Dangerous Dumbfuck-ness in the New Year

So now that we can see the sun rising on the irradiated nightscape of the Asshole Presidency, we’re faced with a few inevitabilities. Certainly Biden will attempt and fail at being all things to all Americans, and will certainly fail at doing something, anything, legislatively worthwhile, however much the sincere effort will feel to many of us like the sweetest of handjobs, after being trapped in a POW camp dedicated to our lonesome suffering. Certainly the news will feel less catastrophic and in fact rather dull, which for the media venues will surely pose a crisis. Certainly a few things – namely, foreign relations – will gradually and professionally improve, insofar as that stuff matters as much as a flea’s shit to most Americans.

Certainly, though, our real problems will not desert us. Namely on one hand, That Asshole will not vanish into a quiet ex-presidency – he will dedicate what little life he has left to regaining the public stage in whatever manner he can conjure; the Asshole Network’s programming will continue, even if its ratings will dip, given that the largest chunk of its audience so far – the portion that vehemently wishes him an early, painful death – will be happily tuning out for good. A sizable audience remains, of course, and that means the carnival of drooling horrors will at least attempt to be all up in our grill, on various media, every day. Our consolation is that the media will not be obligated to cover it, and we might be able to go a month or two at a time without hearing That Name.

On the other hand, the larger dilemma sits on our sleeping chests like a succubus: those people, that voting block, the Americans amongst us who will still tune in to the Asshole Network (by which I don’t necessarily mean Fox TV, a separate and parallel infection) and believe everything it tells them, as though they (as adults) have managed to live in a media-saturated America for 30 or 40 or 50 or more years, and in the process have learned as little as a chicken’s recklessly running body once its head’s been cut off.

Right now the punditry is all aflutter wondering how this rather enormous wedge of America will assert itself in the next four years, as well they might. As I’ve groaned about before, there is for me almost no fathoming this America’s vicious, quasi-Christian, bigoted, bullet-spitting ineptitude – a panel of Nobel-level anthropologists and cognitive scientists need to train their studies on this cohort, to decipher exactly why and how they confuse reeking bullshit for wisdom, faith for knowledge, pain for triumph, stone-cold bigotry for “reality,” blind narcissism for justice, plug stupidity for savviness, flat-out ignorance about government and society and history and the law for “know enough,” “one issue” malevolence for righteousness, con men for statesmen, felonies for business, nepotism for biz-as-uszh, illegally pocketing tax dollars for no big thing, hilariously dumb conspiracy theories for “what’s really going on,” and being lied to by the worst liar in this country’s legacy of liars for hearing the gospel truth.

But that’s a fantasy – we’ll never figure them out for sure. They don’t even know, which is only the most vital of the many things they don’t know. For perhaps the first time, it’s clear to all of us, even those who once thought Obama would save us, that no politician or political movement will be able to defend the country we’d like this to be from the country it absolutely is. The near future may look like a relief, a return to dull, ordinary, and quietly compromised political reality. But soon thereafter the goblins will rise up again. They will not disappear, they will not be quiet, they will not relent until everything they don’t understand, from disease research to diplomacy to tax law to immigration policy to the economy to justice, will be vandalized into dust, like the ashes of the public tax dollars wasted on these yahoos’ public schools over the last 70 years. If anything, the last four years prove that they have a halfway decent shot.