the separate wings of the party

I’m reading an article about Ru Paul, where she is on her television show in her newly energized post – Trump “Opposition” “Resistance” role, and mocking the Rust Beltians who swung to Trump.  It’s some interesting hectoring on his part.

“If you were a factory worker and your job was to put this to this from 9 to 5, we don’t do that anymore,” he said, his soft voice carrying the imperious, jokey edge familiar to viewers of RuPaul’s Drag Race, his reality-TV show. Then he referenced a viral video from Ts Madison, a transgender activist and former porn star: “You better step your pussy up. Get on a business, bitch!” He delivered this spiel with the clipped, decisive tone of a therapist on the clock. “Nature will not allow you to just sail on through doing some factory job,” he said. “We don’t do factories anymore.”

It’s a not unfamiliar point.  Not without its points of value — I too found some irritation as I read down the story of Hillary Clinton on the hustlings confronting old-timer people saying “I don’t want to work with computers!  I want to work with machines!”  And maybe Trump is over-promising on trade agreements.  And maybe the time the trade agreements mattered on this issue passed sometime in the last decade.

But all this runs counter to the elected Democratic officials of that region (should Hillary Clinton have picked out Sherrod Brown for the vice presidential slot after all?), and the campaign rhetoric of Bernie Sanders.

Actually, I have the distinct sensation here of people talking to themselves, in a feedback loop of sorts.  What the hell does a factory worker in Akron care about “get on a business, bitch” — which, I guess is a reworking of Republican rhetoric — Reagan’s and Romney’s conception of Freedom as the freedom to open your business — and while these entertainers have their niches working and skill-sets to hit hard in this target demographics, good luck to random Akron guy in finding the niche for this economy.

Amusingly, the previous decade or two I recall seeing an article somewhere about how “the gays” have turned out Drag, now a vestige of an earlier time.  While surely Ru Paul is big enough to weather the ups and downs of the Drag Economy, maybe something about Trump makes it big again?

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