Skip to main content

How Two Montana Democrats Wish They Hadn't Spent Election Day

Late afternoon on Election Day, before the dismal returns began coming in, I was copied on an email from a friend of a friend, a guy I’ve never met in person, but who has been a reader of this blog for several years.

John’s story was terrifying when I first read it, but as that unhappy evening wore on, it grew into a sort of metaphor for what was happening to the rest of us.

Trust me, John’s night was worse than ours. He and his wife Julie spent it in fear for their lives.

They had been living their dream retirement in the wilderness of Western Montana, on a mountainous property four miles from town, but two miles from their own mailbox. To them, this was an idyllic lifestyle, a home in the woods, exactly what they wanted. But in recent months, it had all turned dark, and the blame is entirely Trump’s.

As long as a year ago, John had written privately to several friends, including me, about the extreme Trumpy-ness of his adopted region. There was trepidation, bordering on dread, even then.

Somehow, their accents, their education, and their general worldliness touched off a nerve in their new community, and branded them as what? Elite? Liberal? Intelligent? Whatever it was, they attracted an unexpected animosity that brought real anxiety into their everyday lives.

One night in late August, a neighbor — whom they’d never met — fired four rounds from a shotgun, the last one into their deck. The pellets narrowly missed their three terrified cats and came alarmingly close to John in his pajamas and slippers.

When John confronted this neighbor, he was greeted with three blows to the face, one resulting in possible eye damage. He was called a “liberal faggot,” and told that “the guns come out in November,” presumably referring to the election. This was followed by the bizarre claim that "I talk to Donald Trump every day, and he supports me," as if that explained everything. And perhaps it does.

In this particular part of the country, legal recourse for such behavior is largely unavailable. The law enforcement community does not respond to reports of gunshots — if they did, they’d be backlogged into the next decade. Besides, as one deputy put it, “You moved to Montana without a gun? Are you crazy?”

By now it was clear John and Julie needed to rethink their retirement. In October, they put their home up for sale.

For the first open house showing, the neighbor festooned the property line with huge Trump signs, flags reading “Fuck Biden,” a t-shirt depicting assault weapons, and a sign saying “Deport them all.”

The placement of these items was strategic, intended to discourage potential buyers. The open house, unsurprisingly, was a bust.

A week later, John opened his mailbox to find a hangman’s noose, a fresh animal turd, and a cardboard sign reading “J+J Your dead 54,” but no mail.

The “J+J” came from the sign in front of their property. Apparently, “54” is cop-speak for a dead body. When Julie noted that the sender couldn’t spell, the deputy at the scene asked her what was misspelled.

Meanwhile, with the election approaching, Trump’s campaign was ramping the violent rhetoric up to eleven. The atmosphere in many parts of the state, including theirs, became charged with menace. As John put it:

…[T]here's no talking to Trumpers unless you glorify Trump by the time you utter your second sentence. If you emit the slightest liberal funk, Republicans will steer the subject to violence against your person. And it isn't generic, like "I hope you die." It's specific — descriptions of the guns, knives, ammunition, and so forth. You will be lucky to get back in your car or into your home because a punch to the face is milliseconds away. A conversation with a Republican will last ten seconds, max, and if you haven't declared your loyalty to Trump by then, you will be greeted with violence.

They managed to get several restraining orders against the neighbor, the first of them begrudgingly issued by a judge who’s an open Trump supporter. The neighbor’s guns were to be temporarily confiscated, though it was never confirmed that the order was carried out. Meanwhile, they hurriedly installed spotlights and motion detectors on their property.

On election night, John was sufficiently edgy that he wrote out the basic story I’m repeating here, and sent it to some friends, alarming all of us. He was wondering, quite explicitly, if he and Julie would survive the night.

I’m happy to report that the night was uneventful, though they heard at least eighteen gunshots, presumably in celebration. Still, they were relieved, even as they understood that a reasonably decent democracy might soon be on life support.

Their situation remains fraught until they can sell and leave. Lawyers are now engaged. John now owns a gun for the first time in his life. This is who we are now.

Metaphors are rarely perfect, but given the electoral spasms of that night, this neighbor from hell seems an archetype for what much of our population has become, almost without our knowing.

Who knew we were living among tens of millions of ignorant, racist, misogynist dupes? Yes, we knew they were there, but we had no idea there were so many, or how brainwashed they actually were. Vast swathes of the electorate have been steeped so long in blatant lies and malicious propaganda, they fail to even perceive their own interests, let alone vote with them in mind.

John and Julie understand this better than most. They spent election night actually living out the terror that the rest of us were just starting to imagine.

Our imaginations are quickly catching up with them. 


Comments

  1. I suppose it's a good thing that every Trump supporter in Montana doesn't think that people with differing opinions have no right to live. It would have been more than one lunatic neighbor who acted, scary as that must have been.

    While there are far too many right-wing nut bags, it didn't take long for the left-wing nutbags to start declaring election fraud with all the evidence that the right had in the last election.

    Nutbags gonna be nutty. Nuttin you can do about it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't understand why the neighbor wasn't arrested. Even if the police don't respond to reports of gunshots, punching somebody in the face is assault, and shooting at an occupied structure is a real crime, not the same as firing off guns into the air. Making threats is also illegal.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I suspect that things could get far worse for them, in the unlikely event that the local sheriff decided to comply with the law and arrest the guy, because the other neighbors would be really pissed off.

      Delete
  3. The root of the problem is... Fox Fifth-Column News

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This Election is All About the Women

  As you probably know, I publish this blog on Tuesdays, so I’ve written this piece with no knowledge of today’s election outcome. Under the circumstances, I had to think more than usual about what I wanted to write.  With everyone’s anxiety levels turned up to eleven, I’m quite sure I have neither illumination nor comfort to offer at this late date, least of all to myself. So I’ve decided to talk about the heroes of the election, win or lose: women. If the American Experiment is to be extended for at least another four more years, it will largely be because women willed it to happen. Yes, the Dobbs decision made it easy for them to turn rage into votes. And yes, the rise of Kamala Harris made it easy for them to fall in love with a candidate. But I like to think they’d have stepped up anyway. It was only two weeks ago, though it seems much longer, when Harris dared to appear on Fox for an interview with Brett Baier . Remember? Nobody expected her to ...

Anybody See Any Bright Sides?

Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies. The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please. —    Andrew Coyne , Globe and Mail   Leave it to a Canadian columnist to give voice to my utter disgust. Canadians, of course, had no say in our election, but they’ll be hugely affected by it, and not in a good way. The same goes for Mexico, most of Europe, Ukraine, and — come to think of it — just about every country in the world. We just told most of them to go to hell. Shame o...