Moveable Feast

With arbitrary inevitability, my regular Thursday writing slot clashes with Thanksgiving every year. It may well be that I handle it each time with a repeatable tradition of a specific type of posting that readers look forward to as a sign of good-natured community building around this humble space. But if I do handle it that way, I don't remember and I'm too loopy on carbs and milk fat to bother to check.

I guess I should take a second to say what I'm thankful for this year. First of all, I'm thankful for the times when I check my ingredient list prior to attempting to cook so I'd know if, for example, the brown sugar I have on hand is all old and dried out, so that when I try to use it anyway because it's SO LATE ALREADY and hey, who knows, it will probably be fine, the pumpkin pie I've attempted doesn't come out all un-sweet and, you know, gourd-flavored because my brown sugar has become a collection of grit and gravel.

Secondly, I'm thankful that as a straight white dude, I'll personally probably be OK during the Trumpista years. I'd be more thankful to live more precariously, which is to say on an even footing with the rest of the people in my country so we'd have a sense that we were all in this bullshit together, but apparently it's the dawn of a new age of political re-ascendency for beleaguered white-straight-dude-ness, which I can only imagine is going to end at some point with me smashing a broom handle over the head of a Nazi youth during some sort of street fight in Orange County someplace. And even then I'll probably just get a stern talking to from the cops and released on my own recognizance. I AM ALL SET FOR PRIVILEGE, THANK YOU. PLEASE STOP TRYING TO GIVE ME MORE.

Also Florence Henderson died, so fuck everything anyway, at least for an hour or two, right? Here's a picture of a smoking monkey.



Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

IMMA POINT AT 'EM

I've heard a lot in the past week-plus about the stages of grief with regard to the election, or the fragility of scorned liberals and their feelings, or alarm klaxons about the coming wave of official, institutional anti-semitism (at tragic minimum)... With the exception of the genuinely terrifying last one, it looks like we're trying to find our way to a post-election equilibrium using the same exact ill-suited tools we used to try to understand the pre-election world as well: through the high-volume exchange of ideologically sourced memes and/or obviously false news stories.

Just in time, of course, Google and Facebook have swooped in to save us from the pernicious and reality-warping influence of deliberately false news by attacking the advertising revenue the purveyors of this kind of bullshit receive from those platforms. An heroic post-election decision taken in the face of zero opposition, done in the truest and purest spirit of hypercautious corporate ass-covering, consequence free now that the damage has already been done. Fortunately for all of us, Edward R. Murrow remains dead.

The slinging of nonsense designed specifically not to appeal to anyone other than people one already agrees with has not only continued past the election, but is now shaping how we interpret and contextualize a world in which a clumsy xenophobe with a Golden Retriever comb-over is about to become president.

Some of them are funny because they're intended to be, and genuinely do help. The idea that Joe Biden is a petulant teenager committing acts of petty revenge or a goofus granddad sidestepping traditional decorum is a harmless, cathartic one, allowing progressives to wallow in a place of bittersweet positivity, reflecting warmly (if weepily) on a genuine partnership that has transcended politics and grown into real, familial love between two grown-ass men they (we) admire. It's a way to celebrate as we reluctantly send them off.

On the other side, the modus is less intentional humor and more of the laughing-at-you kind. They would like you to know that, if you only count the counties where Donald Trump won a majority of the votes, Donald Trump is also totally leading in the popular vote! Honestly, this is what counts as a right-wing headline. Yes, it's sort of funny, kind of in the way it hurts when you laugh when you have pneumonia, so someone makes you laugh and it's really painful but you have to say "oh god, don't make me laugh" which makes you laugh more and then when you're done, sure, you had a hearty chuckle (which is good for you!) but you are also in the most pain you've ever been in, you cracked two ribs from the subsequent coughing and now you sort of wish you were dead as you watch the hospital staff insert a needle the size of a turkey baster into your chest to clear a pleural effusion.

None of this has to be convincing because it's not meant to convince anyone who isn't already convinced of its "truth" before they even read it. Because we're no longer a culture that values or even tolerates persuasion as an idea. It's all reinforcement of pre-existing prejudices. It's a classic and basic sign of pathologized dysfunction. I grew up in a family where our basic mode of communication was exchanged accusations and our default stance with regard to one another was in defense of not only our stuff but of our basic dignity. An attack from any and all quarters was not only anticipated but expected. My sisters and I were (and still are) all very close in age, meaning we were all about the same size for most of our childhoods, meaning also that when we did ever emerge from our default defensive crouches, it was to augment our verbal attacks with physical ones. We're all incredibly close now, as fiercely protective of one another as we once were competitive, but at least for me, my first years outside of that state of affairs, amongst people not similarly conditioned, I felt like a feral boy being introduced to 19th century London aristocracy.

Right now, though, we're all in the same dysfunction, but there's no civilizing outside to escape to. Before the actual election, when everyone (including, I would argue, Donald Trump) was preparing for the inevitable Clinton victory, there seemed to be some hope that a begrudging understanding could be reached. Not without effort, but the two Obama terms could be a model and precedent for us to exist with, yes, an undercurrent of frustration and resentment, but without violence, ill-will or intentional suffering. That's sort of gone out the window. There are dozens of cases to cite of verbal and physical assault, uncorked open racism expressed in the explicit name of Trump. Which we need to get a handle on before someone actually goes out a window.

All of this is considerably less funny than the Biden thing.

Orange Dawn

I guess a month of strident and pernicious worry about the outcome of the election turned out to be not only warranted, but not fucking nearly enough.

It took me awhile on Election Night to really twig what was going on. All I knew for sure was that the tone of the commentariat on the many channels and websites I was flipping through (I had three screens working. Seriously, I put in less effort to pay attention at the job I get paid for) was gradually making me more and more uneasy. My first reaction was to get somewhat pissy. My second, later reaction was to turn the anger on myself for not having any bourbon in the house. I knew teetotal would come back to bite me in the ass someday. My third grade teacher was right.

All we really learned from this particularly vulgar Election Night are:

1) Can this pit of despair go lower? Why, yes! Yes it can! Si, se puede!

2) Don't nobody know nothing about nothing.

All the polls missed it. The Huffington Post pollster in the days preceding got into it with Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight, suggesting that Nate's super-low chance of winning for Hillary (only about 70% likelihood on the day before) was indefensible and anything that wasn't his own 98% likelihood of Clinton victory was not only methodologically dubious but socially and morally irresponsible. It's not just that the numbers were wrong, there was a clear emotional commitment to the error that permeated media and the punditariat.

Because I went into the contest armed with this shitty data, I was hanging in there, moreso with the many friends I was experiencing this bullshit with via text and facebook (I'm old, I get it). I was further lulled into a false sense of renewed hope when Virginia's urban areas came in late and heavy for Hillary. I convinced myself, which was not hard to do given the narrowness of the margins and the pattern of vote tallying, that this would also be the pattern in PA, MI and WI and things would be closer than we thought, but still the right outcome in the end.

So, uh... nope.

My kids happened to be with their mom that night and my lady friend was stuck working really late. I ended up over at her place late and cheered her on as she got drunk enough for both of us.

Since then I've been processing, online a lot. The hard thing is ignoring not the taunts and triumphalism of my GOP-minded friends, but the passive-aggressive condescension and sanctimony from the ones who either didn't vote or went third party because "both candidates are just as bad!" I'm getting a lot of "you should get behind President Trump" or "now is a time for unity," which... yeah, fuck that. Not in a nihilistic way, the way assholes like Susan Sarandon might employ it, but more in a this-is-still-a-two-party-system-where-one-side-exists-to-check-the-other way. I've got four years worth of fight in me. Especially if that fight is in the normal way I do it, with hastily thrown-together social media postings during commercials of football games. Prepared to be zinged, Cheeto Hitler, and zinged hard.

After the media and polling catastrophes, who is left to trust? I'll tell you who, sisters and brothers: it's just us out here. Conventional wisdom is the enemy. I mean, even look at the last election. In 2012 there was all this public soul searching about the GOP existing in an increasingly multicultural America, the conclusion of which was that there would have to be more of an effort of outreach, ESPECIALLY to Latinos.

And then four years later, the GOP nominated Latino Repellant. And he just won. Don't nobody know shit about shit.

Lastly, I cannot listen to one more variation of "well, this is what the people want, so we have to give him/it a chance." Um, no. More people voted for Hillary than for that one. In fact, I have voted in seven presidential elections now, going back to 1992 and in those seven elections, the Democrat has won the popular vote six times. This isn't about soul searching. This isn't about redefining what it means to be progressive. This is about maximizing how to make the right gains in about 10-15 counties in three or four states so they come out the right color on the electoral college map on Election Night. Four years is more than enough time to figure out how to do something that small. It should also be just enough time for most of us on the left to sober up again.

PS: I have yet to watch Hillary's concession. I know Al Gore's in 2000 was an heroic act of patriotism and I expect (and have heard) it's close to on that order. But the parts I know she has in there speaking to disappointed women and girls, I just can't yet. Today's post I recognize is a little bloodless considering. I know I haven't let it all land yet. I'm pacing myself.

Argumentum ad baculum

See, I fucking told you guys. No way was this going to be easy or restful. I haven't been at ease this entire election season, not because I'm availed of any sort of prescience or political mastery, it's just the evidence before my own stupid eyes. If the argument is "Donald Trump can never be president because of who he is and what he's said" then the obvious counterpoint has to be: this is an election cycle in which Donald Trump was a major party nominee in the first place. To a certain degree, there's a systemic inoculation to his putrescent virulence by exposure to a smaller part of the whole body before introducing it into the blood stream. The GOP primary process was our exposure to the attenuated virus of unveiled racism, sexism, triumphalism and open appeals to violence. These are pestilences endemic to our culture as Americans, in a background* and gene-coded way, as inheritors of both Western thought in general and the specifics of our own peculiar institutions. Unlike most vaccines, this one works in reverse. When left to rampage throughout the entire body, these weaknesses should kill the host. Instead we've just been primed to tolerate the parasite without the promised release of death.

The guy still said "grab them by the pussy," that hasn't stopped being true. And yet if you look at the polling, things are tightening again. The entire arc of the post-primary campaign hasn't been an arc at all, it's been a goddamned oscillating sine wave of Hillary breaking out to an apparently insurmountable lead only to have it largely surmounted. Usually the wild breaks in her favor happen any time the American people have the opportunity to consider the candidates in person at roughly the same time, both after the conventions and after each debate. In all instances, Hillary benefitted hugely from the direct comparison to a sniffling, inarticulate, narcissistic used hotel salesman who thinks things like "reading" and "practice" are for nerds, the kind of pathetic humans who are doomed to spend their whole sex lives with one woman with a B-cup or below.

But then they go back to their campaigns and people... what? Forget? I have no idea. He's either an odious, intellectually incurious troglodyte or he's not. Right?

Well, not really, I don't think. No, he is obviously, but that's not the most important takeaway. I think actually, in a lot of ways, Mitt Romney was right about the numbers. There are about 47% of people who would never consider voting for him no matter the content of his message. Now, what he got wrong was by then going on to describe the people who don't vote for him in condescending and contemptible ways, turning voters off and leading to his inevitable defeat, for which we should all be grateful.

What else he got wrong is that, at this moment in American political history, that 47% number applies to both sides. It doesn't matter what Donald Trump says or how uninspiring you find Hillary Clinton. This election was always going to be close. You can see it in the historically unprecedented disapproval numbers. In a practical sense, nobody really likes either one. But the incentive remains strong to stick with the tribe.** You can see it in the way Paul Ryan and Marc Rubio and Ted Fucking Cruz are still voting for what is essentially a gallon Ziploc bag of room-temperature Sunny Delight. And yes, OK, their particular offers of highly begrudging support are made out of a very special and particular kind of calculation and political cowardice, but I think they're instructive for the nation as a whole: at this point in history, you don't cross the lines and vote for the other team. If you doubt their capacity to put faction (I won't even say "party" because that implies an idealogical underpinning instead of simple reflex tribalism) before country, please see every action of the GOP Congress during the last eight years. That means the whole election comes down to the leftover 6%, or to put it another way, plus or minus 3%. These are the people I call "the margin of error."

I'm doing a lot of talking without much of a point. I've spent most of the past week just trying to make myself feel better, if only so I can maybe get some restful sleep. I'm anxious, but not discouraged. I know my country is complicated and bitter, but not fundamentally self-destructive. But then again, we contain within us those who have the capacity to dislike Beyoncé. Maybe we don't deserve to survive.

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*Not "background" as in "gosh, racism or sexism have never really manifested before" but as in "it's not a question of if, it's a question of how much."

**Sorry, Cleveland Indians fans, I'm not referring to you or your team here. I know it's been a rough couple of days. Chin up. Also your mascot is racist.