Brief Impression Of Hideous Man

My friend said Elon Musk sucks because of me and it hurt my feelings.

(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! Every ♥️ helps ensure that the first shall come last and the last shall come first… to whatever degree I have a say in it!)

I’m sure The Reader’s got a man (and it’s always a man) in his or her life who — up until maybe a couple weeks ago — had a big ole boner for Elon Musk. A boner that’s been rock hard for so long, a medical professional really should have been consulted by now. You’ve tried to express concern, but they argued, no no! It’s totally okay to be THIS into a white South African who isn’t Charlize Theron! And their boner’s heart is pure, they insist, because it throbs for his Beautiful Mind™. They say things like, he singlehandedly dragged the world into an electrified future! Or blah blah blah blah STARLINK blah blah blah blah! Historically, Muskies have believed that this guy’s contributions to modern society are so great that they outweigh his inhumane labor practices and bigoted worldview and decision to name his children after Dewey Decimal numbers.¹

You telling me about the SpaceX Mars Colonization program.

Recent developments have made it harder to argue that the good in Elon supersedes the bad. This leaves those of us who’ve always hated the man who ruined Grimes in a confusing position. Sure, it’s nice to be right, but at what cost? America is buckling under the weight of its own greed, shortsightedness, and fecklessness to oppose said greed and shortsightedness! How can we be smug about that? And yet, smug finds a way. Which is why, a week after the election, I sent an email titled lol to one of the Muskies in my life — with whom I hadn’t discussed Musk in several years — that read simply, Remember how much you loved Elon Musk????? Reader, I was shocked, nay GOBSMACKED, by the Muskie’s response. And I quote:

I still believe exactly what I believed back then — which was that, by criticizing Musk for the small stuff (it was small stuff back then), we were missing the larger context of everything he was doing, and we were only going to further alienate him and push him to the right. I firmly believe that this is EXACTLY what happened. That he was a perfectly normal genius autistic inventor who didn’t care much about individual humans — a driven workaholic asshole, but a basically sane apolitical asshole — and then he got relentlessly shit on for no truly good reason from the left…. and it slowly made him crazy, until, well, here we are now.

Did I have permission to publish this email? Reader, I did not. But in the spirit of Musk’s give-zero-fucks-about-whether-you’re-allowed-to-do-it approach to democracy, consider my recklessness an homage to the villain my friend holds so dear. Did I even respond to this email when I got it? Again, no. But only because it hurt my feelings and then I forgot about it until two weeks ago when Musk moved a cot into the White House and started selling the government off for parts. Then I began to stew in the truly fucked up implications of my friend’s argument. And I don’t mean to hate on my friend. He’s a mere mouthpiece for a culture so desperate for control that we try to blame ourselves for the decadent demise befalling us. Who wouldn’t want to believe WE broke these cruel, powerful, people? That they are, in fact, BROKEN, instead of just awful? After all, you can fix what’s broken.

If only we’d been nicer to the tyrant, he wouldn’t have wreaked such havoc. I’ve heard (and bought) this argument before. Who doesn’t remember when former President Barack Hussein Obama lit the match that would torch democracy by roasting Donald Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner? For months, Trump did a birther media blitz, proclaiming on any outlet that would take him that the President was born in Kenya, not Hawaii! Wearing a cute lil kanga, not a tiny Tommy Bahama! At the same time, Gabby Giffords was shot in head, Egypt ousted Mubarak, Japan was hit by an earthquake that killed 20,000 people and caused a nuclear meltdown, yet Trump’s birther bullshit still ate up media oxygen. Then Obama lightly ribbed him at an event designed for light ribbing, and according to Frontline, the rest is history. Or rather, the rest is our present; America is history. I remember seeing Oliver Stone’s Nixon in theaters as a twelve-year-old. (What does that say about me?) I wept when Paul Sorvino’s Kissinger whispered, can you imagine what this man would have been had he ever been loved? And sure, I myself can be a bitch (get used to it), but I have always believed, and still believe, that fewer bad things would happen if we were all kinder to each other. So maybe if we’d been nicer to Elon, if we hadn’t called him out for seeming truly unhinged on Joe Rogan, or booed him at a Dave Chapelle show, he wouldn’t be shutting down cancer research and letting babies get AIDS.

At yet…. think of all the people in the world who get treated like shit and don’t retaliate by trying to dismantle The Department of Education? These men, who exalt being STRONG and TOUGH above all other virtues, can’t seem to summon the inner fortitude to stomach the minor cruelties the rest of us tolerate daily, when our boss blames us for something that’s clearly their fault, when our friend tells us we’re not invited to the girls night our other friend is planning, when our child grabs our stomach and asks us if we’re pregnant and if not then why are we so fat? Maybe we write a petty newsletter or two about it, but you don’t see us causing a constitutional crisis.

Like Spiderman’s aunt once said: With great power, comes great responsibility to not be a little bitch when someone hurts your feelings. But the world is lopsided for reasons I don’t think I’ll ever understand. The morally weakest people have accrued an abundance of influence, and not knowing how to build anything beautiful with it, they use it to break, to make a world that has hurt them suffer. The rest of us are just left with our voices. I’m not going to feel bad about using mine to call Elon Musk an asshole. How he chooses to respond is all of our problem, but it’s his responsibility.

1. Seriously guys, that last one is truly fucked up. As a mediocre mother, I get wanting to have fun at a baby’s expense. But put them in a vest or a make them wear a newsboy hat or stick them inside a head of cabbage and pay someone to take a picture! Don’t name them after the numbers under a barcode. If that’s not child abuse….