Election 2020: “Stupid People from the Middle of Nowhere”
‘Sup, y’all?
It’s your favorite blogger here, reporting on the 2020 US election.
This will most definitely be controversial.
Ready?
Okay. So without further preamble…
The other day, down here in Gran Canaria, I met a friend for a beer. German guy. Cool cat. Does yoga and shit.
We sat at an aluminum table outside a downtown hotel with a long history you’d rather not hear about, ordered a couple of bottles of cheap swill, and talked. And at some point, he asked me for my thoughts about the (then upcoming) US election.
Of course, I gave him some sort of nuanced non-committal opinion, the details of which I cannot recall.
It was probably something along the lines of “I cannot fucking believe that the brightest and best political minds in my country can’t come up with a single candidate who’s not a cadaverous pussy-grabbing millionaire who long ago lost the ability to form a coherent sentence… and so I was forced to choose between Douchy Trump and Sleepy Joe.”
Something like that. But really, I don’t remember what I said at all.
But I do remember perfectly what he said next.
He, my German friend, said, in fact, and I quote, “Yeah, the problem with the US is that it’s just full of stupid people from the middle of nowhere.”
I actually thought it was funny. Hilarious, even. I’m still laughing about it, to tell you the truth.
Because… what a concise-yet-elegant way of expressing what so many people are thinking.
Still, 5 drinks into my afternoon bar crawl, what I said in response was…
“Hey – I’m a stupid person from the middle of nowhere. And I resent that statement!”
And I was joking and he was (probably, sorta) joking, but at the same time there’s a lot of truth to that sentiment. Which is what we’re going to talk about today.
So, with that in mind, let me tell you a little bit about…
The lives of stupid people from the middle of nowhere
Because, in a way, I’m sort of an expert on the topic.
It turns out that hard-line Biden enthusiasts are already super angry about the election result: they won, but around 70 million people – mostly in the middle of the country – still voted for Trump.
How dare 70 million imbeciles from the sticks disagree with their strongly-held lefty opinions?
Do we (the coastal elites say to themselves) really have to share a country with these morons?
They try and they try to explain the continued popularity of the Republican party, but they can’t – at least not without having a temper tantrum and hurling insults.
Well, they can’t explain it, but I can.
I know about it.
In fact, I spend about half my life here in Europe feeling like I’m someone’s token “uneducated red-state friend”.
Listen: I grew up in Arizona. In the desert. Literally the middle of the fucking desert.
When I was younger, within walking distance of my house, there were about three “things” – or four if you count the cacti.
- A couple of evangelical churches.
- About 3 shitty prefab houses, built from mail-order kits.
- An ostrich farm.
Other than that, it was just sagebrush and various kinds of cacti, as far as the eye could see.
These days, people find out I’m from “Scottsdale” and say, “OMG, I love Scottsdale! I stayed at [name of some fancy resort] for three days and it was beautiful!”
Psh. “Scottsdale.” Whatever.
That “Scottsdale” is not where I grew up at all.
Because I grew up, quite literally, in the middle of the fucking desert, in an area that had nothing to recommend it except for the fact that it was a bit “greener” than some of the world’s other arid hellscapes.
Those people think they’ve been to Scottsdale, but if anything, I grew up cursing their pampered rich-person lives when I’d drive by that resort in my old, broken-down pickup truck.
And then, karma being karma, my pickup’s radiator would explode, and I’d have to call a tow truck and be two hours late to my job as a cashier at Safeway.
It’s cute that you (or at least someone you know) grew up in San Francisco, or Seattle, or – gasp! – New York, and have formed your opinions on life from that perspective.
Because listen: I wish I’d grown up there, too.
Every time I read a book about some famous person, and it starts off about how they grew up in Manhattan’s East Village, while their parents hung out with artists, composers, bohemians and revolutionaries, my blood just about fucking boils.
Because in my town, growing up, it was shooting things in the desert for fun, or it was nothing.
In fact – and cover your easily-offended costal elite ears if you’d like to – many of my fondest childhood memories involve shooting things with guns of various calibers in the desert.
On weekends during elementary school, my best friend and I would shoot rats with our pellet guns. His grandparents owned a junkyard, and they’d pay us a dollar a rat, for every dead one we brought home.
See, rats would chew through the wires and tubing in the junked cars, out there in the desert. So if your junkyard was overrun by rats, you couldn’t resell the spare parts that had been eaten.
That there was a crash course in junkyard economics…
You’re welcome.
Anyway, it was fun as hell, shooting rats, and I’m sorry your limited-ass Manhattan life didn’t have anything as satisfying in it as capping large rodents, execution style, inside the rusted-out chassis of a ’64 Chevy.
Guns, drugs and sexual intercourse
Later on, but not much later, my dad would take me out to some very remote locations to shoot real guns with his ex-military buddies. We shot at coke bottles, or targets shaped like animals or people, and – once again – it was fun as hell.
Oh, did you not spend your Saturday mornings as a kid visiting the houses of Vietnam vets with grenade collections and safes full of semi-automatic weapons on the way to the shooting range?
I feel terrible for you. Really I do.
And honestly, I’d ask you a couple of follow-up questions about that, but it turns out I already know everything about your life. What you don’t know is ANYTHING about my life, as, once again, I’m just a stupid person from the middle of nowhere.
Because – guess what – Hollywood and the New York Television-Industrial Complex spend billions every year making shows and movies about you. Not about me.
Anyway, later on, when I was a teenager, other kinds of fun emerged. There was sex, there were drugs, and there were video games.
I (eventually) had a ton of sex. But I also yearned to try drugs and video games. Unfortunately, my parents were anti-videogame, and – despite what I learned about peer pressure in high school “health” class, none of the cooler kids at my school ever insisted that I try drugs with them.
And so, my teenage years passed, boring as hell, in the desert, with a life that was nothing like what you used to see on Saved by the Bell or Gossip Girl.
Eventually, I tried to get the fuck out of there. For a stupid person, I had pretty good grades and test scores, so I went off to a “nice” university in a place where my parents couldn’t possibly drop by for a weekend visit.
Initially, I was hopeful about the college experience, but once there, I found I was surrounded by rich East-Coast kids who I had nothing at all in common with.
After a year, I dropped out, because I decided couldn’t afford it.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. I dropped out of college because I did the math and decided that graduating with $40,000 in debt was a terrible idea. So I moved back home, and got a job as a cashier, and drove that pickup past the expensive resorts on my way to my supermarket job.
Never worked in a supermarket?
I feel sorry for you. It’s an experience that’s guaranteed to broaden your horizons, just like getting a liberal arts degree… Well, not “just like” getting a liberal arts degree. But trust me, it’ll definitely broaden somethin’.
And if you’ve ever complained about your student loans, yet you still feel superior to people who don’t have a degree, perhaps you should take a look in a mirror for a glimpse of what an actual “stupid person” looks like.
Because – and, of course, I’m just guessing based on what the media says about you people – all you’ve ever accomplished in your life is to spend a bunch of money on daddy’s credit card while going to keg parties at frat-houses.
After several years of that, you took your degree back to your old room at your parents’ house, complained about being an unpaid intern for a few months, got a couple of badly paid jobs (oh, poor you), then whined to all and sundry about how #adulting is so hard, etc…
And finally, after all that time feeling like life is unfair, and delicately ensconced in your cocoon of moral superiority, you voted for Joe fucking Biden last week and now you feel all great about what a wonderful person you are.
And I’m sure you are wonderful.
But like I said, I’m just a stupid person from the middle of nowhere, and my opinions are naturally suspect. I could be wrong.
You might actually be the intolerant asshole in this conversation, and not even know it.
Because guess what – I didn’t choose to be born in the middle of fucking nowhere, and if you’re ready to write me off based on my demographics, well…
You’re the one who don’t know shit about shit.
And yes, that’s how I really talk.
Fun fact: I learned how to pretend to be an “educated” person in my 20s, so I could keep you people happy.
But you don’t know shit, about shit, and (while I’m at it) you ain’t shit. At least you ain’t shit in my part of the world. But you LOVE to judge, dontcha?
Back in the middle of nowhere, I had a bag boy job. I worked as a cashier, and as a barista. Customer service.
It was miserable.
But I learned a couple of things: for example, I saw all y’all’s lame asses come into the places I worked, freshly moved into your McMansions from New York or Whereverton, California – and I saw how you looked down on us, the locals, from your superior social positions.
All of this is to say: if you’re tempted to call people from my part of the country ignorant bigots, or racists, or hate-filled hicks, who (according to several of my Facebook friends) need to be “educated in basic human decency” – and you think that’s going to persuade someone to vote for your candidate – then you’ve got another thing coming to you.
Because we stupid people from the middle of nowhere don’t think of ourselves like you think of us. And we don’t think of you like you think of yourselves.
There’s a huge perception gap between the red states and the blue, and a large part of it is because y’all can barely locate our states on a map. Trust me. I’ve met plenty of of New Yorkers who only know that Arizona is “one of those square states” they fly over to get to California.
But like I said: we know all about you. The media humanizes you, constantly.
It treats us as mostly cultureless rednecks who are only useful as the butt of your jokes.
So let’s be real: you’re the one who has the choice here. You wanna talk about time for healing?
Do some fucking healing, then. And try being civilized to your fellow Americans.
Because let me tell you: being insulted or treated condescendingly by all y’all “morally superior” folks from the coastal cities isn’t going to convince a single goddamn person to vote Democrat in 2024.
So if it’s that important to you that Democrats win every election, all the time, so you can feel like you’re firmly in the majority, guess what…
You and your lil buddies in Washington are gonna have to figure out what life is like in my part of the country, and what our values are like, and what keeps us awake at night.
We’ve got problems too, and it seems like the coastal-elite political and media mafia is intent on completely ignoring them, in favor of issues that don’t matter at all to people who are struggling to get by, out in the middle of nowhere.
You think you’re the bigger person?
Great.
Then be the bigger person.
‘Cause we’ve insults got for people like you, too.
And you can bet your sweet coastal-elite ass that hearing them from some “stupid person from the middle of nowhere” wouldn’t make you suddenly decide to vote Republican.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today.
Sorry about the swearing.
Hopefully – about the future of America, and the world – yours,
Mr Chorizo AKA Mr Daniel.
P.S. Okay, for the sake of brevity, I lied earlier. I didn’t want to go off on a tangent about that one time where I might or might not have done acid, but I did technically get offered drugs by slightly cooler kids back in high school. It just wasn’t enough for it to be a thing.
P.P.S. I know it doesn’t sound like it in this article, but I actually do have a sense of humor. And so I’ll leave you with this list of redneck jokes which I consulted while doing research. It’s the best thing (except Pfizer’s new Covid vaccine) which has happened to me this week. Enjoy!
