I’ll Have What He’s Having

I read something once that tried to explain why poor white people in the Confederacy risked their lives to help a bunch of rich assholes continue owning black people as slaves, even though there wasn’t materially much in it for them, and the rich assholes in question also often looked down upon those same poor as subhuman, too.

While racism was of course the primary overall factor, another contributing motivation was the fact that some people can’t feel like they’re “winning” unless someone else is “losing,” and for many, even losing constitutes a win as long as someone else loses even more—they’ll fight to the death for a society that tells them, “you may be lower than dirt, but at least you aren’t as deeply underground as those subterranean creatures over there!”

The piece, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to find again while preparing to write this, discussed things in tribalistic terms, and illustrated its point with a graphic of characters on graduated platforms. This showed a wealthy white guy (probably wearing seersucker, or perhaps a top-hat and a monocle) standing on the highest platform; a poor, shabbily-dressed white person on one of the lower platforms; and the lowest platform occupied by a black man in rags.

I recall several scenes in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained which also brought this up: for example, when the plantation owner “Big Daddy” tells one of his slaves to give Django a tour of the estate, he tries to explain the difference between Django, her fellow slaves, and “white folks” by comparing him to “that peckerwood boy from town that works with the glass.” Later, Calvin Candie cites phrenology in an attempt to argue that even the most “exceptional” black person by his estimation is still inferior to the most unexceptional white. Soon afterwards, Dr. King Schultz soundly demolishes this preposterous notion by pointing out the racial heritage of Alexandre Dumas, an author and intellectual whose work Candie holds in such high esteem that he’d named one of his slaves after the lead character of The Three Musketeers.

Anyway, I wanted to draw something which examined these same ideas in the modern context of Donald Trump, his racist, misogynistic supporters, and people who support him even though they themselves occupy the very racial, social, and economic groups he openly attacks.

There’s the phenomenon of Trump supporters finding out what it’s like to have their faces chewed off by the hungry leopards they’ve been fucking around with: for instance, some immigrants who voted for him now find themselves, their spouses, or other members of their family either threatened with illegal deportation or already locked up in concentration camps, and those who’ve had the chance to speak publicly about it all seem to echo some variation of, “I thought he was talking about those OTHER, LOWER-CLASS immigrants and minorities, who are ALL FILTHY, PET-EATING CRIMINALS, not ONE OF THE GOOD ONES, like me!”

However, the platform imagery mentioned above was a bit too old-fashioned and cliche for me, at least without a novel and relevant twist which I was unable to conceive this time, and I feared it might also be too easily misinterpreted unless presented in textbook terms stripped of all humor and irony. Hopefully the above cartoon, which quotes the body-horror Human Centipede movie series, is impossible to misunderstand, especially since the source material included a critique of Nazism among its themes.

With all that in mind, I was careful about the figures placed in the line, and the order of their arrangement. Donald Trump of course sets the tone for the entire thing, since we know for a fact that he wears diapers, because he just can’t stop shitting himself any more than he can stop getting his picture taken with his fellow pedophiles; and every single member of the Republican Party leadership’s either pleased that he’s loudly spewing all the horrible, bigoted fascist shit they’re always thinking, whether they’re willing to say it themselves or not, or at best all too happy to personally benefit from the association despite being secretly embarrassed by it.

Meanwhile, the majority of MAGA voters are knuckle-dragging, cracker-ass, male slobs—“that peckerwood boy from town that works with the glass”—who barely derive any actual benefit from the empowerment of those ahead of them in the line or are even actively harmed by it; followed by white women, who are unequivocally worse-off than they otherwise would have been, as are “One of the Good Ones” minorities, no matter how much better they think they have it than the other, “lesser” minorities they despise.

Some people have such a warped, sadistic sense of morality and justice that they’d prefer to be personally abused, beaten or killed over nobody being hurt at all, as long as someone they dislike is being abused, beaten or killed even more savagely.