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<div class="userStyles" style=" font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000;">I Understand Trump Supporters<br>
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I wanted to give a personal account of my life under the effects of Neoliberal America. These are only (largely negative) moments that are a sharp edit referring to the effects that Robert Reich cites in Inequality for All.<br>
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You know, I get it, Really. I'm from Akron-Canton, Ohio, and I get it - why Trump was elected. (If you don't know where that is, it's the place where The Daily Show went to a Trump rally and a man said Hillary had AIDS because of Bill contracting it from Magic Johnson...)<br>
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In 1985, I was a Unix Systems Field Engineer for Tandy Computers in Canton Ohio. In the late 70's my parents saw my love for my Atari 800, and they said I should go into Electrical Engineering (Instead of Computer Science like I should). I had a few years in my backward home town, I was part of a Star Trek fan club with a lot of people who would become professional, but something happened.<br>
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I noticed that I had not gotten a raise in 4 years, and our facility has being downsized. Efficiency needed to be raised to meet projections, and repair need to be regional. A few months later, the automated troubleshooting of motherboards and complexity of them turned me into a board-swapper and network engineer. I saw the writing on the wall, and eventually went into sales, which lasted for a while until I met the woman who would be my wife for 20 years. <br>
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(Retraining I)<br>
And being that she demanded that I be geographically independent, I quit and followed my dream of art and design - I started a small firm and freelanced around the country, first doing graphic design, then screen design. That was the 90's (Clinton) and they were pretty good. NAFTA came about, but I never really felt it. We cried when the former Yugoslavia blew up, but things were fairly good. <br>
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And then Y2K came, which outsourced a lot of computer work to India, and the Dot-Com crash from the tech sector. My business imploded, and I took the time to finally get some severe cataracts out - I was still hopeful, but my wife was having some issues in her professorship in the South from institutional pressures tied to a chronic illness, and i left to go to graduate school in 2004 (little did I know that I would continue to leave in 2010; I honestly thought I was goign to come back and support her)<br>
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(Retraining II)<br>
Grad school in Bowling Green Ohio was bucolic, we worked, set fire to the fraternity rock monthly and did all those art school things, graduated at the top of my class, and got a tenure track job in Chicago. Things were OK, but I saw Detroit crumbling and the rank-and-file people in the rural areas were starting to hint at Appalachia at times. Still, I was optimistic.<br>
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Chicago was good, but the administration kept talking about the lowering of scholarships and the raising of tuition, and for a number of years, I had a decent salary, but it flattened out too. And with my department's increasing emphasis on Jobs and Outcomes, a massive internal scandal gave the moment to go entirely professional, and artists or theorists were not welcome, which I see as an outcome of the de-humanitization of Higher Ed in the US.<br>
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I divorced my wife because I felt the economy was never going to reunite us. My 90 -year old dad, who bemoaned the emergence of LGBT culture in my Unitarian church, died. I took another position.<br>
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I spent a couple years in Milwaukee under Scott Walker and saw the Walker/Koch engine attack the Wisconsin Proposition for higher education, and my initial offer coming to Milwaukee was <em>half</em> what I made in Chicago for nearly twice the work. The position I got was not even a professorship, but a lecturer position that had been created from a denial of tenure the year before. Ironic. My place was a dump compared to Chicago, and I went bankrupt due to some expenses that the flattening of my wages had allowed to build up, and the absence of two incomes. For two months, I ate rice one week a month and took a side gig woodworking chopsticks. My cat died. Milwaukee was abject. I decided to leave the US.<br>
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(Retraining III)<br>
So, I took a one year position at the American University of Sharjah - wow. Had no idea what I was doing - the culture, going cold into a RISD-style environment as an artist teaching Interaction Design; I did OK. Culture shock, workload, Middle Eastern Students. Still the work came out all right, and -<br>
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I spent the remaining summer in Canada with the sizeable net egg that I had and expanded my VR/AR skills to come back to Dubai the next year at Zayed. but I saw a lot of things in Canada, the real emergence of BLM, postcolonial discourse (which was a shock, as discussion of gender politics in the UAE is, 'far more restrained'), the emergence of racial tensions in Milwaukee (not really emergence, but the unsheathing of hostility that I saw when going to the West Side). I was also told by a friend of mine on search committees at OCAD that I had little or no chance of getting in because of age, race, gender, and orientation.<br>
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Being that I am currently in the year at Zayed, I won't say much except the colleagues are good, pay is decent, the Emirati students deeply respect you as a professor, and research is encouraged. However, one evening when I was contributing to my friend Vikram Divecha's (this year in the Venice) portrait project, I found myself just rattling off the most colonial, racist, condescending Trump-like stuff during our session, and I realized that the American, middle aged, middle class white zeitgeist had set up shop, and I was appalled. It wasn’t the first time I had done something like that, and I won’t say when, or who; I’ll just state my regret. The election was one month off, and I had felt marginalized, diminished, afraid for my precarity, on, and on, and on.<br>
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But then I realized like the United State becoming another country, I realized that as a middle-aged white man, my privilege had died, and I was just another person. T<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px;">he American, middle aged, middle class white zeitgeist had set up shop, and I hadn't really realized it.</span><br>
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Then I cried. Not in any selfish way for myself, but for the situation of things. <br>
For the oppressed who have never gotten a good deal (relatively) for hundreds of years, if any.<br>
For the ones here that have a warped sense of the American Dream here, only to work for $300/month.<br>
For the ones who are being vectorially exploited in Central Asia and Africa.<br>
For the ones I cannot talk about for any number of reasons. Yet.<br>
For the Nigerian cab driver in Abu Dhabi for not understanding that just because Trump's rebellious, he isn't the best choice.<br>
For, honestly, decent Middle-Class and Working Class people who have been ground down in the USA from the Greatest Generation to create the Trump Nation. <br>
And only a little for myself for having allowed to be sucked into it for a while without realizing it.<br>
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I get it, and having that Batailleian knowledge is useful, but not pleasant.<br>
I feel like knowing what I know has put a splinter in my soul the size of a nine inch nail.<br>
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(Retraining IV)<br>
And I am starting a PhD soon.<br>
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I feel as if I will never be able to live in the US comfortably anymore,<br>
nor ever return to my home town.<br>
In creating this soft civil war (and that is what it is right now), in which families are only hoping for the return of Jesus to reunite them, I have a deep pathos and melancholy for the American Dream, for what parts of it actually existed, and try to exist. Burroughs’ Thanksgiving Prayer comes to mind.<br>
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It is for this reason I try to project the world I want now, regardless of whether I live in it. I have to live in a bubble of strength, kindness and egalitarianism for nothing else than my own well-being, in hopes that I might make a Butterfly effect.<br>
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Trumpettes? I get you; you're wrong, but I get you.<br>
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ALAN SONDHEIM REPLIES:<br>
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I agree with you totally here; as you know, I think; I'm from the northern reaches of Appalachia, with all its problems - Wilkes-Barre PA and actually a subset of that, Kingston across the river. And I've also tried to move to Canada - I've tried for years, my brother and sister live in Victoria and Toronto, but I haven't been successful for precisely the same reasons. And what you say about not being able to live in the US comfortably, again the same; we feel as if we're in a foreign country, with a proto-authoritarian for a lead, but not my leader, and so forth. I also get the Trumpettes (good word); I knew from the moment he came on the stage of the primaries, that he was going to win. And what I fear now the most is what will happen to the really poor, for whom, say, tax breaks for healthcare lead nowhere, for whom there is no hope! T. pays no attention at all to that class; there is nothing for them. I wish BLM was also Black Votes Matter; that might have made a difference.<br>
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Much as I like, now, the camaraderie and actions on the left, I fear so much that they won't make any difference at all. And the problem, fundamental problem, is how quickly the U.S. changed - inconceivable! A few months ago we felt there was some sort of progress being made...<br>
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