Where We Are This Week
Electing Hitler, killing America, and nobody seems to care! Still!
Nobody Cares Part Deux
Picking up where I left off last week, I meant to write a couple more things down.
But first of all, you know what I’m saying? Donald Trump has survived not one, but two assassination attempts and we’re not all talking about it all the time.
One of them nearly killed him and we, the public, have no idea who the kid was that shot him. No manifesto, no real social media history, nothing. If, if, it had been a darling of the media that was attacked, we would know exactly how many Tucker Carlson videos they watched.
Or what about the fact that he was in a BlackRock ad? And the second guy, the golf course attempt, had been working with the Ukrainian Foreign Legion — and was very well-known by American media companies.
I’m not suggesting anything. I’m not sure what it is I would be even implying, but shouldn’t we think it ought to be demanding a little more attention than it’s gotten? Nobody cares. I don’t either, really, it’s just something I think about when I check to see if Donald Trump has had another attempt on his life yet.
Maybe it’s the phones.
Thom Yorke, frontman of Radiohead, suggested in an interview that was the case; that when you see the bad man on your tiny screen in the palm of your hand — in this case it was Boris Johnson — you treat him with the level of seriousness that a handheld apparition would deserve.
Everything has been shrunken down. Learn how Israel is committing genocide in a sixty-second video. Watch this lib get owned by facts and logic with one sentence. Share this, like that. Online content isn’t an opportunity to educate yourself; it’s a chance to earn the top comment on the video — or regurgitate the same bilge on your own timeline.
It’s the meme-ification of real life — sorry, IRL. Have you ever been in a conversation that feels like a Twitter exchange? It’s what happens when an entire generation learns how to communicate with their thumbs instead of their minds. It’s what happens when you can cultivate an image of yourself online that’s more important than the flesh-and-blood avatar sitting on the couch.
Before I go to that protest, how would I tell this story on Instagram? How would it look on my LinkedIn profile? Is it sex work if I’m just posting reviews of OnlyFans accounts?
No one cares because we can’t. We don’t have the time. There’s an endless stream of notifications vying for your attention every moment a synapse fires, telling you to check your phone. Texts, calls, alerts, emails, advertisements, calls-to-action, alarms all demanding your immediate attention. We can’t care because we’ve granted instant and perpetual access to the most banal of interactions.
Or the television! My goodness, the television. If people would talk about the national debt even half the amount of times I’ve been asked if I watch Yellowstone, we’d be on our way to fixing the problem right now. I guarantee you I could get more people to explain to me the plot of Game of Thrones than could tell me what the Electoral College is.
We’ve had four years to come up with a better candidate for president and all we’ve managed to do was find someone that is actively worse than Joe Biden and a man who still refuses to admit he lost in 2020 — when almost anyone from either party could beat either one of them.
You might care, I might care, but as a nation, it’s obvious that we don’t.
And one more thing!
We were all supposed to be toning down our rhetoric. Like a fight between family members that gets out of hand, someone is always called a communist, and the game of Monopoly is abandoned before a winner can be established.
Hitlerian epithets are being handed out as freely as candy at Halloween. Trump is Hitler, Vance is Goebbels so I guess that would make his chief opponent, Kamala Harris, Joseph Stalin?
I can’t keep up when we get into historical name-calling. Let’s try again. If Kamala Harris is Xerxes, does that make Trump King Leonidas? If Harris is Castro, then that would make Trump Bautista — or Che?
Wait, I’ve got it. If Trump is Harvey Milk, then Harris is Sean Penn.
Look, I know that the FBI ran a smear campaign against MLK and probably had a hand in his murder, the CIA probably got JFK and Lennon (really? probably!), and definitely was behind the Manson murders, but that doesn’t mean a crazy person couldn’t be encouraged to do something insane without the intervention of a clandestine organization.
If we would like to avoid political violence, which I still think is a pretty admirable goal, then we might consider not constantly invoking the name of the person that is colloquially understood to be a synonym for ‘most evil person in the entire history of the world.’
But what do I know, I’m just a poor man’s Hunter S. Thompson writing about George McGovern.
Democracy is on the ballot
I’ve come around to the possibility that this election is, indeed, existential — just as the pundits on the right and left would have you believe. As I just mentioned, as a nation, our indifference is staggering.
But you don’t need a nation to affect real change.
The majority of Americans didn’t march on Washington with MLK, nor were they willing to. The majority of Americans supported the Vietnam War. Was I there? No, but I have listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The same can be said of my compatriots and the Iraq War.
I very much like Batya Ungar-Sargon, but I can’t say I share her faith in the ‘wisdom of the crowd.’ I never wore Phat Farm shoes or Hollister, so maybe I just have an innate aversion to trends, but still.
You, me, and the few of us who still do care might be able to push things over the edge in the next five years or so, but even that lemon feels like it’s running out of juice. I don’t know how many more Kamala Harris interviews or slices of pizza from Costco I can stomach before I give up, create a TikTok account, and pursue a career as a lifestyle influencer.
Those of us who still do care, those of us who still have a stake in the future, are obligated to do so because democracy is literally on the ballot this November.
Not because either candidate will become an explicit dictator or because one might get rid of the filibuster, stack the Supreme Court, add a couple of new states to the union, limit free speech, or limit religious freedoms — okay, I’ll stop before I convince myself otherwise — but because we’ve been saying that it is.
If the Left thinks that democracy is on the ballot in a couple of weeks, then they’ll have to be on their best behavior come January if Trump retakes the Oval Office. If there are riots in the street, chants of ‘not my president,’ then the claims that democracy has failed isn’t exactly a proclamation but an admission.
The same goes for the Right. I’ll be the first to admit that I will find it hard to believe that over half of the country would vote for Kamala Harris to be the leader of the free world, but inevitable claims of a stolen election if she wins tacitly imply that the Right was only ever willing to accept one result.
It’s existential because we believe it to be. The American experiment is only an idea, a living, breathing abstraction taken from the minds of some of the most brilliant men the Western Hemisphere has ever produced. What sustains that figurative being, however, is our collective belief in it.
That tired old Nietzsche quote that says ‘God is dead,’ isn’t all he said. The full quote is this, “God is dead…And it is we that killed him.”
“What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives,” he continues. “Who will wipe this blood of us?”
So, too it can be asked of America.
One hundred years from now, when we’re poisoned and satiated in our boutique, virtual reality immersive pods in between missives from the Great Eagle Supreme Leader, the ghost of the dream that was America may still linger in the most stubborn of us.
A pang of remorse flashes through our skulls as we reach for our government-rationed SSRIs, Sam’s Little Helper, and in the intervening moments, we’ll realize that it was under the weight of our indifference, our desire to be entertained, our lack of faith, and the absence of our love that she was suffocated.
To a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA