Enjoying a little stupidity during the stupid season.
Enjoying a little stupidity during the stupid season. Charles Mudede

It is not possible to disagree with Rich Smith's assertion that Christmas should not be about Donald Trump, and also that Christmas in the urban context emphasizes consumerism. But here is the thing we must begin with: Christmas is stupid. The lights, the bells, the trees, the cards, the laps of Santa—all are just stupid. But that is fine. We need to do stupid things sometimes. With the rural Trumpists, however, stupidity is never on holiday. It is there all through the year. It is not absent from any decision a rural Trump type makes: it saturates the information they consume, their ideas about freedom, their religious beliefs. When we see pretty little lights in the yard of a home in a city like Seattle, we get it: this is a break from all seriousness, from the rigors of the rational. But in a place like Kelso, it is all there is. This relentless stupidity. It goes from the lights in the yard to the ballot box to the people they send to Olympia and D.C.. It's not seasonal; it is a tall and hard to chop evergreen of stupidity.