So, my grandfather likes to send everybody he knows email chains with marginally funny jokes, deeply offensive would-be jokes, purely idiotic fraud/crime/rape/Apocalypse warnings, and straight up bigoted anti-non-Republicans rants. I spent years deleting most of them unread and restraining myself from spam blocking him because once in a while I do get an email I’d actually want from him, like, say, family news. Ages ago I asked him over the phone to stop sending me those emails, but he didn’t. A couple weeks ago after reading a particularly nasty email about bulldozing 1000 Obama supporters and then pissing on them (this was after my Obama breakup, but still, hardly productive political dialog) I sent a short email that went, roughly, “Pappa, this really isn’t my thing and I already get a ton of email. Mind taking me off your forwarding list?” He did, and I had roughly three weeks of happy inbox.
Then today he sent on that old email about the daughter who went to college and turned super-liberal chastising her wealthy father for being anti-tax. He cleverly suggests that a point from her GPA be redistributed to her barely passing buddy, then welcomes the horrified daughter to the Republican party. I saw this email the first time a decade ago, before Bush was elected. I found clumsily executed, it spends way too much time trumping up what an unrecoverable liberal she is, but nicely to the real point. After all, it was grade redistribution that turned me into a cold hard capitalist way back during group work in elementary school.
Interestingly, my reaction to it this time was rather violently different. Now, my political position hasn’t significantly changed in the last decade, but something did. The email ends with “How better to explain the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans?” So I explained.
How about that the Republicans are the party that want to put God, as they interpret him, in charge?
Or that they think they can fix diplomatic and economic problems by spending trillions of dollars bombing people who have no real global power?
Then there’s the bit about where they’re the party that wants to spy on everything you do to on the pretext that it’ll keep you safe, without actually preventing any real threat and using what they find to illegally arrest and detain people?
Oh, and that little thing with rigging the hiring practices in the Justice Department to make sure the people in there would toe the party line and only prosecute cases that the Republicans want prosecuted.
The Republicans used to be the party about small government and grounded economic policy and all sorts of great things I can get behind, but they’ve gone way, way off the deep end. If you’re okay with the way they’re running things, fine, but please leave the decade old saccharine semi-satire out of my inbox.
Love,
Anaea
That, and the fact that the Democrats aren’t doing a goddamned thing to stop them, pisses me off in ways I can’t really describe without the help of explosives. I mean, come on people, the Libertarians have a fucking Republican at the top of their ballot. I’m just this close to deciding to write in Lucifer Morningstar as my candidate.
I fucking wish Obama were the antichrist. Then I could forgive him for ruining the election for me. Hells, I’d vote for him then. Bastard.
Anaea Lay 