Dear Outraged Conservative American On The Verge Of Financial Ruin,
I am so pleased you have found a way to express your hatred for Obama in reclaiming the word Socialism. I congratulate you on your little knowledge of history, and admire your middling pluck in using the Internet to buy a "United Socialist States of America" T-shirt. Why, that is almost a pun! You might have even purchased your "Stalinists for Obama" logo on an organic cotton T-shirt. A T-shirt labeled "organic" in accordance with the USDA's National Organic Program, an act of top-down ecostalinism so dangerous to Democracy that it has made me literally shit the chair I am sitting in just thinking about it.
So you have purchased a shirt that says, "Four Leaders for Change" - and has pictures of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and our current President. That is funny! Now, I'm going to gracefully leap over the wide chasm of ignorance that would cause someone to lump Communists and Fascists together - it's that sort of joyous, carefree mediocrity which inspired the idea that we should fight "the Arabs" in the Middle East, and not raise our heads above the warm waters of assholery for long enough to take a breath of brain-nourishing oxygen and realize that there are things called Suniis and Shiites, and those things do not, in fact, consider themselves one happy fucking family of Arabs. In fact, even entertaining that idea now has infected me with that slimy mucous of idiocy to the point where I may have already come down with a violent case of the dumb shits.
Oh, angry American Conservative, lend me your ear. I understand you probably won't even hear me, because I'm not on whatever television channel has the most news about which star has shown us her vagina this week. However, let me ask you for one moment to turn your attention from the daytime courtroom television show you are no doubt watching on a large, flat screen TV you are nowhere near owning, you overweight, undernourished, 300 pound sack of human detritus. If, for a moment, you might turn your head away from whatever it is on the picture box I will condescendingly call "populist," but which you watch with the same rapt attention as a coma patient watches the animal channel in the hospital, I might impart some wisdom.
And no, I will never say this to your face. Because unlike you and all your destitute friends, I am a human being with an evolved sense of empathy for my fellow man, and if I were ever to actually see you sitting there in your long-broken recliner chair which you may or may not have slept in last night, covered in a mix of processed snack food made by a company whose CEO is 200 pounds lighter than you, and wearing a shirt that says "God Don't Give No Handouts," I would shrink in sheer awe of the difference between our lots in life. There, but for the Grace of God, recline I. I would say to myself, "we must be judged as a nation by the least of us, and I will never truly be free unless this poor soul is given a chance at real happiness."
But it is you who has the "Comrade Obama for President of the USSA" T-shirt stretched taught over your midsection, as if that skin of cotton were the only thing holding together your firmament, unimaginably large and without form. It is you who calls Obama the worst thing for America since Gays on TV. It is you who loves the free market even more than you love that Concealed Carry law in whatever backward state you call home. It is you who hates a handout.
Hey, angry Conservative, do you want to know a secret? The handout is for you, you magnum opus of superfluousness. Do you seriously think that Obama's socialist agenda is going to result in Uncle Samsky taking away your hard-earned absence of anything of value and give it to someone else? Of course not. The handout that you so hate happens when Uncle Sam takes my plutocratic, affluent, barely-taxed money, and skims a little off so that you can have some. Of my money. The money of me, who voted for Obama so he would take some and give it to you, you lame foot dangling uselessly behind the body politic.
Want to know another secret? The "free market" in actuality is for people like me and that radio show host you love to listen to so much! It's great, if you're like us! It helps us keep all the money we make! But like an unrequited lover, even though you are cast down again and again, you somehow still maintain a boner for free market capitalism, you ignorant social tumor unfortunately existing just on this side of Homo sapiens.
Let me tell you about the Communist-Fascist-Stalinist-Hitlerist impenetrable melange of fear that you have so aptly named "socialism." It's not that you get a handout. It's that now you can go to the doctor! Remember doctors? Now, when your body finally gives up its fight against the chemicals you pour into it that you call food, and you have, at long last, to spend a day in the hospital, you will not go bankrupt.
It's not that you get a handout. It's that now your children can go to a school that has the funds to educate them, so that maybe one day they might grow up to be something other than a troglodytic, mandible-breather like you.
It's not that you get a handout. It's that one day, you will still have a job building something awesome like a wind power blade or a solar cell, and that job won't be at risk for being sent to Mexico so your Spanish-speaking doppelganger can do it just as well as you probably would. The free market says "Si" to cheap labor!
So before you go bandying around words like socialism and handout, take a good, long look at the real and metaphorical shitstorm you find yourself in. And then, take my godddamned money. Before I change my mind.
Sincerely,
Aemilia Scott