gods’ displeasure.
Yesterday was the day that the One Big Beautiful Bull (sorry, Bill) was passed by a cadre of craven Republicans in the House and Senate. The bill essentially kicks millions of poor people off Medicaid and hands the money to the super-rich. There are all sorts of other crap in the bull—sorry, goddammit!—bill, like penalties for renewable energy. That’s right: not just the removal of subsidies for solar and wind (and giving those back to oil, gas, and coal), but actual penalties in the form of tariffs for installing solar panels and windmills.
The earth is burning down and the Republicans start more fires.
Hm! Makes sense.
—I know you’re thinking it doesn’t make sense, but that’s because you haven’t yet had the re-education I have. I read today that “more Medicaid enrollees are voting Republican” (Politico).
Hm! So . . . they vote to have Taco take their health insurance away, so they die.
The only way I can understand this is as an expression of B&D or S&M. They want to suffer—and I guess actually, literally, to die.
The Old Me wouldn’t have believed it—people can’t be that irrational!—I have always protested. But apparently they can. Or—to put it more psychologically—they love to suffer. It’s their pleasure. And I get it—I like sticking picks into my gums from time to time; it hurts so good.
I think my problem in understanding Taco voters relying on Medicaid is one of degree.
Using the bristles of my toothbrush to sort of tenderize the meat of my gums is not at all—at least to my mind—like wanting to die. But it turns out it’s on a spectrum.
So I’ve come around to the Taco-take: Instead of gnashing my teeth at the bill or despairing at the craven Republicans, I now understand the Taco-team actually wants this. I confess I’m like Winston Smith in 1984, when O’Brien is re-educating him into seeing however many fingers he says Smith will see: I’m a bit slow.
But I’m learning. People want to be lied to, betrayed, beaten, denied care, kicked to the street, left to die . . . . I feel like such a beginner. Like the Democrats, I never knew. I just never knew.
The least I can do, as a beginner in this world, is to be humble enough to allow people to be granted their wishes. From now on all the Taco voters who are Vets or the working poor, the uneducated, the down-to-earthers: they will have my quiet honor and respect for having the courage of their convictions. Every one of their deaths I promise to celebrate as the triumph of humans granted their fondest wishes.
*B&D: Bondage and Dominance. S&M: Sadism and Masochism.