I have changed my mind.
I have seen the light.
After years of screaming out Donald Trump, Viceroy of Russian North America, I have learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
In fact, I have not only given up my opposition to Donald Trump, I have decided to endorse his re-election in 2020.
Why?
Because I work in a call center.
I am not going to tell you which center it is, or exactly what it does or the precise details on the calls. Because as much as it can suck, I still need the job. You see, I have “pre-existing conditions” and after 60 days I get medical benefits which I would not get from sucking cocks on Boulder Highway, which is the only other job that I can get with my resume.
The other reason is that most of the time, this call center is not that bad compared to other ones I’ve been at. It’s just that when the calls are bad, they were dredged from the sewer system under the 10th Circle of Hell.
Anybody who has ever worked in a call center knows exactly why Donald Trump won in 2016. Because Donald Trump is the kind of motherfucker who calls a call center. The kind of person who is grateful that I’m a white guy who speaks “American.”
In a lot of these cases it’s a hard guess as to whether the problem is a person who’s been repeatedly stiffed by inattentive staff or a person who had a solvable problem that they have made worse because they couldn’t pick up a clue if you held it in front of them with two hands. But in either case, I get the shit end of it.
And then after nearly two hours of back-to-back-to-back-to-back calls, I can actually feel the muscles in my neck and my eye sockets contracting on themselves, but the queue starts to die down, and I’m starting to relax, and then I get a call from a number I’d seen before – “Hey, James! Remember ME? The worst call you had all day? The guy who raised your blood pressure 100 points expecting you to do the impossible and coming up with every excuse I could to not end the call and prolong your agony? Well, GUESS WHAT? I’m back after 90 minutes and I just talked to another office who told me something completely different so now I’m going to start over at Square One and go over the same harangue I gave you for ANOTHER 25 minutes because I didn’t understand what the fuck you were trying to tell me on the LAST 25 minute call!”
A call, that by the way, would have been about 20 minutes less if I had been given two uninterrupted seconds to explain what the hell was going on with his account.
Why? Why do I get all the difficult people? Because Jesus loves me THAT much, that’s why.
Oh, that’s the other thing, I not only gave up being anti-Trump, I gave up being atheist. I now know that God is real and He is doing miracles for me every day. Because no fucking way could I be under such a sustained, intense and prolonged concentration of screaming bullshit by sheer Goddamn fucking ACCIDENT.
But after about two years of not doing customer phone service, I have to be back in the thick of this, and I remember what it is that turned me off about the Annoying Orange in the first place. My worst callers weren’t all white, they weren’t all Southern, and I have no way of knowing how many of them were conservative, but they all had that attitude of oblivious entitlement. The people who cut you off with “EXCUSE ME” as though they’re being polite and you’re being rude. The attitude that they knew more than you when they really didn’t know jack. The need to spend untrackable amounts of time rambling on over everything yet getting nowhere. Complaining that they had to spend thirty minutes waiting on hold, not considering that maybe that’s because the person ahead of them wanted to waste time for twenty minutes and then complain another ten minutes about having to be on hold, and MAYBE if everyone was a little less piggy the line would move faster. The emotional disconnection from reality, expecting you to have a magic wand and do ten impossible things before breakfast even AFTER they spent 20 minutes explaining – over and over and over and over and over again- that the last five people they talked to couldn’t do the impossible thing either. And even after you’d made it clear to them what the situation was, they WOULD.NOT.GET.OFF. THE.GOD.DAMN.FUCK.ING.PHONE. Instead they would rather rage and whine and scream and cry about the existential unfairness of the universe, which they could do perfectly well by themselves on their OWN time instead of keeping you on the phone while people who could actually be helped were in the queue, because they seem to think the only reason you were born is to be their bartender/Father Confessor/emotional punching bag.
If you’ve dealt with Trumpniks on social media, you know what I’m talking about. And if you’ve seen Republicans at the mic during Congressional committee hearings- you know too.
And just as most of what I hate about Trump is his cult, half of what I hated about Hillary Clinton was hers. The people who normalized a president committing obstruction over an affair, letting him get out scot-free, and had no idea that would ever come back on them. The people who took Hillary’s genuine achievements and made her out to be some kind of Superwoman. They all went, “Oh, look at how BRAVE Hillary was over Benghazi! She had to sit there over eight hours, while a bunch of belligerent rednecks took turns asking Gotcha questions trying to blame her for stuff that wasn’t her fault!” And I was like, “Bitch, please. I work in a CALL CENTER. That’s my FUCKING JOB.”
And if I could, I would ask Hillary Clinton, could you put up with that treatment from Republicans, eight hours a day, every day, for at least two years, AND only get paid ten dollars an hour? Could you put up with that progressive, building level of stress AND the stress of not knowing if you could stretch to the next payday? And if that question was answered, I would then ask Hillary, now do you understand why you lost? Because that’s the kind of job that Democrats were citing as an example of “economic recovery.”
The problem, two years after The Election, is that things are not getting any better under Trump, and for a lot of people – especially his “base” – they’re getting worse.
But this goes beyond just one guy, however much Trump thinks that he is the center of existence. This is deeper. Existential. What it comes down to is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that the vast majority of humans are not actually human beings. We are a species of balding apes that were somehow trained to wear polyester suits and use smartphones, and it seems that our technological and emotional sophistication does not go beyond that. And the pressure of having to live in a civilization designed by smarter people is slowly but surely driving us fucking MAD. I mean really, half the reason Trump won is because a critical part of the population got sick of being on hold and hearing “para español, oprime’ el numero dos.”
We can’t handle all this stuff. We can’t handle all these options. We don’t have time to catch up on all the Netflix shows. All our emails. We don’t have time for all the automated “conveniences” that are supposed to speed things up and make things easier but just add up time and stress because that ends up meaning that you have more things to do. I sometimes think we would be better off letting the bad guys win. Let the bullies, bigots and morons stomp all over the wonders of 21st Century civilization and bring us to a new age of barbarism. Kill this increasingly inconvenient culture of “convenience.” Go back to houses made of sticks and stones because we as a species are clearly too primitive and emotional to live in a world made by better people.
If there is such a thing as a “collective soul,” then that soul, at least in America, is sick unto death. Put bluntly, Americans want a Zombie Apocalypse. We want a mass die-off and technological collapse to bring us back to basics. But since zombies are scientifically impossible, voting Republican is the next best thing to get us to Doomsday.
Because it’s not like they aren’t doing their best.
Not even counting… all this… but if you believe Democrats – and objectively speaking, I’m not sure why you would – the clock is ticking on global climate change.
And the main thing getting the way of their “Green New Deal” is the Republican Party, of which Donald Trump is only a part. Why? Because either they’re in the tank for fossil fuel companies, or as Good Christians (TM) they think that Man is the steward of the Earth and not just a renter, and in any case, Jesus is going to come back and make everything cool.
Now, whenever I see some Chicken Little liberal tell us that the world will be destroyed if we don’t go whole-hog on the socialist agenda, I just remember the soothing words of George Carlin:
So that would be my message for today. Don’t just re-elect Trump. Re-elect the Republican House majority. Make Trump God-Emperor and the tenth Supreme Court Justice. Just get it all over with.
In fact, if the Republican Party is interested, I even have a slogan picked out for them:
Vote Republican – Because This Species Can’t Die Fast Enough