This morning, after unpleasant dreams, I woke up to find myself transformed into a giant insect. I got up out of my democratic socialist bed, went to the bathroom, and as I brushed my mandible, suddenly caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.
What I saw shocked me almost out of my licensed Men’s Rights Activist jammies.
There, staring right back at me, was a bleary-eyed Bernie acolyte.
“How did this happen?” I thought to myself, “I’m not campaigning for Bernie. I don’t think Bernie even has the political chops to pull this left insurgency candidacy off. I’m a Bernie agnostic, a Bernie skeptic at best.”
But none of that mattered now. No, it was clear that something, somehow had changed. Despite my conscious thoughts, despite my actual beliefs, against my will, now I had become a passionate, deranged lunatic for Bernie, more Bernie, and only Bernie.
I tried speaking my true mind. I tried explaining my doubts that Bernie could win the primary. But all my words were in vain. The more I wasn’t a Bernie true believer, the more I inevitably was one. Crying, desperate, I skittered under my bed and squatted low to the floor, my viscous tears rolling down the tendrils of my antennae and mixing with the green saliva drooling down my slick shell of a chin, oozing into a fetid pool under my six scaly feet.
And that’s when it hit me. I HAD ALSO BECOME A DUDEBRO.
What’s a dudebro, you might ask? Well, it’s a fratboy sort of Neanderthal, combining the worst of the dudes with the worst of the bros. And just like the Bernie disciple-dom disease, dudebro onset was swift, severe and complete. One minute I was a lifelong ultra-feminist and enemy of male chauvinism and privilege, the next minute BLAM! It was all gone.
In dismay I creaked open my cockroach mandible of a mouth to bemoan my fate, but all the sounds that emerged were unrecognizable. Gradually they coalesced into something resembling human speech, but the only words they shaped were: “Duuuuuude….brooooooo.”
I clacked my insectoid jaw shut in dismay.
Who was to blame for my sudden metamorphosis? Who was behind my mutation into a monstrous freak? If I could only identify the culprit behind it all, the cause of all my suffering.
In a flash, it came to me. I knew. It was Hillary Clinton.
But why? Why was she so afflicting me? Why, back in the 2000s I had swallowed my intense disagreement with her Iraq War support and yes vote and voted for her twice as my Senator (for lack of other alternatives). What had I done to incur her wrath?
I mean, after the 2008 election, for years I had pretty much forgotten that Hillary Clinton existed. Every once in a while, there she was on the TV speaking at another in an endless series of corporate fundraisers or trying to figure out some way to pull Obama into one Syrian war or another. But you know, generally, not in my consciousness.
All this time I had been Hillary-indifferent. Her corporate centrist war-hawking just didn’t interest me at all. It was boring, insipid, and all too pointless. As yet another mainstream politician and dreary embodiment of the system, she inspired almost no emotion in me. She was bland.
But now, again, that all fell to pieces. An electricity filled the air. My antennae quivered and I balled my oily torso into a tight coil, the hardened knee joints of my legs rattling against my carapace. My breaths grew raspy.
And it happened. My mud-black vermin blood transmuted in place to 100% Hillary Hate, coursing through my veins. With every pump of my nasty, icky little heart, my pulse throbbed in my own inner ear: “Hillary...Hate….Hillary…Hate”.
I whimpered, I squealed, I gnawed manically at my abdomen, I scampered around the floor, hitting my head against the legs of the furniture, climbed the walls, shot over the ceiling, ran back down the curtains, dropping onto the radiator so hot it scalded my third left foot. I cried out in my guttural cockroach language to whatever cockroach god I could conjure to purge me of this pestilence.
There was nothing to be done.
My transformation into a Bernie Dudebro Hillary Hater was complete.