Alison Dagnes - Super Mad at Everything All the Time: Political Media and Our National Anger

Cover design by Fatima Jamadar

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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In the fall of 2015, I was waiting for my daughter at her volleyball practice, which was held in a community gym in my small, central Pennsylvania town. This was Rec League volleyball so a small group of 13-year-olds was practicing their serves and spikes, and an even smaller number of parents were sitting in bleachers waiting for their children. There were so few parents in attendance, none of whom I knew, that I was able to sit alone at the top of one set of bleachers and grade papers. Out of the periphery of my vision, I saw a man whom I did not know turn to look up at me. He had been sitting much lower down on the next set of seats, and when he moved his whole body to face me I raised my head and made eye contact. He opened his mouth and spoke:

Ill tell you what. This country is gonna be MUCH better when Donald Trump is president.

I was caught totally off guard, completely surprised, without an idea of what to say. I must have stared at him blankly because he went on:

And Ill tell you what. When Obama was elected, I KNEW this country was gonna fail and it did. You know why? Because hes not an American. And he dont even salute the troops!

At this point, I was able to get out a What? and the man continued:

I gotta friend at Letterkenny [Army Depot] and he says Obama dont even salute the troops and my friend served in Iraq and he knows that Obama dont even salute the troops and hes not a real American.

I realized at this point that my mouth was actually hanging open because I was flabbergasted; I could not figure out where this came from, who this guy was, or how to respond. Luckily, I did not need to reply because the man was wound up and spinning like a top:

And Ill tell you what. I got nothing against women. I like women. My boss is a woman and she dont take no bullshit from no one and I like women. You know what Im saying? So I dont got no problem with a woman president. Not Hillary -- shes shady as fuck. But a woman president? I got no problem with that. You know who would make a good woman president?

Blank stare.

Sarah Palin.

In what felt like ten minutes but was probably closer to two or three, my new friend railed against the Democrats, Obama, illegals, and Hillary in a stream of expletive-laden vitriol and anger. I was dumbfounded and literally rendered speechless, so totally thrown by his fury and by the topic that I couldnt find the words to respond to a single thing he said. As abruptly as he began, the man stopped talking, motioned to the stack of graded papers on my lap, and asked: You a teacher? I nodded. Thats cool. And with that, he turned back around and focused once more on his iPhone.

I could not believe what had just happened, so I did the only thing a smarty-pants professor would do: I went home and I blogged about it. The next day, I told the story to my students and they laughed (especially at the Hillary is shady part) while they nodded and said Yeah. Thats nuts. But hes right, Donald Trump is great, which pulled me up short again. Wait. What? I was well-versed and well-read in American politics, the system, and the politicians; I knew the lay of the political land. Furthermore, I read The Washington Post and The New York Times every day. I had push alerts on my phone from CNN and Politico. Donald Trump was great? The guy who said Mexicans were rapists? The guy who said John McCain was not a hero because he was a prisoner of war? The guy who made fun of the disabled, used explicitly racist and misogynistic language? That Donald Trump? What was I missing?

Turns out, I was missing a segment of the country who got their news from different places than I did. At the time this happened, I acknowledged (in my blog post) that I lived in a filter bubble where very few people thought about Sarah Palin anymore. I admitted that we were deeply divided as a country and I wrote: We have stopped talking to each other and have started talking past one another. At least I got that right. Almost everything else, I got wrong. I woefully underestimated the power of the media, especially the outlets that I did not consume. I did not watch