My favorite Italian restaurant in town is owned by a family of Republicans, as is the only place in Tulsa that has decent bagels. My urologist, a friend, who’s brilliant and funny and someone who probably saved my life years back, is, in his words, “a solid Republican.” The guy who painted my house is a Trump-supporting, raging unvaccinated conspiracist whom I trust with the keys to the front door. My sister loves everything I write except when I write about Trump (and I don’t write about much else).
Yeah, I know — we must learn not to demonize each other. Our political foes are not our enemies, and the price of living in a democracy is accepting the fact that COVID deniers often do the best trim work and supporters of Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin make great chicken parmesan sandwiches.
I was having a really good week on Amazon. The company was responding to my queries, issuing refunds and credits, and had just delivered 12 cans of Don Pepino Spaghetti Sauce, toothpaste, and protein bars, and an elbow brace arrived 36 hours after I ordered it. Amazon, according to Forbes, has the best customer service of all internet retailers. Further, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) ranks Amazon No. 1 in value, customer loyalty, service quality and online shopping experience, and No. 2 in overall customer satisfaction. However, according to a story in The Guardian, Amazon pushes its delivery drivers so hard — including those presumably bringing me my protein bars — they (the men, anyway) are forced to urinate inside bottles for fear of slowing down delivery rates by stopping and using a proper bathroom. This, after all, is an evil, avaricious company and Jeff Bezos is Beelzebub, even if he has kept the Washington Post afloat. Amazon kills small businesses, and its warehouse distribution centers are something out of Upton Sinclair.
In a fight between Amazon, Donald Trump and Microsoft, however, it’s tough to know who not to root for.
I’ll explain.
In 2019, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), a $10 billion cloud computing company that was, according to those who know of such things, expected to go to Amazon — it clearly had the technology. But since then-President Trump had (and has) a hard-on for Bezos, he forced the Defense Department to give the contract to Microsoft. Amazon sued, saying the contract was so contaminated, it could only be explained “by the impact of the President’s anti-Amazon bias on Department of Defense decision makers.”
(The Biden administration ultimately canceled the project with Microsoft, and Amazon’s case against DOD was dismissed. Both companies now have parts of the contract.)
I recently bought a pair of sneakers for $5.98 (shipping and tax included) from a website called TEMU — think a poor man’s Amazon. I’ll bet that the person making them in Indonesia doesn’t have paid leave and a 401k. But try to buy sneakers not made in China, India, Vietnam or Indonesia. And how does that help 14-year-old Aulia in East Java even if I manage to buy them from some other country that provides dental? Closer to home, if I buy scrapbooking supplies from Hobby Lobby, am I saying the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is less important to me than the price of stick glue?
It seems like every decision we make, everything we buy, every rationalization we make costs somebody somewhere something. Some of this is tangential — the stick glue, for instance — but if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, buying spaghetti sauce from the enemy of Donald Trump, even though I am why Amazon drivers don’t have time to pee, seems the lesser of two evils.
In 1932, 13,418,17 million Germans voted for Adolf Hitler. Most, it seems, were driven by economic self-interest (in an earlier column, I wrote about how my bagel shop owner was furious at what he has to pay for cream cheese these days). Yet Hitler was pretty clear about appropriating land and property that belonged to the Jews and blaming them for the country’s financial shape. It’s not like those worried about the price of bagels and schmear in Hamburg didn’t know the Jews were being scapegoated, marginalized, terrorized.
Maybe they didn’t take it seriously.
Maybe they did and didn’t care.
It’s the economy, Dummkopf.
(Hitler, too, didn’t win the popular vote.)
We’re not supposed to blame the voters, but if the carnage of World War II isn’t on the souls of those 13,418,17 million, who should we blame?
And this is my problem with all those good people in my life.
My urologist, my bagel guy, my Italian restaurant people, my sister, and my conspiracist house painter will more than likely vote for Donald Trump. They’re not Trumpers —they reject his misogyny, bigotry, and forgiveness of, well, neo-Nazis — but their votes will not come with asterisks explaining how their support is conditional on Trump being the lesser of two evils. When I ask them who they will vote for, Biden or Trump, they answer, “Oh, God!” as if the failings of the two candidates are commensurate. One talks about immigrants poisoning American blood; one wants to forgive student loans. Their votes, however ambivalently they cast them, will count the same as the guttural certainty with which Stephen Miller will cast his. If Trump dismantles the Justice Department, imprisons his political foes (as he’s promised to do), and disfigures America, these people, my friends and family, will be as responsible for the horror of Donald Trump as the struggling shop owner in Hamburg was for the horror of Adolf Hitler.
How do you pretend that’s not the case?
2016: 62,984,828
2020: 74,223,975
Those are the numbers of Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump.
11,239,147 more.
There’s a joke:
“Question: What do you call people who weren’t Nazis but supported Nazis?”
“Answer: Nazis.”
I just lost my appetite for chicken parmesan.
Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter — quit laughing — and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. His latest book, “Jack Sh*t: Volume One: Voluptuous Bagels and other Concerns of Jack Friedman” is out and the follow-up, “Jack Sh*t, Volume 2: Wait For The Movie. It’s In Color” is scheduled to be released in February 2024. In addition, he is the author of “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later,” “The Joke Was On Me,” and a novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages.” See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanofthe plains.com.
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2024
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