Comfort Food, Sucking Blankie, And Other Ways Progressives Survive Donald Trump

Alison Farmer sucked Bobby - her blankie - until she was a surprisingly big girl. She sucked him (she had personalized Bobby since the very beginning) when she went to bed, pulled him out of the drawer in time of stress, and gave him an incidental quick suck or two during the day.  

She refused to let her mother wash him because she didn't want to be without him even for the time of a short wash cycle and more so because she didn't like that cottony taste of clean wool.  She liked the rancid, slimy, garbagy smell of old Bobby, her Bobby, her friend, and no Tide-smelling, fresh piece of cloth would do.  It wasn't him she insisted to her mother, concerned about germs and disease.  

After all Bobby, sucked and slimy and left on the well-traipsed floor turned greyish and nasty.  How her daughter could put that thing back in her mouth was unbelievable.  And she didn't just put in a little way, but stuffed it as far back down her throat as she could.

 

Mrs. Farmer of course read up on the phenomenon and was reassured that the habit could do her daughter no permanent harm.  Buck teeth were a myth, and the environmental hazards in a clean house were minimal. 

'Early oral fixation', wrote Harold Philips, PhD, child psychologist and Freudian, 'too early weaning or a premature and precocious sexuality'.  Deedee Farmer read the article with some interest.  Sex was all about sucking and licking, she knew well, a precocious girl herself, on the borderline of sluttish adventurism all through middle school; but to attribute some latent, innate desire for mature sexual activity at three years old was a bit much. 

'Let her suck away', said Alison's father, a removed parent unusual for today's time of involved fatherhood.  'She will outgrow it'; and of course she did; although she always kept Bobby in her drawer 'just in case', and in fact years later in psychotherapy she produced him as a fortuitous mnemonic aid.  The smell and feel of him untethered long-hidden psychosocial dynamics and her therapy was one of the easiest the doctor had offered in years.  'Devices', he said to himself. 'Blankies, dildoes, and rubber duckies.  What would we do without them?'

The point of this story is not about the psychological journey of a young, precocious woman - Alison turned out all right in the end - but about the generalized need to 'suck Bobby', the term that Dr. Philips incorporated into his theoretical lexicon with permission from Alison's doctor, a colleague with no proprietary interest in such things.  'Sucking Bobby', Philips wrote in the Iowa Journal of Advanced Psychiatric Practice, was something we all did in times of stress and despair.  

Eating Mac 'n' Cheese for week until the office crisis passed and fearsome thoughts of being left on the K Street curb dwindled.  Watching reruns of The Hustler again and again, miming the dialogue, waiting for Piper Laurie's breakdown and her suicide, rewinding the scenes with Bert in the hotel room, entering and reentering a world of real anxiety and anguish until her own disappeared. 

The world was becoming a very complicated place and the choices were mindboggling.  There were choices about health care, auto repair, parenting, exercise regimes, diet, and emotional stability.  Nothing was simple.  The menus in the best restaurants were indecipherable, bits and pieces of foraged grasses, seeds, and leaves; tiny cockles arranged in constellations around a suggestion of foie gras in a raspberry coulis.  

Rather than give Alison a sigh of relief from ordinariness and tedium, these menus only added to her anxiety about the state of the world.  Was Xerophon actually better than Cetecia? Were the differences in braking between a RAV-4 and a CR-X really that significant?  Was indoor pollution really a problem? How purified could air be? Couldn't she possibly have just one day without facing a confusing bevy of choices?

Not only that, the famous contentious political divide in America made matters for an anxiety-prone woman like Alison Farmer far worse.  A committed liberal - a progressive deep to her core, nurtured at college, matured in her days in the non-profit advocacy world of Washington - she had become 'upside-downed' when Donald Trump took office for the second time.  

After almost ten years of apocalyptic warnings, predictions of the end of days, and the increasing power and influence of an evil man, she woke every morning in a sweat. No amount of policy planning, no hours protesting in front of the White House, no massive rallies for Palestine and the demission of the demon of Pennsylvania Avenue could settle her psyche.  She was a bundle of nerves. 

This of course was not the persona to be shown to the people.  Being a progressive in these troubled times meant commitment, solidarity, purpose and absolute conviction.  It was not a time for worriers but for doers; so every morning as she walked out the door, fixed the last wisp of errant hair, and added blush to her increasingly pale cheeks she tried to keep her bugbears at bay, gin up her courage, and face the addling misery of the conservative agenda. 

It was a bad day to be a progressive, for in the scant eight months that Donald Trump had been in office  the very foundational principles of the liberal agenda had been rolled back and discredited.  There were only two genders, the black man was an endemic product of the slums and unlike to emerge, unbridled capitalism was the way to prosperity and equality, peace and compromise were faded visions.  Americans were speaking out like never before.  

The lid had come off clotured speech, and ridicule, irony, and hilarious satire replaced the careful language of just a few months before.  The change had been so abrupt and substantial that progressives like Alison had to wonder if in fact there really was nothing behind their fevered agenda. 

She was shell-shocked, discombobulated, and at loose ends.  The world, already a complex maze of contradictions, bad choices, and terminal threats became insupportable; and while she could do nothing to stop the chaos she could find a safe space for herself. 

'Safe spaces', of course, were the heralds of the new sexual protectionism.  Women were encouraged to huddle together, circle the wagons against the assaults of predatory men, and find strength and solace in sisterhood; but this was different.  A gaggle of worried females was not what Alison wanted, and found herself retreating to the safe spaces of her childhood. 

She curled up into a ball on the sofa and watched reruns of I Love Lucy, fragments of past evenings when her parents sat before the TV console and laughed. She ate more and more meat loaf and creamed spinach, called on Aunt Betty more than she ever did, and watched children play in the park.

'What's come over you, dear?', asked Betty, used to her feisty, outspoken niece. 'Tell Betty', but Alison could only manage some strangled protests about Donald Trump and the horrific revisionism of his world.  Under Biden and a solidly progressive government, all was in order and right with the world.  Conservatives with their chants of individualism, liberty, freedom, and private enterprise were unsettling the calm, conciliatory, peaceful vision of progressives turning an already complex world into a maelstrom. 

She had hit the nail on the head.  Progressivism was so based on naive, febrile ideas and a fanciful historical optimism that when it was so bluntly and rudely challenged, it hit to the very psyche; and the only thing Alison could do was to retreat into her childhood cocoon, sucking Bobby and feeling comforted.  Progressivism was not for the faint of heart, and yet that is exactly what the movement promoted - a faint notion of social congeniality, faux inclusivity, and diversity.  No wonder its proponents were gobsmacked and fearful. 

The Trump Revolution cannot be underestimated.  For all its Sturm und Drang, closure of bureaucracies, deep digging and oil exploration, unleashing of  the private sector, and trimming the sails of hopeless idealists, at heart it drove into the very psychological frailty of the progressive never equipped for rough and tumble, who finds everything but settled science, settled philosophy, settled society unnerving. 

Progressives, despite their show of anger and defiance are shaking in their boots.  The rug has been pulled out from under them.  The earth is moving beneath their feet. 

Sucking Bobby is about all that is left, and so, as the dances of pretty blonde things and their chisel-jawed beaus gets in full swing at the White House, Alison and her poor, unhinged cabal retreat to basement apartments in Dupont Circle, licking their wounds and wondering what hit them.