I can’t stand sore winners. And America is full of them.
I’m sure that being a sore winner is not exclusive to our country, but it is a fascinatingly unpleasant phenomenon to witness within our borders.
I always try to be a happy loser. I’m the kind of person who plays card and board games and trash talks for everyone’s amusement as I go down down in flames with half the Uno deck in my hands or one remaining army on the Risk board in a a single section of Australia.
As far as my professional life goes, I’m not a total loser, but my level of success doesn’t appear to make none of my former high school classmates jealous. I have my goals of various attainability and try to appreciate the journey towards all of them.
But it’s the winners, the alphas, not people like me, who are the ones most likely to fly off the handle, even if things are going their way.
I’ve seen sore winners come and go, but I could never put my finger on what it was about them that annoyed me so much.
And then Trump got elected. That was the start of me working towards a revelation.
With complete and total victory, there came from both him and his constituents no work for a better tomorrow (besides lip service) but instead bitterness, anger, and constant lashing out.
Trump had certain targets he had intended on fighting all along--like women’s rights—but most times he was on the attack as if he was warding off intruders at his gates, both real and imagined.
Even when he actually did wrong and rightfully got in trouble for it, there was always his persecution complex drowning it out for the voters who continued to enable him. Better to blame it on Deep State or something he’ll never stop fighting because it doesn’t exist.
It finally fully clicked recently when I saw the usual suspects in a news photo. Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. All of them sitting in the capitol they would have rather overthrown two years ago. Two of them had just won reelection in congress, one had won the title of Luckiest Bastard for never suffering the consequences of his actions.
And even before my photo alterations, they all looked miserable.
Whether fair or not, they won their battles. You would think they would try to take it to the next level, that they would have continuing goals, further ambitions. You know, the non-sadistic dreams and desires sane people might have.
You might even think that they’d be scheming in their secret observatory hideout towers maniacally laughing and plotting their next schemes. But now, we don’t even get villains that interesting.
Instead, all I’ve seen is infighting, pity parties and various cases of immature grandstanding over nonexistent threats as if these people are in danger of being taken away in the same chains they’re rattling.
That’s when it hit me. That’s the unifying factor of any sore winner: The need to still be seen as a struggling sympathetic figure even when you’re carrying all that heavy gold.
They’re top dogs, but they still want underdog status.
Once they obtain the object of their desire, they don’t know what to do with it. Couldn’t they just go back to being cheered by adoring fans in perpetuity?
To do otherwise would mean admitting they won, admitting they have power to more than flaunt faux victimhood. It would mean trying to do anything to progress any goal, any point of view beyond the world versus them.
And today’s sore winners want anything but that.
These alleged best and brightest want to perpetually rise and rise again without any fall. If they could they would move a stone to make their way out of a false tomb at the start of every week without ever having to get on the cross.
Perpetual victory laps while pretending they are running from barbaric persecutors. That’s all sore winners want these days.
Then again, thanks to Trump we’ve seen what happens when one of them does lose. Almost seems better to ignore these deluded people if they weren’t winning more often than they should.