Unbeknownst to the outsiders nationwide peeping in, Republican senator from Kentucky Mitch McConnell finding a challenger in Democrat hopeful Amy McGrath is ultimately just a matter of fighting fire with cyanide. A thing being different from another by no means automatically equates with it being a better thing than said other, but that goes against the American dream, where folks get led to believe that contrary to the beseeching for meritocracy as preached by such assassinated voices as MLK Jr, people are just not bred here in the states to dwell on any level deeper than surface. Most people tweet reactionary headlines online without reading the actual articles because they were reared to judge books by the covers alone. Free speech only truly exists in food packaging, because though “corporations are people too” unlike people themselves only for-profit enterprises are permitted by law to use and abuse anyone they goddamn feel like regardless of circumstance.
On a spiritual level, McGrath actually has a perfect counterpart in Republican governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem, with each woman presenting herself in actions if not always by words as an offering from their respective parties for what said parties presume that their respective opposition parties want in a candidate. Both have repeatedly and quite vocally asserted through their admittedly brief political careers that their own interests lay far more with national platforms rather than regional. With McGrath, there’s a number of audio recordings from private fundraising events where she assures potential investors that her goals have less to do with what the people of her state want or need, and more to do with what the Democratic party has in store. Politicians are the first to admit how they themselves spend the majority of their time raising funds for the party and for further campaigning, with paid media continuously playing coy that the DNC and GOP alike are nothing other than wealth-accumulating institutions. Yet liberal voters in the bluegrass largely find more appeal in persons like themselves who may then be more likely to represent them, as opposed to a proud military veteran, nuclear family-oriented patriot who has never seriously worked a blue collar job in her life. For someone who purportedly loves this state so much, she has never throughout her many campaigns set foot inside my county therein. Locally, I have watched people physically cringe when her television ads start up, because contrary to her marketing she is a stranger, and for all intents and purposes to date she may as well be an out of state candidate running far elsewhere. It’s no different from conservative voters in South Dakota finding much preference in a strong female, one so blatant with cronyism by ways and means of gifting newly-created job titles to her own inexperienced kids, and then proceeding to grant them inordinate raises every 6 months or so. I mean it’s the exact same conduct that the actual Republican politicians operating on the national level give their party and their half of the electorate such a headache to justify.
Messaging and optics, when pundits are referencing political matters, are always implored with the syntax of their marketing connotations, but while the prime function of marketing is to lie, the prime function of truth is not to make anyone feel good about themselves. Truth is not subjective, which translates to the notion of everyone having their own truth amounting to utter bupkiss. Combating for the masses to address that individually is such a fun time, in a culture where everybody wills for their proxies and avatars to be taken at face value. The normalcy of soft-core photo-shopping really is the evolution of Halloween presenting an excuse to conflate lingerie with horror, as if Freud never lived.
Likewise and full disclosure as I abruptly steer this short bus off-road; although South Dakota is one of the few states I’ve never traveled to and I have never met Noem herself, I did after a fashion know a personal assistant of hers. Once upon a time I was the handyman for the motel owned and managed by this girl’s parents. She literally grew up there, and by her senior year of high school could not only perform each and every conceivable job there herself as needed, but do it well, while still somehow reading a new novel seemingly every day, for fun. And, she would habitually slam the beautiful butt-cheeks striving to burst from her yoga pants into my groin, the more inappropriate the timing the better as far as she seemed to be concerned. It was all at once inspirational, flattering and maddening. I was not misinterpreting happenstance. If she were merely the flirtatious sort, I never witnessed it targeted in any other direction but this long-haired pothead. Obviously she had every human right to initiative, and if I was merely some sort of experiment to that end, then I produced lackluster results to be sure. Although sexual tension makes any job more agreeable I did not mind the work there itself and I was honestly pretty good at it, but due to the impossible to hide age difference, as well as my total lack of interest in dishonoring her parents who I felt were decent people generally, I never said or did anything to draw such conduct from her toward me. To hear one of her brothers talk, I think she even brought up the potentiality at the family supper table at some point, of she and I ever becoming a thing. There was a definite mutual attraction back then, but I never escaped the line of thought that her life experiences were barely getting started, whereas I was fully ready for the curmudgeon era and then some. I saw her almost daily, and sometimes the jolts would happen days on end and sometimes weeks would go by without any attention from her, and then there would be days making up for the lapse tenfold. Every time was a surprise.
Maybe I was like a marionette, lost in the task of being set on dangling over my shadow, with each burst of taboo contact against this closeted whore presence being a plucking of my strings, reminding me that not like it or really not like it, I was made to interact with the world around me. Maybe. But what’s certain was how wrong of me it was to cast her in a Mary Sue role on my life’s stage. Or as fodder for many the sleepless night at the old weekly motel I stayed when I was not working at her motel. Simultaneously living and working in motels makes the world feel so temporary, maybe it can’t be helped but to ache for something bigger to sink one’s teeth into. But I would have devoured this girl in the old Clive Barker soliloquy manner. I was aware of this at the time, and based my judgements accordingly and soberly. Wisdom has its patience for self-fulfillment.
The scenario of incessant hints at playfully carnal randomness endured surprisingly for months and months, mind racing while I’m replacing toilets and the like, until a day came when I dropped my hammer to the carpet, walked out the doors to my jalopy and quit. I talk a theoretical dance here in my essays, but in practice I’ll go to any lengths I feel necessary to avoid destroying lives. I would much rather beat the living shit out of Trump with my bony fists than to see him emotionally ruined beyond repair, for example. By doing nothing and then exiting stage left, without her consultation I made the call that she could do better and that she should do better, which was sadly not the most glaring example of arrogance on my part, in my life.
Whether any of this gets back to her or not, my intentions in sharing this are certainly not to slander or libel, or necessarily to call attention to her, from me or elsewhere. I just felt it serves as a golden example how, despite my presumptions in knowing or understanding her character, her needs or her wants, or even considering the fraction of racism I saw which her family faced over the years, I cannot now fathom for the life of me what could have led her to where she works more currently. In terms of my perceptions of this young lady, what I’d regarded as a truth proved not to be the truth. My loss in every sense. That is messaging. It is far easier a matter, seeing the fault and wrongness of others, when you have successfully proven that your own faults can just as easily be found in the confining territory of so wrong it’s dramatically wrong.
In the end no American is worth knowing though, and by the choices she has made for herself that applies abundantly to her just as well. Ego encompasses all.