“Nothing” is misleading. There’s plenty. I just can’t work up the energy to give any of it full expression. What I have are stray pieces of potential thoughts that I have not yet given the chance to cohere into anything resembling meaningful statements. Fragments of fragments which threaten, if published, to strain the already loose thematic core of this whole endeavor past the breaking point. I even have mostly-complete pieces that I don’t quite feel like polishing and posting just yet. Every time I go to do so it feels somehow inadequate to the moment.
It feels as if there is a 700-pound elephant in an ill-fitting suit that’s squatting in the doorway between my brain and my keyboard, and the only way to free myself from this paralsys is to address it.
I had an espresso machine that at one point was not producing anything when activated; I unscrewed the portafilter and a loose mixture of water and grounds exploded all over our kitchen. The constituent parts had wanted to merge, but a clog had inhibited them from exiting the machine in their final form even as the pressure built around them, trapping them within an intensive field of energy that only released because I dismantled the machine.
That clog can be any number of things at any given time. It’s not exclusive. Sometimes I feel like all I can do is keep the filter tightened until the brew is allowed to pass through, all the while also toying with the notion that the true solution may be to open it all up and see what happens.
That’s what I’m going to do here.
And the clog, it turns out, is the miasma of destructive political vandalism currently underway in the halls of government; a coup being undertaken under our noses by a technocratic kakistocracy made up of the most pathetic gobs of cells to ever gain sentience and crawl out of the mud.
We are witnessing the attempted endgame of the decades-long conservative project to dismantle every minuscule step towards progress we’ve ever made. Trump, his minions, and his supporters gleefully doing everything they can to make life as difficult and as miserable as possible for all of us. Courting death on a massive scale through climate change rollbacks, the promotion of anti-vax lunatics to positions of power over our health services, and the inflammation (and sometimes whole-cloth creation) of international tensions.
There is, as ever, the grimly humorous dimension to this: a bitter has-been, former reality star/inept businessman moves from hawking steaks and racist conspiracy theories to a vanity run for the highest office in the land only to, oops, win once and do such a spectacularly awful job that there was literal dancing in the streets when he lost re-election. In response, he not only tries (again, ineptly) to steal that second election but leads a full-on insurrection during the official certification of his successor. He is in the ensuing years convicted of dozens of felonies, judged by a separate court of law to be liable for sexual assault, all the while doubling down on the most half-baked yet hateful positions any one human could take, his only hint of policy being a truly demented and regressive think-tank concoction that he denies any knowledge of1 even though its architects surround him. And yet not only does none of this disqualify him, it accelerates his return to office because too many people in this country were either salivating and saying “yes, please” or just couldn’t quite drag themselves into a voting booth to vote for a Black woman.
And here we are.
It’s one thing for us to have to reckon with the degree to which Trump is the apotheosis of everything that’s horrible about not just the Republican party but America itself - a crass capitalistic pig, a gauche new money dullard, the very essence of racism and bigotry wrapped in a soggy bag of skin - but the power this gives him to just run roughshod over the whole world is really hard to wrap one’s head around in its dire totality. The thought of a Trump Tower standing over the ruin and decimation of an entire people along the Gaza Strip is just so sickening that it becomes nearly impossible for any reasonable human being to contend with it.
It is indeed, however, as funny as it is despairing that anyone in search of a cult leader would choose…these fucking people. A chain email wrapped in an ill-fitting suit accompanied by a white South African emerald heir (whose ties to apartheid are most surely only speculative, especially considering the recent Trump executive order stating that white Afrikaners are an oppressed class and one of the only immigrant groups we will happily accept on our shores) who has been so conclusively rejected by anyone with good taste or common sense that he’s now fashioned himself into a Bond villain.
The most hateful and stupid people alive are now in charge, and we are all their playthings. Ha, ha.
There is also a grim humor to the fact that the party who for over a decade has insisted that not allowing them to say the n-word is the equivalent of the radical left “doing a 1984” is not just banning books and actively trying to rewrite Black history2 and queer history3 but even insisting that the Gulf of Mexico is and has always been called the Gulf of America (so low rent).
One can also, as ever, laugh ruefully at how effectively the American Christian has been weaponized against any and every value that Christ espoused, but it’s a small comfort against the paralyzing cruelty that they gleefully underwrite against the most marginalized (before it will inevitably turn on them as well). I seem to dimly remember someone reciting some kind of parabolic account in which God separated those who had helped the less fortunate from those who in their devout righteousness had ignored them or increased their suffering, only to accept the former into heaven while casting the latter, in all of their righteous indignation, to hell.
I’ve always liked this passage for the same reason that I enjoy the episode in which Jesus loses his shit on the money changers gathered in the temple - it’s one of the only passages in the gospels that depict retribution. And in both cases, those receiving the Lord’s scorn are his followers.
I did not leave the church because of the type of supposed Christian who can vote for and support a Donald Trump. I did not need human hypocrisy to open my eyes to the extent of a natural developing lack of conviction. The purpose those people did serve for me, however, was a confirmation of sorts for what I was already feeling - if His believers could so easily ignore His teachings, why did I have to bother to resolve my doubts, or ignore the voice inside of myself that told me it was all just not for me.
They’re also a big part of why I’ve never really looked back. They don’t make a particularly compelling argument for the existence of His Divine Grace in any form.
None of this would particularly bother me if they weren’t so hell-bent on using their illusory convictions to dictate policy. If they kept their faith to themselves instead of enacting laws that pressed their theocratic thumbs deep into all of our backs. If they weren’t so easily duped into following the most nakedly conniving and duplicitous politicians ever seen on a national stage.
Politicians who, among other things, are doing everything in their power to fashion a society in which my wife and kids are shut out of public and professional life.
Who are enacting a campaign of erasure against trans and non-binary citizens that will result in hate crimes, deaths by suicide, and the slow withering of the soul that comes from being mandated to live your life as a lie.
Who are raiding Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and every other federal coffer they can find in order to line their own pockets.
We have oft used “humanity” as a synonym for decency. Can we finally relieve ourselves that egregious confluence? I grow so weary of the same old cliches and axioms. When will kindness save us, exactly? It has yet to lift a finger.
I keep coming back to how pathetically lame, ugly, and embarrassing all of these people are. How unlikable they are to anyone with a shred of decency or common sense.
And somewhere in there, in the ease with which they invite ridicule and disrespect, may in part lie our salvation. I don’t know. I don’t feel much in the way of hope or encouragement currently, to be honest. Not in this particular moment in time. All I have is anger, confusion, and fear - and the hope that talking or writing about it will at least break up the coagulation of all of the above and allow me to function a little more for the immediate future.
There will undoubtedly and unfortunately be much more to say about this during the next four (please only four) years. Every now and then I’ll open the pressure valve and let whatever comes out come out. For now, I can move on and back to more pleasant and enjoyable topics.
I guess I had more to say than I thought.
-cs
No surer sign of his innate and inevitable connection to it.
It’s no surprise that Trump would want any mention of the Tuskegee Airmen scrubbed, as the thought of Black men shooting Nazis from the sky must be triggering to him and his base.
The Parks Service has removed any mention of trans activists from the official record of the Stonewall riots and there is even a push to remove the T from LGBTQ+.