I’m not going to write this from a perspective of trying to understand what a lot of women, LGBTQIA+ and minorities are thinking in the aftermath of the United States electing Donald Trump as President for the second time in eight years. This is only my perspective, my feelings, expressed in a medium that I express myself best at.
Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning, was anxious for me. I was hopeful that the enthusiasm for Kamala Harris was real. I was optimistic that enough people were sick of Donald Trump that we’d send him and his hate packing from the Oval Office. As I followed the results coming in, it felt like 2016 all over again. Yes, the “Red Mirage” of 2020 shifted into hope, but as I was waking up throughout the night, I knew the same was not going to happen again. America made their choice, and it was a distressing one.
I am a straight, white male in Georgia. It’s a fairly good chance that I will be fine in Donald Trump’s America. My anxiety was partially for me, and my emotional outlook on the next few years, but it was more for friends and family who will be impacted by Project 2025, the Republican blueprint that will be enacted in January 2025, whether we like it or not, and will take us on the path towards authoritarianism. The women in my life whose bodily autonomy has been gradually taken away from them over the years. (Seeing men/boys online being emboldened to say, “Your body, my choice,” in the wake of Trump’s victory has been sickening, which is not to say a subsect of the male gender wasn’t already appallingly misogynistic before Tuesday.) The members of the LGBTQIA+ community whose rights to exist have been under constant threat, and will see further turbo charging of those attacks under an emboldened Trump-led GOP. (The anti-trans ads that have been on TV this election cycle have been especially disgusting.) The POC whose voting rights have always been tenuous, at best, in this country. (Why we didn’t nuke the filibuster to secure voting rights in 2021 will always be a mystery to me.) Antisemetic conspiracy theories and grouping all muslims in with extremists. And the immigrants who came to this country, but could find themselves thrown out due to plain old xenophobia, regardless of how they entered. (It’s sad how many people found the images of family separation we got under Trump acceptable.) When we vote, it should not just be for the world we want for ourselves, but for our friends and loved ones.
I have voted Democrat in every election I’ve voted in since 1996, my first election after I turned 18. That doesn’t mean that my politics were set in stone by that point in my life. My father was conservative, my mother is/was liberal (due to her progressing dementia, she has not voted since 2020). I was in Boy Scouts at a time when homosexuals being in Scouts was a big controversy highlighted by former Eagle Scout James Dale, who was a scoutmaster and happened to be outed in a local magazine; his case went to the Supreme Court, which affirmed BSA’s discrimination, which was finally lifted in 2013. I remember when the pastors at our church came out in support of homosexuality, causing an exodus from our church; suddenly, people I saw at church on a regular basis were gone, and it was surreal to see. Part of why I leaned Democrat basically boiled down to the fact, though, that the Republican agenda- taken over by their “Contract with America” in the 1994 midterms- just did not appeal to me. When I took political science in college, it happened to be during Clinton’s impeachment trial; it was a fascinating time. And with Columbine (which happened in my 3rd year at Georgia State), gun culture in America was something that became a discussion point, and even though I am comfortable around guns personally, and my father was very much a gun enthusiast, seeing the inaction on gun control in the 25 years since has been yet another cause of anxiety, not because I was worried about myself, but for everyone else who might have to go through a tragic mass shooting (or ANY shooting, for that matter). This is all before the 2000 election, 9/11, the war on terror and Iraq, and Obama’s election, and the ugly racism it brought out of the woodwork. My politics are not something I had pumped into me by a parent; they are my own, forged over my life as I’ve seen how people’s fear and hate can be weaponized into action against others. Ultimately, I’m left-leaning (or liberal or progressive or whatever the Hell the correct term is now) because those policies and ideas look to help other people live better lives, not because of some reward we might get for doing so, but because it’s the right thing to do.
In the late ’80s, early ’90s, it was not popular to be in Scouts, but it was important in helping me figure out the type of person I wanted to be, as well as growing a circle of friends after we moved to Georgia in 1988. The Scout Oath and Law were not just words to me, but a guide to be someone who valued others, and wanted to be a part of creating an equitable society. Admittedly, I would say that I wasn’t quite sure how to do that, at the time, but kindness was the easiest way forward. I tried to be part of leadership in school, band and Scouts, and was willing to help when I could. In 1992, I earned my Eagle Scout, and in 1993, I was inducted into the Order of the Arrow, which is “based on American Indian traditions and is dedicated to the ideals of brotherhood and cheerful service.” When I felt like I had to reinvent myself after my hospitalization in 2007, and my mental and emotional issues came to a head in 2008, one of the parts of that was going back to what mattered to me in Scouts, and how that could guide me moving forward.
Even if he ran as a democrat, I’d like to think I would never vote for Donald Trump. His obvious narcissism, which can be extended to his convictions for election interference earlier this year, as well as his election denial in 2020 which led to the awful events of January 6. His history of racism, up to his promotion of birtherism during Obama’s presidency, and including everything he’s said about POC since he came down that escalator in 2015. His history of sexual harassment and assault (of which he has been adjudicated for in the case of E. Jean Carroll), and general misogyny. (Yes, my first Presidential vote was for Bill Clinton, but honestly, if he were ever imprisoned for any of his past assaults, or anything he may have done with Jeffrey Epstein, I’d be fine with them losing the key to his cell.) His bullying nature. He is the bully in every ’80s teen movie we saw misfits and the protagonists get the better of in the end- Hell, he was literally the model for alternate 1985 Biff Tannen in “Back to the Future Part II.” As someone who was bullied in middle school and high school, whether it was for being in Scouts, or band, or because I was relatively introverted and easy to pick on, or whether it was the scar from my life-saving surgery when I was born, Trump has always been a non-starter in every way for me. All of these are character issues before you even get to his politics, which have extended each of these things into public discourse.
I know many friends and family who are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, and they mean a lot to me, because people mean a lot to me. For me, however, voting against Trump has never been a point of principle when it comes to political ideology, but a fundamental moral choice. Even if someone votes for Trump for policy reasons, they should carry the weight of his character along with that, along with the weight of how those policies- be they draconian abortion bans, repealing Obamacare, or mass deportation- make the lives of people more anxious. The most unsettling thing about Trump’s win in 2016, and his win now, is for how few people his character issues- which have always been up front, for the world to see- appears to matter. If that is the case, then we are reflecting a society where our own interests matter more than the interests of others, because nobody’s interests matter more to Donald Trump than his own. That’s been true in business and in politics, and it’s not going to change for the rest of his life. Then again, maybe we should have been prepared for this in 2020, when COVID revealed a self-centeredness to the American character (protesting lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates) where our personal freedom to do whatever the Hell we wanted meant more than the physical health of our fellow man. Donald Trump is not making America great again- he’s revealing how narcissistic American culture is, and likely always was. After all, this is a country built on the backs on slavery, and on the land stolen of Indigenous tribes that our ancestors all but wiped out in the name of “manifest destiny.”
The picture that is accompanying this post, I saw on Wednesday morning, when I was really in my depression about what had just happened. It gets to the heart of what makes the support of Trump so distressing for me- from a young age, my parents raised me to be someone for whom work ethic and caring about others mattered; how can it not matter for millions of my fellow citizens when we elect the figurehead of our government? This isn’t to say Kamala Harris (or Democrats in general) are not without their flaws, especially when it comes to some policies and messaging, but from the moment she entered the race, it was obvious that she was the polar opposite of Trump in terms of who she would care about moving forward; it was about everyone, not just herself. That’s the difference that matters most to me between the two.
Sonic Cinema is more than just a movie review website for me- it’s a platform for which to share my worldview, and my emotional journey, and that is where this blog comes from. Apart from the title, which is from the TV show “Firefly” to mentioning Biff Tannen and teen movies of the ’80s, movies and pop culture have not been part of this discussion. That is because this was something I needed to write, in the wake of what happened this week. In 2016, after Trump was elected, seeing Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival” was a much-needed catharsis; its emotional story about contact, and how the world had to come together to resolve its issues, helped me heal some of the feelings of hopelessness I felt in the moment. On Wednesday, we had a press screening of Rachel Morrison’s upcoming boxing drama, “The Fire Inside”, about Claressa Shields, the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal for boxing. It helped some, because I will forever be a sucker for the underdog sports drama, but in the future, something weightier will be needed to truly get away from the hopelessness this week has brought. Writing this has helped, and Sonic Cinema will help in the future, because it allows me to freely champion films, filmmakers and stories that mean something to me, and will hopefully find an audience in the future. One of the best decisions I ever made when it comes to Sonic Cinema was to begin accepting filmmaker submissions of their own films. It helped me expand my views on cinema, expand my circle of filmmakers, and I feel like I am championing the underdogs of filmmaking, rather than just relying on the best known films to get clicks.
I would like to close this with another quote from a beloved sci-fi franchise that sums up my feelings in this blog- “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.” I don’t plan to forget that.
Thanks for listening,
Brian Skutle
www.sonic-cinema.com
