Tryna Strike a Chord

It's regrettable sometimes that we do not speak German. Sure, some smart-guy will hit you with fake history about how America almost decided to make German the official language in the early days of the country, but that's just a weird lie that seems impervious to dying out no matter how many times it's debunked, like George Washington and the cherry tree or that Democrats aren't running a pedophile ring out of pizza shops.

But like all nigglingly persistent sociohistorical eggcorns, the misinterpretation is based on a thing that was spoken, but misheard or misremembered. Like for example, all this worry about Democrats or leftists being sex traffickers and pedophiles seems to have its roots in the understanding seeping into the common knowledge that, yes, at some level there was some deviancy going on at high levels in government, entertainment and business, it just turns out it wasn't necessarily all Democrats or leftists. In fact, a lot of it is coming to light now that Donald Trump is nominating all the most egregious offenders to his cabinet. It's a bold act to bring all this information into so glaring a public limelight, but what else would we have expected from Jeffry Epstein's best friend? Say what you want about old, addled, stupid Trump, but he understands brand consistency.

We're in a weird re-evaluation period after an election, where we're supposed to assess what went wrong and where we are as a people. This is where the thing I was saying before about the Germans come in, because they do have a tendency to create words with subtle, nuanced meanings that we don't seem to have quite the same facility for in English. The most famous of course is schadenfreude, the feeling of pleasure one feels at the misery or failure of another person, or verschlimmbessern, making something worse as a result of a good-faith effort to improve it, or geleineberüchtgesertz, the stringing together of nonsense sounds in order to approximate German.

What we are good at in English is the neologism, especially within subcultures, like from gaming with my kids I learned the word copium and it's sister-cognate hopium. These portmanteaus denote a mythical substance you self-generate and ingest like a drug (e.g. opium) in order to cope with an unpleasant situation (typically getting your ass beat in an online gaming lobby) or, similarly, to willfully persist in delusional hope that things aren't so bad as they seem. See, hanging out with my kids pays off in the renewal and strengthening of evolving bonds that will better stand the test of time as they grow into mature adults blah blah blah, but I also get access to the sickest GenZ slang, so I can most thoroughly embarrass myself in work meetings.

The hopium was flowing on election night as the results came in and they looked progressively (ha) worse and worse, e.g. "well, the counts from the urban areas usually come in later, let's wait and see..." Afterward, the trick has been to pick apart what are signs that things aren't a total disaster and what is pure, noxious, anti-reality copium facing down a pretty dark future.

Trump slips just under 50% of the popular vote as the last of the votes are counted over these few weeks? OK, that's pure copium. Fine, he won by less than we thought and it sure doesn't look as mandate-y as it did on the night, but he's still going to put his greasy mitt on a Bible he's never seen before and slur his way through the oath of office in two months, what difference does it make? He definitively lost the popular vote in 2016 and it didn't make the next four years any more tolerable.

But you do have to look for signs of... well, not hope as that seems a bit fantastical if you have in your head and heart priorities related to equity/equality, public health or organized labor against transnational monopolies. An election year beating for the losing party in our system is always, always a time of recrimination and regret, finger-pointing and score-settling. You have to start from zero again, building up small wins just to remind yourself and the voting electorate that it's still possible to win, that a future still exists. Of course it obviously does in a two-party system. The results are binary and can be pretty swingy (see: the last four presidential elections), so neither party is ever actually dead, you just kinda sometimes feel like it. Change yourselves wholesale or just hang out until the electorate comes around to your way of thinking, whatever. The latter is definitely what the GOP has decided to do since 2016. But I'm not sure the race-baiting populist model is the one you want to look at if you're the Democratic Party in the wilderness at this juncture.

Sometimes the early wins aren't really wins, they can just be circumstances, like celebrated pervert and sex-crimes enthusiast Matt Gaetz withdrawing from consideration as attorney-general. I wouldn't call that a thing orchestrated by Democrats, it's more a reminder that even with wins in the presidency, the senate and the house of representatives, this posse of circus geeks coming (back) into power are so shockingly inept, 51% of the time or more, whatever grand designs they make mouth-noises about in public won't come to pass as they'll be too busy stepping on their own dicks.

The consequences will still be gross and dire for a lot of people in this country, but you do want the punitive anti-human vengeance monsters to be as inept as possible. If that looks or sounds like "hope" one or both of us has made a mistake, either in the reading or the writing.