Imagine going door to door asking people how often they view pornography.
Or even taking such a poll over the phone.
Aside from the many doors slammed in your face and taps clicked into your ear, chances are that most all respondents will say never. Some wags over a phone might ask what you are wearing, but they are to be discounted. By mail or online, some may venture into “rarely” or “once a month,” but you know it will be an undercount.
No matter your own response, truthful or otherwise, you don’t need me to tell you why.
Instead, let’s consider the political polls we keep hearing that have Biden leading Trump by about ten nationally, and between four and eight in the swing states.
What if numerous respondents to those polls feel the same way they would if their taste for pornography were made known?
Perhaps like the celebrated preacher who for years insisted that a marriage is “between a man and a woman” while skimming from his generous collection baskets to pay for a marriage between a man, a woman, and a pool boy or two.
I’m not talking about the obvious con-artists who support him, from Falwell to LaPierre to McConnell, nor about his base, the red-hatters, Confederate flag wavers, Swastika-wearing torch carriers, the anti-science, anti-intelligence, anti-reality cynics and paranoiacs. No, because it took more than them in a few states to put him over the top in 2016, and more than that across the country to keep him there despite impeachment in 2019.
And I’m certainly not talking about those who will turn a memorial service into a political rally as happened today at the gathering in Manhattan to commemorate the 19th anniversary of 9/11 on the very site where it happened.
I’m talking about people who put up a front of “faith” and “family values” and “neighborliness” and “civic involvement” and “support for local business,” much like the rest of us. Unlike the rest of us, they are drawn to the veiled but unmistakable appeals to their fear of anyone not like them.
And so they fall for the imagined protection of “the beautiful suburbs” against “mobs” from “Democrat-controlled cities” illustrated with videos of violence. Against all evidence, they willingly accept this as the work of all protesters rather than the right-wing Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys who infiltrate protests for that purpose.
Most recently, when he urged his supporters to vote twice, they rationalized that he was “just joking.” Maybe their sense of humor ran out before the revelations of his insults aimed at POWs, amputees and victims of war. Ditto his deception regarding COVID. They’ve fallen silent over those.
Too bad that, in this case, silence is consent. Just as it is each time he demeans someone as sleepy, crooked, little, crazy, lyin’, shifty, wacky, low energy, etc. or calls someone a disaster, a disgrace, a horrible person, a loser, horse-face, human scum, etc. & etc.
To hear all of this during a campaign and still vote for him had to make those upright family values folks feel unclean in 2016. To hear it for nearly four years and do so again?
Maybe, but who would admit it?
This would explain why the polls were so wrong in 2016. Given the hush money paid to prostitutes and the “Pussy Grab” tape, it would have been easy to call Trump the “Pornographic Candidate.”
True, there’s no sensible comparison between a few minutes of arousal and four years of the nation’s economic, environmental, and all other policies, but the unwillingness to admit the choice has the same reason.
In November we will learn something which the polls cannot and will not predict: Will the “land of the free and the home of the brave” overdose in shame.
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Mouth of the River 