I Got You, Fam

There's always lots to talk about these days unfortunately, as we all experience the waking nightmare of living in interesting times. But of course it's hard to focus on anything else when, for the second time in 12 years (almost to the day) we've had to watch a major American city--this time the fourth largest in the country--get temporarily wiped off the map by what is euphemistically and underwhelmingly called extreme weather events. This is like referring to being hit in the face with a crowbar as a kinesiological demonstration. It's not strictly untrue, but it falls severely short of capturing the awful grandeur on display.

It's always worth noting what dire circumstances will push us to as a people in this country. It's tempting to say we will either draw together despite our disagreements or fracture into smaller and sharper separate shards under immense societal existential pressures, but what's really impressive about human beings in general and Americans in particular is we're able to do both at once. Why choose when you can have it all? We can raise $50 million in an hour and, during the exact same event, suggest that the president is a racist. Tell me, could another country do that? Probably! But let's hope for their sake the celebrity-telethon-to-save-human-lives confluence of events never comes to pass.

We certainly already know foreigners can be total assholes, even in the face of human tragedy. I should have guessed it would take smug French people to make me say "Hey, what a second!" in mild (and passing) defense of American white supremacists. #notallTexans

Hurricane Harvey has landed, with both feet, in the economic capital of America's least understandable state.* We've spent the last year or so locked in sniping, grumbling, sometimes shouted ideological warfare with one another, between parties, regions, states, even within families. The odds of a catastrophe at this point doing anything but squeezing out a little more of our worst impulses seem vanishingly small.

And of course it doesn't help that Ted Cruz is involved, a one-man font of self-fulfilling prophecy. Or that President Fauntleroy would find a way to make the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people a minute-by-minute referendum on the potency of his brand.

But this has been a week of divisiveness and revanchist spite from the Beloved Leader. Normally that would be a blow to the national spirit in a time like this, but luckily for all of us, that's his default functional space anyway. So if he's a neutral (that is to say, stuck in a mode of being we can all dismiss as his sad, spittle-flecked "normal") we can get on with the business of ignoring the fuck out of him and doing what we otherwise can.

And we are. We're doing it on our own, in the total absence of any leadership. We can't rely on the president to humanize, galvanize or motivate. Inspiration, of course, is so laughably out of his reach, unless of course we're meant to be inspired in the human ways that require plastic dry-cleaning bags to come with warnings about suffocation. The type of unheeding recklessness trending toward self-harm is not the best way to move people in a time like this.

Do what the secretary of state and secretary of defense are doing: give up on Trump. Ignore, disregard, work around. We'll just do it ourselves.

Even if you're not there right now, go ahead. You can help, too. Don't be a provincial, cynical dick-face like Ted Cruz. Do it now. Texans are Americans too, no matter what they might claim in calmer times. And even if they weren't, we'd help them out anyway. Despite our differences, we as a nation can in times of crisis come together and agree on a few things: water damage to drywall is a massive drag and drowning seems like the absolute worst, especially in your own living room. When the water recedes, lots and lots of us are going to be there to put it back together. Not physically, you understand, but in spirit. Disasters like this remind us of the things that bind us together, dampening (no pun intended) the divisions and drawing out the things that unite us, like human perseverance and the fact that Ted Cruz fucking sucks.

Love you, Houston. Looking forward to the time when everything is back to normal and I can pretend not to remember ever having said that.

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*Everyone assumes it's Florida, but come on. Between the humidity and the wild boa constrictors, the meth sort of explains itself. It's the linchpin that brings that whole state into focus.