“The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece. When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.” -Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values

There’s a lot of ruminating going on, as you would expect, regarding how the hell this country, which put human footsteps on the moon, managed to elect Donald Trump to a second term in office. I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of it in the months and years to come. Already I’m seeing that it was a woman at the head of the democratic ticket, or that democrats are insufficiently willing to throw hated minorities under the bus, which naturally gives republicans an edge among the voters. Some point to the right wing media cocoon. Others that too  many voters simply don’t pay attention. Complaints about billionaire disinformation campaigns are being raised.

I’m sure there is something to all of that. But something more disturbing is developing among researchers who dig deep into the mindset of Trump voters. Yet it’s something we have all seen throughout our lives, and maybe it needs closer looking at, but the frustration factor is so great most of us would rather not even bother with them.

Think of the flat earthers, or the anti-vax nutcases. The ones convinced that the moon landing was faked. That global warming is a hoax. That UFO Aliens are real and walk among us. Every one of us who has had to engage one of these quickly realizes that it’s a mug’s game. Arguing with them is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Good faith is a good starting point with someone, but you are allowed to see that it isn’t there when it isn’t there.

Trump voters are not all kooks, but we are finding out they all seem to have something terribly rotten in common with kooks, which is Facts Be Damned And I Have A Zillion Ways Of Denying Anything You Tell Me. As it turns out, they were not unaware that they were being fed lies by the republicans. They just didn’t care. If anything, they embraced the lies. The lies validated a choice they were always going to make anyway. They were not ignorant of the facts, they are hostile toward the facts. It is not a healthy skepticism, it is a willful rejection of truth.

You can pour a firehose of facts at this particular subset of the human family tree when it comes to their political notions, and not a bit of it will get through to them. They’ll change the subject. They’ll argue beside the point. They’ll throw junk science at you that both they and you know is bogus but as long as it’s something to throw back at you that’s what you get. You will hear the complete catalogue of informal fallacies out of them but not one single solitary acknowledgement of a fact. And the favorite, You Just Disagree With Me But That Doesn’t Make You Right. And yet they are not kooks in the sense that they know the earth isn’t flat and leprechauns aren’t breeding intelligent goats to replace mankind. But they have the same exact response to criticism that kooks do. It isn’t just simply I don’t believe you, it’s I don’t care if what you say is true or not.

The root of it, of course, goes deeper. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said that a bigot’s mind is like an eye; the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes. De Gaulle said that patriotism is where your country comes first, and nationalism is when hating other countries comes first. There are perhaps many poisonous springs from which this effect comes forth. But they all have that mindless hate at the core, and you can tell which of them is worth spending time discussing politics with…or anything else…and which are not, by the way they play this particular game: If you can’t make me change my mind, I win…if you can’t make me admit I’m wrong, I win.

So…I propose an update to the Voight-Kampff test. Let’s call it version two. It’s still about sifting the humans from the look alikes, but without assuming that just because one Is human, that they haven’t discarded, as Jacob Bronowski said, what it is to be human, whenever the facts offended them.

I’m seeing a bunch of posts on BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) lately, from people who are astonished that so many voters, let along politically aware newspapermen, columnists, pudits, just don’t see what’s coming down the road with a second Donald Trump presidency. How can they not see it, people ask, when he’s been making it clear as a bell what he intends to do with power once he gets his hands back on it. It’s reminding baby boomer me, ominously, of how clueless people were said to be in the aftermath of the second world war. 

So many excuses for what happened. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. No one could have seen all that coming. We heard the rumors but we didn’t believe them. Nobody could have predicted that he would actually do everything he said he was going to do in Mein Kampf… 

I remember the documentaries I saw in school. A common thread was that Hitler’s speech had “strange powers” to sway the masses, almost hypnotic, as though that was supposed to excuse the belly flop into the human gutter. No. Just no. Watch the few speeches with english subtitles. He’s a moron. I have read Mein Kampf…granted an english translation and German isn’t easy to map directly to english…but you read it and what you see is a common bar stool bigot who can’t shut up once he gets going. This is no mystical hypnotic orator. What he was, is a street thug, a brawler, an outsider who walked into German culture with its emphasis on formality and process and order and set about trashing everything about polite orderly middle class German society he could. The magic was he had no rules. Just hate. Lots and lots of hate. In the wreckage of post World War One Germany, his act found its audience. And one day Germans awakened to discover there were more thugs among them wanting to trash it all then they’d supposed.

I’m seeing it now. It’s pretty hard to fit Donald Trump into the image of a master orator, but some try. They talk about how Trump is going to take down the cultural elite. That was Hitler’s promise to his thuggish base too. They talk about Trump’s spiritual connection to the common man. Here’s your common man.

The scene is in Mary Renault’s novel “The Charioteer”. The main character, Laurie Odell, a wounded survivor of Dunkirk, has just crossed paths with his schoolboy crush Ralph Lanyon. But time has passed, Laurie is crushing on a hospital orderly, a young Quaker named Andrew, and Lanyon has a boyfriend now…who becomes instantly very jealous of Laurie. We learn later he’d been breaking the lock and reading Lanyon’s diaries. At a small gathering of friends, Lanyon’s boyfriend (oddly nicknamed “Bunny”) spikes Lanyon’s drinks, getting him too drunk to drive Laurie back to the base before curfew. This allows Bunny to get Laurie alone in the car with him, at which point Bunny starts putting the moves on Laurie.

Laurie is furious. As they drive back to the base in silence, this is what’s going through Laurie’s thoughts…

With a cold barren weariness that quenced the dry glow of anger, he thought, What can you do about these people? The terrible thing is, there are such a lot of them. There are so many, they expect to meet each other wherever they go.

Not wicked, he thought, that’s not the word, that’s sentimentality. They are just runts. souls with congenitally short necks and receding brows. They don’t sin in the light of heaven and feel despair: they only throw away lighted cigarettes on the Exmoor, and go on holiday leave the cat to starve, and drive on after accidents without stopping. A wicked man nowadays can set millions of them in motion, and when he’s gone howling mad from looking at his own face, they’ll be marching still with their mouths open and their hands hanging by their knees, on and one and on…

Then he stops himself, thinking of the young Quaker he’s fallen in love with…

No, Andrew wouldn’t like that.

I’m seeing it now. The excuse making for not seeing a common thug for what he is, and all his devoted followers for what they are. All the looking the other way by everyone who should and can know better. All of them taking for granted that he doesn’t mean to do what he has always said he would do.

I wanted to chew a bit on what happened to me yesterday before I wrote about it. But I never felt more alone at a thanksgiving table than I did yesterday. Not my host’s fault though. He worked hard to put out a great thanksgiving table. He’d have sat there and talked my ears off but he was too busy. The others…well…they talked past me, they talked around me, they talked over me. Whenever I opened my mouth to contribute to the conversation someone would immediately start talking over me, and then yank the conversation to a different topic. Fact was I didn’t really know any of them, and they apparently knew each other but not me, although I’d seen some of them at previous gatherings. So that put me on the outside looking in from the start. I tried, but could not break through.

The worst moment came when one of the guests asked to take a group picture of all of us at the table, and the guy sitting next to me quite deliberately put his head in front of mine so my face wouldn’t be in the picture. I had to ask for a second take. What I should have done was get up and leave. But I didn’t want to offend my host, who I’ve known since the BBS days. It was no accident, he knew I was sitting there, he kept crowding my space at the table and I kept having to move away. This is something all us weird outcast kids get to experience over and over. But this was a Thanksgiving table for gay guys who didn’t otherwise have family to be with on that day. I expected some sense of…you know…Family.  

I have never felt more alone at a Thanksgiving table.

Later I saw this post from Father Nathan Monk, who I follow on Facebook…

Some of you had a rough day because you were alone. Others choose to be around family that isn’t supportive because that’s easier than the alternative. There are those of you who had to sit at tables with those who hurt you. Then again, this might be your first holiday alone because you finally stood up for yourself. Maybe you are a seasoned veteran of the Black Sheep Society. Perhaps you’ve long ago found a chosen family and never looked back. You might be the person who has to show up because you are the only one who protects your vulnerable sibling who can’t bring themselves to walk away yet. Whatever your situation is as we step into the holiday season, whether you are alone or surrounded by people who despise you, just know that I love you just the way you are.

No one can replace a family with a status or undo all the pain with a few words; I won’t pretend to have that power. I just hope, that if you’ve snuck behind the tool shed to catch some of Willie Nelson’s breath with your cool cousin, or are hiding in the bathroom for just a moment, that as you look down at your phone after being told, “We said no politics!” because you were responding to the thing your uncle said about abortion but it’s only politics when you take the opposing view so he’s not in trouble for bringing it up, but you are for responding, that when the screen glares brightly as you check out of the hell you are in for just a moment, you look down to these words and know I’m thinking about you, I see you, and I love you.

If you fall into one of those cracks know that you’re not alone. But remember that cultivating chosen family requires digging below the labels that get put on all of us at one time or another. I might be gay for example, but that won’t mean we have anything in common with each other apart from a political battle, and you might even disagree with that.

I would have loved to have had Thanksgiving with my little crew of high school classmates. We have gathered semi regularly, those of us who still live in the area, and it is always a good time. We knew each other from when we were teenagers. Those are good friends to have and keep. I would have loved to have had Thanksgiving with my brother in California, and that part of my family tree out there. I’ll be there for the Christmas and New Year holidays though, so there’s that. A casual post Thanksgiving happy hour with some of my co-workers at Space Telescope would have been lovely. Maybe some other year. Assuming I have a few of those still left to me.

I made myself a nice turkey dinner yesterday, to somehow make up for the miserable one I had on Thanksgiving. Yes, I ate by myself. But it was delicious. I made myself a drink and settled into some fond memories before going to bed. I reckon this is what solitary old men do. Then again, I often did this when I was a young man too.

“Acquainted with the Night”
by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

This is why my art photography is so dire.