I Love Christine O’Donnell

The following was originally written as a letter to my friend Ismail.

Christine O'Donnell

When I ran my first set of election projections, my methodology spat out a loss for Chris Coons to then-presumptive Republican nominee Mike Castle. I reran the numbers after the majority of Republican primary voters chose Christine O’Donnell and witnessed a dramatic reversal: Chris Coons is almost certainly going to trounce O’Donnell.

Political campaigning is difficult for Christine O’Donnell. She is a self-confident, ambitious female seeking public office – read, mences in the water for media commentators accustomed to gaggles of bobbing heads as they confirm to their primarily elderly-white-male audience that here, here is one of the witches; suffer not. I have often wondered if female Christian politicians get the joke that retells itself every time they attempt to hoist the banner of the head-of-every-woman crowd. She faces a media that wants her to lose, and has surrendered her intellect to a faith that wants her to lose. Strikes one and two.

Three: She is unspeakably, unforgivably stupid.

She is unconscionably brainless. Her cognitive abilities and the Zulu space program hang out together on weekends, reveling in the levels of relative functionality they share. There is nothing she could say about public policy that the enucleated carcass of a North American opossum found by the side of the road could not, with its gas-bags squeezed just right, say with equal eloquence and authority.

Edmund Burke, one of the founding fathers of American conservatism and (like most conservatives of the past few centuries) a to-the-death enemy of American democratic institutions, was convinced that democracy must be controlled by a plutocracy properly immunized against public opinion lest rule by majority “devolve” into mob rule. He was convinced democracy could not work because the most immediate, crass, idiotic desires of the average voter would overwhelm the carefully-considered preferences of the hard-working upper crust upon whom their numerous lowers were mere parasites. Most individuals were too stupid to be left to decide for themselves.

This is why I love Christine O’Donnell. More precisely, I love the close similarities her poll numbers, her IQ, and the current night-time temperature of upstate New York share. Because I love democracy and hate Edmund Burke, I love Christine O’Donnell.

The mutants have had their chance in the state of Delaware. They nominated a cuntish windbag who deigns to tell you when it’s okay to masturbate, and to what; who exerts with the casual certainty uniquely accorded to the brainless that you will be set on fire forever by her man-child godking if you ask him to explain where life on earth came from; who has accused every scientist, thinker, and everyone among the innocent and productive and occasionally left-leaning intelligentsia of the lowest insults of deliberate fraud and of conspiratorial commitment to lies about the nature of reality – and demands in turn that the public brand “bigot” onto anyone who dares defend their name from her sick, throaty bleeting. She is an eager slave of the oldest enemy of human rights, and the shackles rattle only louder under the microphone wall.

Christine O’Donnell is losing because the mutants must always lose. The freaks can only demand equality of misery for strangers for so long. We the strangers always fight back. We are a difficult lot, we strangers. We don’t like each other. We don’t meet up every Sunday for wine and cannibalism. We don’t even like the people we vote for. But we are the new moral majority. We are dissatisfied and fucked up and drinkers and assholes – but we are not the mutants. We are not slaves and we are not stupid. We don’t take what we know makes us happy and shit on it. We don’t owe the failed ancien regime the respect of silent deference. They are wrong and they are in the way. And, if we just balls up tell them to fuck off and die already, they don’t get to bully us anymore.

I love Christine O’Donnell because she reminds me that I am not obligated to take the superstitious seriously. I am not obligated to bob my head politely as someone tells me that war is peace and slavery is freedom. I have no compunction to pretend that brainlessness is a virtue. Chris Coons is at least slightly more intelligent than Christine O’Donnell – as are all of us.

When O’Donnell loses she will get to write a book. She will shuffle from talk-show to talk-show crying on the arms of her sympathetic elders about her mistreatment, and they will reward her handsomely. She’ll make more money in a decade than I will in my entire life. But one day she will wake up and she will be alone, because the old die and today’s old will be replaced by generations that know better and are no longer forced to pretend otherwise by the guilt of pity that has cost us so much in the past.

Ismail, you are a stranger. You get to be in a sea of strangers who welcome you with music and merry. She is a mutant in the desert, who had an army behind her that is now exhausted. Her kind will be alone; deeply, irrevocably alone.

Love,
John