Imagined Community

I've been thinking some fairly dark thinks since a week ago Tuesday, and should really be getting a lot darker as the president-elect starts to name names for cabinet appointments that seem to be limited to people who seem specifically unqualified to fill them, like an ethics-and-legally-challenged attorney general or a head of the Department of Health and Human Services who thinks diseases are caused primarily by insufficient wheat germ intake or, in all other cases, hoodoo.

I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing, though, that I seem to be taking it a lot better this time around than I did in 2016. I think the absolute collapse of the polling in that cycle, plus the basic incredulity that we as a people could elect someone that obviously stupid to be president, made it a much more whiplash-inducing collision of expectation and reality, especially coming off eight years of Obama and what seemed like a fairly stable center-left coalition of voters. Not hugely inspiring or transformation in retrospect, but at least an environment where positive sociopolitical change could be negotiated, like Obamacare. One day we'll remember the days of relatively reliable, slightly subsidized medical insurance before "coverage" devolves into your insurer just mailing you an at-home surgical supply kit (with simple pictorial instructions) in lieu of the expensive kerfuffle of in-patient professional intervention, any day now.

It's probably because these pathways have already been carved that I'm not swirling into tornado fits of rage-panic. I wouldn't even say I'm feeling numb (another common sentiment over on Bluesky, come check it out before it's all Russian porn bots, like twitter) and I know that because of the impatience I definitely feel for my fellow lefties mouthing a lot of the "take care of yourself and remember to breathe" advice through this. It's not that I discount their feelings or that huge segments of the population should rightfully panic (including civil servants, which may well include myself or people very close to me as far as you know) when a president is arriving blown into office on the bloviating winds of recrimination and punitivity, in a Stalinist kind of mode, but with fewer machine guns and more bronzer. I think it's more that a creeping, unbidden lump of nihilism has crystallized in my trachea, filtering out expressions of fear in favor of only a simmering low-level anger drowning everything else out, like a self-soothing cat's purr through a Marshall stack.

It's a hell of a thing to have your belief in your country shaken, but it's almost more shocking to come to the conclusion that belief in your country maybe isn't really a necessity at all. The idea that a country exists as an idea is definitely some New World thinking, where all our countries are way closer to the year in which they were made up out of nothing, and thus appear to rely a lot more on constant positive reinforcement than older nation-cultures. It's a combination of insecurity and romanticism that doesn't sound all that durable when you say it out loud anyway; a lot more Tinkerbell than Türkiye, if you follow. Modern Türkiye only dates back to 1923 so maybe that's not the best example, but it's an old culture and I wanted the alliteration, you get it.

America represents something, which politicians like Reagan and Obama have been able to articulate and mobilize into practical political results, but what's the right amount of investment for Regular Joes like you and me? Maybe the feelings of disappointment following an election ranging from ick to existential despair are tied too much to this overlay of Enlightenment thinking that cynics have been exploiting in four-year cycles for going on 250 years now. I mean, what's Poland, right? It's the place where the Polish people live, like literally Pole-Land. You don't gotta believe in that, it's just a cultural-linguistic truism expressed as a line on a map in Eastern Europe. It's defined as much by what it isn't (these aren't Belarussians or Slovaks and VERY DEFINITELY not Germans) as what it is. Sure, it's disappeared a few times historically, but the Poles as a people stayed in roughly the same area. There's persistence of identity not reliant on anybody's feelings... well, except for when whoever is running Russia or Germany at any point in history gets handsy, but it seems safe for now!

OK, so Türkiye and Poland, maybe not the best two examples. And yeah, here in the Western Hemisphere we don't really have the cohesion of old human migratory patterns and the development of linguistic other-ness vs. neighboring populations to give us a core to rely on if the borders imploded or were erased by a grabby neighbor (we're watching you, Canada). I guess if we broke up, we could all "go back to where we came from," but I was born in LA County, that's two counties over from where I am now. For the time being, I supposed I don't have much choice but to continue to keep believing in this silly, self-destructive place. I don't want to have to move all my stuff. I just wish all of my friends could say that