Merrily We Go to Hell

Welcome back to the coulrodrome (that’s my coinage, extrapolated from coulrophobia, the fear of clowns) – but of course, it’s me who has returned, having enjoyed devoting a mere half-watt of attention over the last few years to That Asswipe’s mounting indictments, which have indeed accumulated like pustules on a plague victim. The Biden administration has likewise only summoned tedium. Sacred, blessed tedium.

But now we’re back, and everyone, particularly the media, knows it. The media, it should be noted, are beginning an amok frenzy of warning and fear and admonishment largely because the industry’s fortunes right now are tied to the thrill of disaster That Asshat brings with him like the stink of vomited jug wine. The Biden paradigm has, relatively speaking, been a revenue disappointment. It was a relief to us to not have to grasp our news outlets with white knuckled anxiety, for a few years. Now, the goblins are returning, and 2024 will surely become a news-world bonanza.

Which is predictable, and unimportant. Long should newspapers be bought and read. The irradiated blast zone that will be this year offers its own promise of Dantean hellscenes, but for now, we have That Asshose blathering like he’s the reincarnation of George Wallace, we have the Republican Party continuing its deevolution into what rat-experiment scientists call a psycho-cannibal “behavioral sink,” and we have, still, the something like a quarter of American voters – their votes now count more than yours or mine – who have become full-on cult members, screaming their memes all the way to the edge of the lava pit.

Much of what can be done, to terminate this pox on our sociopolitical carcass, is being done, as far as I can see. All we can do is fine-tune the discourse, so it might actually make a difference somewhere, sometime – and I’d begin by outlawing a battery of cliches the op-ed artists are already overusing. Guys, stop talking about “the American project,” “the American experiment,” “the American dream, “our principles and ideals,” and so on. Stop asking, “do we still believe” in the Founding Fathers’ lofty rhetoric, or even the hallowed idea of this country being built from, and on the backs of, a rainbow mess of immigrants, from every point on the globe. Which it was.

But moaning in this way is problematic for two reasons. One, it’s propaganda, most of it, and too many Americans smell the bullshit – just in the last 120 years, there have been too many wars, too many occupations, too many torturings, too many civilian dead, too many tax dollars delivered to autocrats, too many corrupt politicians, too many bombings, too many coups, too many foreign assassinations, ad infinitum. Since 1945, American skullduggery has left every other nation-state in the dust, even the USSR, and no one, not even children, can any longer swallow the patriotic homilies I was school-fed in the halcyon days of the Ford Administration. Objectively, by an alien, say, “the American project” could only be defined as a variegated mission of butchery and profit, with a sugary compote of mythmaking on the side.

Two, no one cares. The rest of Americans who aren’t historically aware enough to be appalled? They think of themselves as rugged individualists, driving pristine fake work pickups and wearing cowboy hats even though they’ve never touched a cow – their America is more about John Wayne than James Madison. They don’t think about ideals, the American whatever, the wisdom of the tripartite system, checks and balances, etc. They watch Fox News, and work their jobs, and drink their cheap beer, and think “American” means whatever privilege they can see that their whiteness has garnered them. If the media – by which I mean, the portion of it run and written by decent human beings and not power-hoarding pieces of shit – keep it up, leaning into the rhetoric of ideals and pluralism, then this whole ship may end up going down to the ocean floor.

I’d talk about fairness, about law and order, about culpability, about the very real labor shortage and workforce shrinkage in the US – we need those immigrants. I’d talk about money. I'd talk about expertise. I’d wonder why That Asstool was suddenly barking about NATO in 2016 – NATO? Had any politician even mentioned NATO for decades? What did he know would happen in Ukraine?

I’d talk, like Biden, about what kind of people we think we are. That works for the Northern Europeans, for the most part – there’s an ethos of community, fostered by massive infrastructure that feels, to the Finn or the Norwegian or the Dane, as though the state goes out of its way to care for its citizens. Try that in America.