Hillary in 2018 #56
I see this and my reaction is “Yawn. Another one.”
I feel nothing about this. There’s nothing to feel. It’s impossible to have any response to yet another invocation of Vince Foster, Benghazi, Uranium One, to say nothing of random things like ‘lies’ and ‘dirty deeds.’ The outrageous will always become familiar when it’s constant enough.
I have to assume it’s different for Garrison. It would be easy to explain this as Benjy using Hillary as an easy distraction when he wants to avoid things like the Russian NRA spy, the Paul Manafort trial or Trump’s random Iran tweetstorm (which was itself a distraction). But simple ‘whataboutism’ doesn’t explain his hearing about Ozyfest. I’d never heard of that before today; had you? He had to have been actively searching for something about Hillary Clinton - probably a Google news alert - to hear about it.
No, I think Garrison needs the hatred. He needs to rekindle his contempt for Hillary on a regular basis because it’s the only thing he feels anymore. The only way he knows he’s alive is when he feels the bile rising. But even then there’s a diminishing results factor at play. Like a rat becoming desensitized to the dopamine surges he gets when he hits a button, Garrison couldn’t have felt the same passion when he drew this as he had back in 2016, could he?
Even if only in the back of his head, there must be the random thought ‘She’s not the president. She’s not in power. It doesn’t really mean anything to go after her now.’
And then he’ll slam his fist down and tell himself ‘She’s running in 2020! I know she is. She’s still relevant, dammit! I’m not wasting my time by focusing on her. I’m not obsessed! She still matters!’
Because what else does he have? He’s an old man. The world is growing ever stranger, with no apparent place for him. He needs something, some reason to exist. Hatred of a woman who doesn’t even know he exists wasn’t what he dreamed of back when he was a child and the world was bright and huge and full of potential, but it’s all he has now.
All he has.
