Would You Shut Up, Man?

I guess I'm supposed to be surprised or outraged or something that we had ourselves a whole-ass presidential debate that featured the crudest form of pure-id showmanship, verbal abuse, a dearth of emotional discipline, an unbroken litany of almost exclusive untruths and a full-throated direct assault on American political norms and institutions. I mean, six weeks ago this is the same country where the military was dragooned into fucking up some regular people who were guilty of being outside so the president could hold a Bible upside down in front of a church. It's the same one where we just found out the Department of Homeland Security enacted a policy to publicly defend a right-wing terrorist first-degree murderer on White House direction. The only thing that would have been surprising in a debate in the prevailing circumstances would have been some active listening.

We've been in crisis for so long now, an event as quadrennially predictable as a debate cycle could have done a lot to reassure, to refocus us on the concrete and steel depths of our institutional foundations instead of the teeter and sway making us all motion-sick up here above ground. But at this point, only a moron would have expected any serious attempt at normalcy. Stability is not the goal. It's never even been a consideration, except as perhaps just another exploitable by-product of circumstances that may or may not have value in the moment toward the ultimate pursuit, the retention of power, partly to satiate the cold-blood reptile ego that needs the public response like it's the sun but primarily to keep the stalking mongooses* of creditors and auditors and state prosecutors in their hiding places, unable to pounce.

I've seen some criticism of Chris Wallace as moderator and of Joe Biden as a participant, but that's like blaming a family of opossums in the road for the indifferent, unblinking headlights everyone always saw coming. Their opponent--and Trump was both their adversaries Tuesday night--doesn't act with a plan; it's simply the nature of who he is to continue in a straight line. Other paths exists, it's that he lacks the ability to imagine them. He barrels forward not as an act of focus or (as his supporters imagine) inevitability. It's not even indifference. If there's any discipline involved at all, it's the dogged adherence to a nihilistic cynicism that moves forward out of fear and/or for motion's own sake. The destruction that occurs sometimes as a result is just a coincidence of timing and intersection. It comes down to the agility of the accidental targets to preserve themselves. Sometimes it's a news guy and a former vice president. Sometimes it's literally all of us in the whole country at the same time. Sometimes we get clear. Sometimes 200,000 of us don't.

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*Mongeese? That doesn't sound right. I think the right thing to do would have been to pick a metaphor that didn't drop me in this predicament in the first place, but here we are.