(I wrote this before Bannon got shitcanned, so it may not even be relevant anymore. That’s how quickly south things are going in Washington these days).
Don’t get me wrong: I love bashing the Trump administration as much as the next guy. But there is one recurring thing I can’t seem to get behind, and that’s the constant mocking of Steve Bannon’s skin condition. People have done it with Trump for years, and that seems okay to me. Mainly because he doesn’t seem to have a skin condition, his issue stems from vanity: he uses an ungodly amount of makeup.
But there’s a different type of thing going on with Bannon, where people feel ridiculously comfortable bashing a guy with what appears to be some kind of dermatological problem. Although I do see the humour in a white guy with an unlucky skin condition running a news website frequented by white nationalists who think their skin is “supreme,” something feels really off when laughing about it.
Full disclosure: I have eczema. It comes and goes, and it gets worse during certain parts of the year. Although it has gotten slightly better with age, and I can have several months in a row where I feel normal; there are random times where it gets really bad. The difficult thing about explaining eczema to people that don’t have it is a lot of people think it’s really treatable and easy to get rid of. They think you can just put cream on dry skin, and it’s taken care of. It doesn’t fucking work like that. It’s like telling someone with AIDS, “Why don’t you just take a nap? You’re probably just depressed and sleepy. You’ll feel better tomorrow.” The exact cause of eczema isn’t even known. When I was a kid, the only thing I was told by a doctor was that it’s hereditary. It boils down to genetics and environmental factors, e.g. too much heat in the summertime.
Sometimes the shit that doctors give you don’t even work. If you talk to different people with eczema you might find each person has different things that work for them. For me: when I feel itchy or can’t sleep I take a Diphenhydramine pill I got from Amazon awhile ago. It’s a knockoff Benadryl brand, with a bottle of 600 fucking pills. It feels stronger than Benadryl and it makes me sleepy. If they discontinue the brand I don’t know what the fuck I’ll do.
And that’s just the itching. There’s also the issue of the dry skin. I put different creams on throughout the day, and they never seem to work. So a lot of times the only solution is….ride it out. Simply live out my shitty existence. I try to live without stress, and the big one for me: I stay indoors a lot. That is a huge deal, and it has fucked up a lot of things for me. There are certain times I want to go out and get laid or drink at a bar, and I just can’t because I don’t have the confidence and also don’t feel like being seen in public.
So anyway, back to Bannon. When the fuck did it become okay to simply effortlessly make fun of people’s skin? A lot of jokes people make about Steve Bannon are fair and creative. John Oliver is particularly pretty good at coming up with ingenious ways of illustrating how the guy looks. However, the shit about the weirdness of his face isn’t really funny. It feels like we’re all taking a step back into this strange, hive mentality where it’s suddenly the 1800s again and we’re allowed to make fun of people just for being ugly. It feels like I’m being told, “liberals are supposed to laugh at this man's face. We all agree on this.” I say fuck that; hate the guy for his politics, not how he looks. Make jokes about him sucking his own cock, not the shit he can’t control. How would it look if this guy was in the White House and everyone was shit talking him? Not as funny.
Isn’t hating someone based on appearance kind of a white nationalist thing to do?
