Something About This Man Disturbs Me

Whenever I imagine a fascist dictator in America, he always looks, talks, and acts exactly like Rick Perry, a bible-thumping free-marketeer who’s more Texas than Texas. The oligarchs will love him and the press will adore him. I’m just saying. When fascism finally does come to America — notice I said when, not if — it will come courtesy of this kind of figure. This is precisely what the real Berzelius Windrip will look like.

Maybe I have an overactive imagination, but I sense something sinister at the root of this man’s character. It’s just an intuition, but he gives me the creeps, like the stranger who’s been looking at your daughter just a little too long, you know, or the guy at the front door whose eyes are darting all around your living room while you’re talking to him. He’s just wrong.

There are many thoroughly detestable people on the America political scene. The English language itself is not nuanced enough to capture the full depth, color, tone and texture of, say, Mitch McConnell’s loathsomeness. I’m not kidding when I say that McConnell’s weirdly asexual visage makes me almost physically ill. Same with Dick Cheney. Same with Newt Gingrich. And, so no one can accuse me of partisanship, Chuck Schumer, who reminds me of nothing so much as a bipedal rat minus the integrity. They are complete scoundrels, to be sure, utter swine with no visibly redeeming qualities, but they are awful in certain conventional kinds of ways. At the end of the day, they are just corrupt and venal politicians. They represent a mundane form of evil that we are familiar with. I’m tellin’ you there’s something different about this Rick Perry fellow. There’s poisonous sediment in his soul.