Through a Pool Darkly
by Maria Bustillos
My late brother Carlos was a far-right Republican, a “Dittohead” follower of Rush Limbaugh from the mid-1980s onward. This was a bad development for me on a lot of levels but the saddest thing about it is that his politics stole most of the fun out of him. Our political differences created enormous friction in my family, but for our mom’s sake I didn’t “go no contact” with him until 2016, when he loudly announced his intention to vote for Donald Trump, and tried his damnedest to persuade her to do the same. (She hated Trump, would never have considered such a thing, and was very bummed out by my brother’s antics in general.) By then Carlos’s politics had remained exactly the same for more than 30 years. He was a “vaccine skeptic,” and he died of Covid-related pneumonia in November of 2021.
All this by way of saying that MAGA is much older than people seem to realize. Though it hadn’t yet acquired the acronym or the red hat, MAGA politics was fully formed and deeply entrenched in the United States for two full decades before the Tea Party launched in 2007. Its path is clearly documented in the legacy press. In 1994 the Washington Post ran a profile of a Dittohead named John Cavallo (“46, white, male, husband, father, Catholic and aerospace engineer”) who lived in a four-bedroom house in North Potomac equipped with an electronic doorbell that played “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”
“We’ve got to really get off of being so liberal and come back to the center,” [Cavallo] says. “We’re letting the minorities—and I don’t mean blacks and whites, but minority groups like gays, lesbians and radical feminists—tell us how to run our lives.” He is indeed Republican: “The Democratic Party at one point stood for all the things I believe in,” he says, “but they have gotten so far to the left, so extreme, they’ve gotten away from their roots, the roots of middle America, that if you work hard enough you'll be successful, that a good day’s work is worth a good day’s pay.”
It’s all right there, in the Washington Post in 1994: the racism, the homophobia, the transphobia. Opposition to affirmative action. A queasy, prurient misogyny. “Femi-nazis.” They were only waiting until they could get their mitts on the Supreme Court to really start tearing things down, it is plain to see (as many did, even back then).
In any case, after so many years of watching this deep-rooted plant bear its filthy harvest I came to see clearly that what MAGA offered my brother back then, what it has always offered, what it is offering people now, is entertainment.
The algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is choking Donald Trump in the last days of his time on earth because it is an irrefutable, inescapable TV image, like his own. Countless other and far worse crimes have failed to seize the public imagination like the defilement of this one national symbol because this one is a made-for-TV crime, a lurid green daily spectacle of instantly-damning evidence of Trump’s unique stew of incompetence, narcissism, and corruption, complete with dead ducks, peeling paint, and literal, festering rot. An allegory too heavy-handed for The Thick of It or The Death of Stalin. He has responded to this fiasco in the only way he knows how, by making wild, unfounded accusations blaming other people.
Keep us breathing fire!
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