Crimson Tide

On Face-Eating Leopards and Blood-Drinking Hogs

I heard a news story yesterday that Donald Trump’s gutting of money for scientific research is likely to economically decimate states that voted, overwhelmingly, for him. Alabama, which most of us think of, if we think of it, as the 49^th or 50^th state we’re likeliest to visit, is actually a major center for biomedical research: the University of Alabama at Birmingham receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the NIH annually, making lifesaving progress studying diseases from cancer to Alzheimer’s. It is also the state’s largest employer, meaning that when those researchers lose their grant money and people stop applying for positions at UAB’s labs, the entire city of Birmingham and the rest of the state will suffer: not only administration and staff at the university but local businesses, the real estate market, the tax base—the whole economic infrastructure that supports that work. They will be, as a direct result of the policies of the President they elected, fucked.

This story is a subgenre of revenge porn for progressives called Leopards Eating Faces¹—Trump voters experiencing the easily foreseeable consequences of having voted for Trump. I am a petty and vindictive man and enjoy this genre as much as the next guy, but its satisfactions are mostly pyrrhic—and not only because we’re all going to take shrapnel from Trump voters’ petard.

illustration by Michael McCurdy for Harry Crews’s Childhood: Biography of a Place

A cognitive error I think a lot of progressives make in thinking about Trump voters—me included—is the unconscious assumption that they’re basing their decisions on the same information we have, the same worldview, so we can only helplessly infer, from their actions, that they must be unimaginably stupid or cruel. If they knew what we know, and understood what we do, yet still voted as they do, they would indeed have to be moral imbeciles or monsters—but of course they don’t know or understand any of that. Their lips are sealed open-mouthed around the pumping anus of Fox news and Truth Social and and their Facebook and Twitter feeds and the rest of the right-wing/Russian propaganda machine, eagerly gulping whatever it feeds them. You can of course fault them for not bothering to critically evaluate their sources—or for not wanting to, for too eagerly believing whoever tells them whatever they want to hear—but, based on the disinformation at their disposal, they’re doing what seems obviously reasonable and right to them. By this point it’s no longer a novel insight that right and left inhabit wholly separate, non-overlapping informational universes. The issues that most preoccupy conservatives seem to me largely imaginary or manufactured—the seething brown tide of rapists and escaped metal patients at the border, hulking hirsute men in dresses demanding access to the little girls’ room—while the most urgent existential threats to the real world—like our swiftly tilting climate or daily child sacrifice to the second amendment—they’ve decided not to believe in, or to ignore.

The Face-Eating Leopard fetish appeals to our fantasy that there will inevitably have to come a long-delayed, bitterly gratifying epiphany—what the Greeks called anagnorisis, wherein the tragic hero recognizes his fatal flaw, albeit usually way too late, after he’s already fucked his mother. Having been disabused of the illusion that we might eventually educate conservatives as to their own best interests—if we could just explain things clearly enough, we thought, using emotional appeals or easily-grasped analogies or brightly colored graphics—we now glumly hope that, if nothing else, good old cause and effect, the disastrous real-world consequences of their decisions, will finally force upon them the conclusion that we were right all along. They’ll belatedly find out what “the deep state” actually did once it’s gone, realize that the main beneficiary of all those government handouts was them, finally put it together that their health insurance was “Obamacare.” Hunter Thompson quoted a man who’d voted for Nixon despairing that Watergate was “like finding out your wife’s been running around but you don’t want to hear about it.” It’s hard to imagine anyone who voted for Trump ever acknowledging that their President is a crook. More likely they’ll resolutely keep believing that Trump is saving the country and owning the libs and that climate change is a hoax and big cities are dystopian hellholes and blaming everything on the illegals and drag queens and “DEI” (which is what they get to say now instead of n____r), even as their veterans’ benefits disappear and gas hits $10 a gallon and Galveston sinks beneath the Gulf of America.

By now everyone knows that prose poem by Martin Niemöller that begins “First they came for the Communists…”, cautioning us that it’s indifference to the oppression or suffering of people we see as Other that enables fascism and genocide. Now that I’m seeing it happen around me in real time, though, I think I’ve happened across a more accurate analogy in a grim anecdote from Harry Crews’s memoir Childhood: Biography of a Place. I improbably found a beautifully illustrated edition of this book at an AirBnB I stayed in last week, where it was placed as a decorative prop. In his recollection of growing up in the poor rural south of Georgia in the 1930s, Crews describes the festival atmosphere of hog butchering day. The hogs, corralled into a pen, were fed and kept busy eating as, one by one, they were felled with the flat of an axe to the head, and then their throats slit with a butcher knife. Crews observes that the as-yet-unslaughtered hogs seemed untroubled by the ones being bludgeoned to death all around them, continuing to lustily snuffle up slop from the trough, drawing no connection between their fellow hogs’ fates and their own imminent ones. Sometimes, he writes, “a live hog would […] turn to one that was lying beside it in the trough and stick its snout into the spurting blood and drink a bit just seconds before it had its own head crushed.”

A common criticism of conservatives by the left is that they only ever recognize a problem when it finally affects them or their families directly—that they lack any empathetic imagination. I think the real problem doesn’t even rise to a failure of empathy. Most people are just too brutely stupid to realize they’re no different from the victim standing right next to them—they literally can’t imagine that the same thing might ever happen to them. They even see it as a windfall, a win for them in a zero-sum game, delightedly guzzling the blood from their neighbor’s throats—applauding their layoffs, cheering their deportation, sniggering at their being made to use the “right” bathroom or piously approving their being made to carry their own fathers’ babies to term—not yet apprehending that they’re next.² Their moment of anagnorisis, and ours of catharsis, will never come. Before they ever get it, the axe will come down, obliterating whatever dim consciousness they might’ve had, and yielding up more bacon for their unpitying owners.

1. Derived from the tweet: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for Leopards Eating People’s Faces party”

2. I’m remembering Orwell’s description, in 1984, of an audience laughing raucously at newsreel footage of a raft full of refugees, people exactly like themselves, being machine-gunned by a helicopter.