Last weekend, I was at a birthday party for an in-law of an in-law. I’ve been at them many times before. They have a great place and they put on great parties. And I am invited, largely because I make some dynamite side dishes. It is basically on a farm and it has its own bar. I bring my own beer, however, because they never have what I consider acceptable beer. The image above is from the bathroom of this private bar. I don’t present it because it is unusual. It is quite common, and I mean that in many ways.

The thing is, the people who own the place are quire comfortable. Both husband and wife have good, high paying jobs, even though I don’t think either of them have college degrees. I assume together, they bring home about a quarter million a year. They both work in professions that are highly regulated by the government. I mean that not in the “they just can’t get ahead” sense. I mean it in the “these are professions that are highly lucrative because of government interference” sense. They both have expensive hobbies, which they not only have no trouble affording, but they aren’t so exhausted from their jobs as to be unable to do them.

I’m not saying they are bad people, because they aren’t — at all. And they are good neighbors. They are the kind of people who help out their friends and neighbors. But they are representative of what I think of as the last gasp of the American middle class. They are the very last generation who have been able to live the American dream without being enormously lucky or skilled. And every time I go to one of their parties, I see a bunch of people who are just the same. Each and every one of them is convinced that they did, in fact, build that.

So sure: piss on Obama. Of course, why not piss on Bush when he was in office? I went to parties at their place when Bush was in office, but I didn’t see any George W Bush urinal targets at that time. No, it’s just the Democrats who have to be peed on, even though it is overwhelmingly the Republicans who are responsible for making the world enormously worse for people just like them who showed the bad judgement of being born just ten years later. But the sticker didn’t make me angry — just sad. What foolish people.

Before seeing this splendid example of urinal art, I overheard two in-laws discussing Donald Trump. They agreed that they liked Trump, because he was telling it like it is. I said nothing. I wanted to say, “I think Trump is the best Republican candidate out there.” That’s what I actually think. I like the fact that Trump wants to protect Social Security and Medicare. And I like that he is skeptical of trade deals. But I knew these guys weren’t talking about that. In fact, I knew these guys didn’t have a clue as to what Trump thinks about these matters.

It became all the more clear when they started badmouthing Mexicans. That was really interesting, because we were on this little farm. My in-law isn’t a farmer. He grows grapes, but it is more accurate to say that he has other people grow grapes for him. And that very morning, there had been a crew of Mexicans picking the grapes — getting poorly paid for it, no doubt. But these two guys talking get paid really well and don’t work that hard. But they were sharing their contempt for how hard these Mexicans worked who made perhaps one-fifth as much with no benefits whatsoever.

Conservatives love to talk about future generations and what we need to do for them. But these two conservatives don’t give a damn about future generations. They don’t even have a clue how well they have it. They can pass off the fact that younger people are struggling as the result of them not working hard enough. But I knew all of these people when they were young, and if anything they even bigger slackers and drug users.

They are right to want to urinate on pictures of Barack Obama. Despite all of his deficiencies, Obama really does want a more fair society. And in a more fair society, these jerks would be doing far worse.