Winter Is Coming

How can you keep up? We’re so chin-deep in worrisome discourse already, I can’t imagine how we’ll be able to breathe come October – and I do hate to add to the chorus. So I’ll endeavor to be extra punchy and mean.

First I make the joke – in the good old days, they knew enough to shoot politicians not schoolkids, hahaha – and then someone tries it, and fails. One more quarter-inch! Well, we do seem to be on the march toward an “In the Flesh?” (the Floyd song) autocratic Mad Max antfarm America by autumn, and so I suppose a smattering of sacrificial blood on the grandstand on national TV has a certain Aztec ring to it, though by any standards, not just the Aztecs’, the smattering was trifling indeed.

But then Biden steps aside, eight days later? Is there a syllogism here I’m missing? Are we supposed to suppose that getting winged by post-teen gunfire has tilted the scales so badly that the incumbent prez, facing the coliseum crowds swooning over the gore, decided to simply give up? Or, perhaps more logically, Joe is in fact more infirm than he wanted us to believe, and That Asswipe’s lucky moment in the sun was just a coincidence?

Whatevs; those poor, poor white Asshole voters, taping pantyliners to their ears, suffering so much through the lowest unemployment in 65 years, the near-ubiquity of some kind of healthcare thanks to Obama, the fact that the struggling class can still manage to universally afford cell phones, smart TVs, tattoos, and enough junk food to make 42% of them morbidly obese – all you can wonder is what these barking yutzes might make of a confrontation with real poverty: spend a month in Madagascar, say, or hauling sulfur in Indonesia, or eating dry grass in Chad.

What they’re really bawling about, of course, is some variation of the quite authentic Replacement Theory, which accurately predicts that in some number of years, yeah, Mr. Ham-Faced Post-Euro Middle-American Whining Dick-Swinger, you’ll no longer be a majority. The Jews won’t replace you, but the less-than-pasty-white chunks of our demographic pie will, in fact, as in, they will constitute more than 50% of the population in aggregate, and white folks won’t. So fucking what.

Watching this Mini-Me contingent characterize themselves as “Christian nationalists” is no surprise – that is, the historical contradictions and idiocy embedded in that phrase and belief system fits perfectly with this crowd’s inability to pass a 3rd-grade history test given anywhere north of Frankfurt. What concerns me is the supposedly “growing” number of Latinx and Black Christians who are leaning right this year – it’s as if being Christian makes you stupid. Which might be a tautology. Look, guys: they don’t want you. The 400 million Central and South American Christians, much less the almost 700 million African Christians, should they be on their way over – that’s not who they mean when they say “us.” In fact, that one-eighth of the world’s population is exactly the problem, because so many keep coming over here, expecting a way to make a living and, maybe, to be accepted by a loudmouth America that claims to get all Christ-like in everyone’s grill. If you come, you’ll learn the truth soon enough. You’re not only not in their tribe, you are part of the “crisis” that caused the tribe to form at all.

Biden was, and still is, dull – how clueless of him to think, like an artifact from the 60s, that we wanted actual legislative achievement and economic progress, however incremental. We used to like boring government, back when people read magazines made of paper and prided themselves on having interests and passions they didn’t need to advertise to the world. Today, in the social media vortex we all know is poisoning us like plastics-factory runoff, we prefer politics to be a thunderdome, looking at it like a bloodsport instead of what it is, a system by which the mundane aspects of public life are supposedly managed. Terry Southern said it first: “There is no power on earth that can loosen a man's grip on his own throat.”

We’ll pay the price for this, and that may be the only question worth asking: what that price will be. We haven’t, I’d think, seen the last shots fired.