by Don Hall

I’ve never encountered someone with a third eye — like, a legitimate seeing/blinking eye in the center of their forehead — so I can’t say I know how I’d react.

I used to love the sideshows at state fairs and circuses. Two bits to see the “Flipper Boy,” “The Albino Woman,” and “Zambora - Girl/Gorilla.” I loved the freaks. Not to make fun of although I’m certain these poor souls were not living a life of dignified existence. I loved them. They had an outward manifestation of how I felt inside and I felt a bizarre kinship.

Once on Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive, in my Turquoise Geo Metro with my window down on one of the seven or eight nice days available in the year, I pulled off on Fullerton and looked to my left. There was a dude in the passenger seat of the car next to me with an Elephant Man arm. The arm was huge in proportion to his torso and the skin was bubbly but solid. It was awesome. “THAT IS AWESOME! LOOK AT THE DUDE’S ARM! SO COOL!”

Except that the Elephant Man didn’t really take too fondly to my enthusiasm. Joe and Jason shrunk in their seats and the car sped off as Joseph Merrick called out “Fuck you, man!”

To this day I feel shitty about it.

I comprehend the concept of a black Trump supporter. Ben Carson, Candace Owens, Stacy Hash. I mean, I understand that a black person of either wealth or conservative ideology might see something in it for them. There are race grifters on both sides of the partisan highway making fat cash on nothing but the color of their skin and some sort of “I’m black so I speak for black people” pulpit. The idea of a regular, run-of-the-mill black person who is a supporter of one of the most obviously bigoted presidents we’ve had since Woodrow Wilson is hard to conceive. Like a dude with a functioning third eye or a woman who can change (BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES) into a gorilla, I’m both fascinated and mortified.

Now, I know I’m not supposed to talk politics in the casino. It almost never goes well and gets in the way of their purpose: losing their money. The head sportswriter on our property and I are the only true liberals in the joint so he and I once in a while commiserate our disdain for the GOP, Moscow Mitch, and the Trump Dump.

He and I are in an in-depth discussion of my assertion that there is hope to be fostered. He is less optimistic. We talk about the work of Steven Pinker and of using the data available to mark progress rather than the lived experience of those victimized. Then the unicorn walks up to place a bet.

He’s a young black guy, maybe 25, wearing his mask.

“You know,” he interjects “if people look at me they make a lot of assumptions. I’m black but I don’t get the whole Black Lives Matter movement. I mean, Trump has done a lot of good. A lot. It wouldn’t matter what he did, CNN is gonna make it sound bad.”

Is that a...third eye? The words and the image are not...in...sync...

My mouth, known internationally as an unfiltered spew of whatever is in my head, wants to pop off with “WHAT?! Are you fucking STUPID? Trump is a menace. A monster! How can you, a young black man, POSSIBLY BE AGAINST BLACK LIVES MATTERING?” The cost of a decade of social media has my Twitter-brain engaged as a non-thinking weapon that I am compelled to unleash. I stop my mouth and focus on the fact that I am staring at an almost mythical creature. If he were the Flipper Boy, I’d have more curiosity and wonder. I cork the troll in my brain.

“That’s interesting. What good do you think Trump has done? Not to be combative but in my eyes I seriously cannot think of one thing.”

I look into his eyes. No animosity.

“He cut taxes. He is standing up to all the countries that have mooched off of the American military forever. I mean, I don’t really care who wins next month. I think they’re both the same. Not gonna change my life either way.”

All the information I have in my head from years of confirmation bias plus the stakes I see in this election collide with both my sense that an argument on the casino floor is verboten and the recognition that this guy is earnest and not looking for a fight. Years of writing about the need to control our kneejerk responses is key to a unified and functioning society slap me in the face like that Batman meme.

“I can see that. I don’t agree but I can see your logic. Maybe I don’t care for Trump and I like Biden because I wouldn’t want to sit down and eat a meal with Trump but I think a dinner with Biden would be a fine time.”

He laughs. “Yeah. Trump would hog the conversation and make the whole time about himself!”

“And he’d probably chew with his mouth open!”

“So you’re voting Biden, huh?”

“I am.”

“You don’t think he’s too old?”

“Well, Trump is seventy-four and Biden is seventy-seven so I think that point is moot. I think they’re both too old but the choice seems to me to be between that old man screaming at kids on his lawn and the old man who springs for all the kids to get ice cream when the truck rolls by.”

“The truck?”

“The ice cream truck.”

“Never heard of it.”

The sportswriter who has been silent, pipes up. “Don is a lot older than he appears.” We all three laugh. The unicorn places his bet. Pleasantries are exchanged as well as a fist bump. He moves to the bar.

I still don’t truly understand the idea of a young black American supporting Donald Trump. I do understand a disdain for #BLM as that movement shifted in the last year from advocating police reform to a wholesale push to eliminate police altogether and an academic orthodoxy of racial separation rather than unity. 

On the other hand, I am a classic leftist who believes that the disease of our experiment is income inequality and the fight between Wall Street and Main Street rather than racial divisions, who believes in reparations but bristles at justified riots and looting, who does not embrace socialism whole cloth but looks for a healthy blend of socialism and regulated capitalism, who is seen by the Far Left as a racist Nazi and by the Far Right as a drooling libtard.

It occurs to me that I might be the freak after all.