I'm cooking dinner when my wife calls me into the front room. 'Can you believe this?'
I turn to the TV. We're tuned to the evening news, presently taken up by footage from someone's cellphone. Some woman has encountered Judge Nelson Wolff in a local supermarket and is giving him a piece of her mind, such as it is, whilst filming it all on her phone. Wolff walks to his car, refusing to acknowledge the woman as she calls him a communist and a traitor, adding that making a kid wear a mask is a form of child abuse. This is a woman who likes to stand up for what she believes in. She's shared this video clip on social media and now it's on the news.
Nelson Wolff is among those supporting Mayor Ron Nirenberg's opposition to our state governor's most recent decree, the one banning mask mandates. Our state governor believes that ordering people to wear masks during a pandemic - and presumably he understands that we're in the middle of a pandemic on some fucking level - is a violation of human rights or something. Our city council appears to believe that our state governor is a shithead and I can sort of see their point, if that's actually what they believe.
'Who the fuck does she think she is?' I ask.
'She's a hairdresser,' Bess tells me.
'Wow.'
We rewind the clip and watch it again, then I go back to the kitchen and Bess gets to work on her phone. Within minutes she's found the woman's home address, the hair salon, and everything else you would probably rather not know.
The woman's surname is obviously something she came up with herself. I won't repeat it here, but let's just say that as names go, she may as well have named herself Ashley Awesome or something similarly imaginative. It's the equivalent of a personalised license plate on your vehicle, letters and numbers somehow tailored so as to imply that you're a hit in the sack or whatever. If there's one surefire indication of life's success stories, it's that which is written on a personalised license plate because it's always the truth.
Ashley Awesome's facebook page is batshit - exactly the sort of thing you would expect of someone who calls an elected official - here in Texas in the year of Our Lord 2021 - a communist: Trump was clearing out the swamp, the pandemic has been orchestrated and anyway it's not that serious, blah blah blah freedom blah blah blah the constitution blah blah blah…
A couple of days later we happen to be out and about on a drive, and we just happen to drive past the woman's home. We want to see what it looks like. We want to be Robert deNiro taking his seat in front of Nick Nolte and lighting up the world's smelliest cigar. The house is in one of those bland personality free subdivisions which make English council estates seem wildly Bohemian. Every house is the same, few trees, no shops, no stores, nothing communal and everything just a little too clean; and these houses cost a shitload too, much more than our own rundown corner of the 'hood. This is where all those success stories end up. There's a dirt bike in the woman's drive, and the flag of the black and white stars and stripes bisected by a blue line. Ashley supports our brave boys in blue, which isn't a massive surprise. There's also a vertical banner which reads AMERICA just in case anyone was so terminally fucking stupid as to have forgotten where we are.
We drive slowly past the woman's house, which brings us both a great feeling of satisfaction for reasons which are quite difficult to describe. There is about as little substance to this person as we had guessed, and that's always good to know. She's an assemblage of signifiers calculated to annoy liberals. It doesn't really matter what she supports or claims to support because the most important detail will always be who it annoys. None of this shit is even consistent. It's just a symphony of differently hued raspberries blown at anyone who ever read a book, or tied their own shoelaces, or who once called you something hurtful, perhaps implying you were a bit of a fuckwit in some respect.
When was the last time you heard anyone banging on about freedom or the Constitution in service of a cause which wasn't about them getting to dictate what happens with everyone else, and which wasn't in response to something which has no impact on their own continued existence whatsoever?
It really feels like it's been a while.
Meanwhile, the Yelp page for the woman's hair salon has all but vanished beneath a deluge of negative reviews. She's replied to a few of them, a form response explaining how she knows the reviewer has never even visited her salon and can therefore expect to hear from a cyberdetective she has hired to tackle such fraudulent submissions.
That's how it works, see!
Scary.
No comments:
Post a Comment