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.