The headline of the month—just nosing out The Telegraph’s “Elon Musk: the saviour of mankind or a real-life Bond villain?” for the top spot—comes to us from The Charlotte Observer by way of the Tampa Bay Times and heads a first-person testimony by one Ruth Mayer: “I detest Trump, but a ‘redneck’ fixed my Prius with zip ties.” It wouldn’t surprise me if cultural historians looked back on that line, lifted from the daily paper, as the perfect summing up of the curious contradictions of the Trump era in America. But it wouldn’t be quite the little gem it is without the quotation marks around “redneck” (indicating that the redneck in question had used the word of himself). Or the Prius. Or the zip ties.
Alas, Ms. Mayer, who is a development and communications consultant from Charlotte, describing an incident on her way home, with her teenage daughter, from the Women’s March in Washington, doesn’t get the joke in her own, or her editor’s, inadvertent witticism. Although she writes that she found her experience with the redneck Good Samaritan “humbling,” she was not humbled enough to regard his presumptive political views as worthy of any respect. She is left dangling at the end of her column between what she purported to see as a lesson in loving her neighbor and the virulent Trump-hatred she cannot let go of, and which she still parades as a sign of her own virtue.
A lack of self-awareness has lately
