“Why can’t I hate like I used to be able to?”/Image: Licensed Adobe stock, aijiro.
Greetings, Alt-reading lovers!
It’s one of those classic days on the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States of America, overcast and humid, the kind of day that makes you say, “At the very least, if I’m sweating through my clothes, the goddamn sun could be out!” I, of course, as I type this very article, sit in an air-conditioned office, the kind buzzing with the fluorescence of artificial light, humming with the incessant drone of copiers and faxes, and blinking with the desultory and inhuman flash of router-lights. And if you interpret that phrase to mean I don’t like what I do, then you obviously don’t know me, Kaylee MacEnnaKnee, LCSW very well, dear Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW) readers. I’m all about a little person called “me,” and I’d never do something that wasn’t super-gratifying in a guts-and-glory kind of way! I love answering your stupid, moronic questions and always tying the answer to a figure or event in contemporary right-wing politics. It’s nothing less than a nightmare–I mean, dream–come true. And today, in honor of the Spring season, and because I couldn’t find a more specifically, particularly, and Right-Wing-Nut-Job-ally right-wing-query letter that I could use to weave an Alt-advisor tale based on, I offer you a more general, altogether, and overall one. Feast your conserva-peepers on these, the basics of a life-so-Alt!
Related: Join our One Good Thing™ campaign to support Trump’s one-good-thing presidency.
Dear Kaylee,
I feel so down in the Alt-doldrums. I have a really great life, but I’ve lost my right-wing mojo, to use an uncomfortably ethnic phrase. What motivates me as a right-winger? Why did I sign up for this life of dissolute horror? How do I put the spring back in my Alt-step?
Slouching in St. Louis
Dear Slouching,
The number one way to be Alt-right, of course, is to harbor a bizarre fondness, to put it mildly, for the firearm. You must value the gun as an abstract idea, and the particular guns you’re Second-Amendment-lucky enough to own over anything and everyone in your sad, empty life. Your ridiculous conviction that you’re just one fewer firearm away from the Federal government busting through your door to take away all your liberties should make you so wedded to the idea that you can own as many guns of as many different varieties as you deem necessary to give you a cozy, cutesy feeling of safety and power–two sides of the same bullet–that you’re willing to sacrifice life after life, even those of children, to ensure that you have unfettered access to these bang-bang implements. Also, keeping you distracted by this idiotic obsession ensures you have little time, energy, or even ability to see the ways in which the Republican party truly makes yours a life of servitude to overlords: lack of access to quality healthcare, low wages, and suppressed votes.
Animus and Antipathy
And: Read all about the top three right-wing rom-coms you must see!
Given that straight-up hate is so much of what we do when we do how we do on the right, it’s ironic that the classic book on Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) by Kreisman and Straus is titled, “I Hate You–Don’t Leave Me.” What makes it ironic, my little right-wing charges, is that there’s nothing unstable about our political relationships on the right as there is with interpersonal ones for those with BPD. We favor rigid hierarchies that firmly establish who’s in and who’s out. And who’s out is who we hate. These days it’s everyone except Christian Americans of European descent. It just doesn’t get any simpler than that!
401-KKK
Money is green, as I’m sure I scarcely need to remind you, readers, so if the Liberal Loony Left wants us to live green lives, we can happily oblige them. By making, hoarding, and lording over others our personal bank-based coffers busting past capacity, filled with cha-ching cheddar. The stockpiling of money, with some earmarked for flashy, trashy lifestyles full of gold-plated toilets and yachts with ridiculous names, is our raison-d’etre. To put a finer point on it, it’s what makes our “etre,”–“to be,” in French–possible in the first place. Life in a Late Capitalist economy with an ever-shrinking social safety net requires a ton of it. So, any time you need an acute, in-the-moment reinvigoration of your Alt-game, open your wallet and take a big whiff. That’s the smell of Alt…of money!
Quivering Jelly
The brain has, for today’s fact to make your skin crawl, a wet, spongy feel. And it’s grayish and reticulated. Gross. Anyway, as a conservative yours should also contain remarkably few facts, little logic, and reason-based apprehension of the realities that surround you. All you need to keep in that noggin of yours are opinions, uninformed and self-serving ones that you arrive at by watching the Alt-porn on Fox News. Done and done.
Heart of Stone
“I can’t believe you’ve got a heart of stone.” So sang Cher in the title track from her classic 1990s album. Except, I can believe you have, and I encourage it.
With each of these little categories of right-wing foundational advice, I’ve thought to myself, “Now this, is the most basic of them all, the one that enables all the rest.” And it’s no different with this one. You must be dead inside. Your soul must have long ago ossified into rock, so that compassion, empathy, and sympathy are memories so distant they make Neptune seem next-door. If you’re able to see that all people have inherent rights and dignity, you might want to grant those things to people who aren’t members of your self-styled tribe! And if that’s the case, you might as well, cease to call yourself conservative!
A Shot In the Arm
Just as smelling salts revive the unconscious, so too do I hope my penta-pointed advice above will bring you back to right-wing vigor.
I want you, my good (and I mean right-wing “good,” so “horrible”) readers to know something, which I hope is abundantly clear in all my counsel: I value you so very much. And by “so very much,” I, of course, mean as much as I can from nine-to-five, Monday through Friday. After hours and on the weekends, you’re dead to me, and I like it that way. All that being said, this is my main gig, so it’s not like I don’t need you. I need you to put food on the table, the clothes on my back, and the roof over my head. And in the grand Alt-tradition of Capitalist codependency, that keeps us in a sick, resentment-inducing push-and-pull relationship with each other. Because I have to do something with the time I devote to SYRW each week, I look forward to the 51 dumb-ass epistolary suggestions I’ll have for you in the coming year. Meanwhile, I hope you’ll take the above advice and make sure to re-invigorate your conserva-life using it.
Also: A mixed grab-bag of gossipy fun.
And between now and my next column on this day, at this time—ask questions, but promise me you will fail to grow and evolve—indeed, change in any way—when you get the Alt-answers.
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© 2018 Akbar Khan
