Hunter:

Conservatives and assorted hangers-on want to represent the 9/11 anniversarytheir way, to such an extent at this point that they’re not even willing to share the sameday
as the rest of the nation. On their day, they can say vicious things,
and be as reactionary and bitter as they want, and take all the
birthers, teabaggers, deathers, immigrant-bashers and all the other
bottom rungs of ultra-conservative society and lump every political
grievance all together into something that both is and is not
explicitly about 9/11. Because it’s notour 9/11, not the one the nation knows, but adifferent 9/11 of their own making. On a separate day.

I said yesterday that I learned about the Internet from the fandom Internet, and this is one of those times my years on Livejournal and Yahoo Groups become really useful, because what we’re basically talking about here is fannish entitlement. The idea that because you love something, or think you love something, you get to say how it goes. You care about it, therefore you’re in charge of it, and when it becomes blindingly clear that you’re not in charge, that your love and what you think of as your dedication to your favorite thing means exactly shit to the people actually in charge, well, cue the angry ritual burning of the Buffy T-shirts, is what I’m saying.

Absolutely, there’s racism in there too, and a general hatred of Democrats, attention whoring, and the basic human need to yell out one’s frustration lest it choke one in bed, but mostly it’s fannish entitlement. These people are fans of something they call America, a long-running comedy/drama series in which cowboys fight bad guys while fucking prom queens and then feeling bad about it in church, all the while wearing a flag. Trouble is, the people now running that show are taking it in a direction some of its fans don’t like, and those fans are throwing a tantrum in very large part because they don’t have a say and they know it.

Our White House, that sign. Eerily reminiscent of the Villager creed about the Clenis, that Washington “wasn’t his place,” that this belongs to ME because I think it does. I’m not being sympathetic to the many-headed Teabag monstrosity over here. I am saying, this is what happens, and eventually, if you don’t empower pissed-off fans, even a lot of them, they go away. JK Rowling is taking exactly no notice of everybody who hated the epilogue toHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows because she’s too busy counting her giant pile of money. Obama’s the president, he wins. He is under absolutely no obligation to listen to anybody, even lots of anybodies who show up on his law in costumes.

This is, of course, exactly what enrages them, but it doesn’t mean he has to give a shit.

A.

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