A Nation of Monsters

Is the election over? I can barely keep track anymore.

Whatever the result — even if the good guys win — it’s still bad news. Because the bad guys — the people who looked at four years of open corruption, hatred, racism, sexism, homophobia, police violence, and Nazi bullshit — still did a hell of a lot better than they should’ve.

So 2016 showed that far too many Americans were comfortable with the Klan, the Nazis, and white nationalist violence. But 2020 showed that they’re not just comfortable with it — they’re eager for more.

On the bright side, of course, is the fact that American voters have strongly rejected Trump twice — Hillary Clinton got 2.8 million more votes than Trump, and Biden is on track to get even more than that. But because the Electoral College is an outdated joke implemented solely to appease white slaveowners in the 1880s, America gets to be the only democracy that periodically tells its voting majority to fuck off.

Of course, Tyrannus Tiny-Thumbs may still figure out a scheme to steal the election, but we’re rapidly approaching the point where only the maddest of the mad will accept that. When even the quivering cowards in the national media are willing to call him a liar, and the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court are fine with telling him to get lost, you’re no longer fighting from a position of strength.

If this were a comic book world, it’d likely be more depressing. In the comics, the supervillains are generally feared by almost everyone. In the real world, however, if the Red Skull or the Hatemonger or the Joker or Lex Luthor tried to take over the world, we know that a lot of people who used to be all about small government, low taxes, and family values, would now follow the villains, ’cause they OWN TEH LIBS or because they want to put non-white people in camps or because you gotta run the government like a murderous, destructive megacorp, or because they just want to cheer as a lunatic murders innocent people.

If Mephisto, the Devil his own damn self, offered up an Antichrist who demanded people brand themselves with his mark to show their loyalty to him, it’d be a heavy-handed summer crossover event that ended with most people refusing to embrace evil. But in the real world — well, we already know how many people agreed to wear the mark in 2016 and 2020. They had hats to show it off, didn’t they?

We’ll be back to doing proper comic book content soon enough, but for now, let’s remember an eternal truth that remains no matter who runs the White House, something agreed upon by Captain America, Indiana Jones, Jack Kirby, and every other good American:

The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.