A cynical sadists hero.
A cynical sadist's hero. Samuel Corum / GETTY

The big story right now revolves around U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz traveling "to Mexico for a family vacation as his home state struggles with a weather crisis." CNN is pushing this story. Fox is, too. Many of Cruz's voters have been without electricity since last Sunday, and many have no conventional way of staying warm during a winter storm that anthropogenic, and many have seen pennies placed on the eyes of loved ones. Mainstream media is milking this new Cruz fiasco for all it is worth.

The story will appall those who provide the networks with center-left and center-right eyeballs. We can also expect the superstars of broadcast news—Don Lemon, Chris Wallace, Rachel Maddow—to be outraged, and to go all out to bring the GOP voters in the dominant Trump wing to their senses. Can't you see, they will say on primetime, these men—Cruz, Perry, Abbott—are not only incompetent but brazenly malicious. They stomp on your interests. They golf when you need their help. And so on.

Those on the center-left and center-right will eat this message up. But the obscene vacation, the outright lies, and the occult call for sacrifices to be made in the name of concentrating the wealth of public goods to the highest parts of society will have no impact on the voters who put Trump, Perry, Cruz, Abbott, and the like in power. They will most certainly vote for these goons again. Indeed, they love that Cruz is going on a vacation at a time like this because it frustrates/stuns the mainstream and moderates on the left and right.


For Trump voters, Cruz is the worm-pussed wound they display with the certainty it will make the "coastal elites" convulse. This is the joy of being being openly walked upon and shat on by your leaders. The famous pee tape may not be about Obama. It could be about the Trump voter. Sadism is the name of the essence and jouissance of their politics.

Those concerned with the goal of matching their politicians with their own interests will never understand this form of political sadism. But I have some idea of it. And it's possible sadism may not be the right word for this context. How do I mean?

Well, once upon a time, I was a Black woman's roommate. She had a white boyfriend. One night, I stumbled upon one of their sex scenes in our shared living room. The two did not expect me. I did not expect them to be kinksters who played white (man) master and Black (woman) servant (she was in chains). Basically, they were replaying a moment from the days of slavery. I said nothing about what I saw, and only later did my roommate make her case in this way: She experienced massive orgasms when playing the role of Black-woman-abused-by-white-man. It was like a volcano of the soul. But is this like the Trump voter freezing in Texas?

Not exactly. In fact, I would say it's something even stranger than sadism. For the Texans, Trump, and Cruz, the busted and unwinterized power grid is a kind of negative truth. The positive truth about this situation says, "This crisis in Texas is due to negligence." But the negative truth says, "Nothing can ever be fixed, nothing will ever work the way we want it to, we will always lose to the 'coastal elites,' it's best to embrace death and the self-destructive negativity of Trump/Cruz/Abbott."

Seventy-four million Americans voted for Trump after over 300,000 COVID-19 deaths (many of them GOP deaths) were unquestionably caused by his indifference. Not long after the pandemic took off, Texas' Republican Lt. Governor, Dan Patrick, told his voters to die for the sake of the economy. And now the former U.S. energy secretary and Texas governor is asking voters to die to keep the busted power grid busted. The left looks with horror at this monstrous submission to the negative. But our horror is only their joy.