I've always found that a little unfair. Conservatives don't want to rewind social and mass cultural institutions back to the 1950s or whatever because they don't understand them entirely. It's always both cheap and dangerous to reduce and dismiss those with whom you disagree as either misinformed or unintelligent. It's a classic bit of George W. Bushian misunderstimation. Although, yes, to be fair, that one person was demonstrably un-smart. But that's an exception to the point I'm trying to make. It's so much worse and so much scarier if you understand, in the front of your mind at all times, that this is going exactly how they want it to go. It's not that they understand; it's that the plan is actively working. The dumb person is the one who shouts back "oh, you really want the 1950s, like when Black people couldn't vote and women were socially and economically crippled?" thinking this is some kind of confounding riposte, when the counter-argument coming back the other way is: "Now you're getting it!"
It's difficult if not impossible to resist something systemic from within the system itself. If you're not a sky-magic believer, you understand that modes of beings are relative to themselves, inherently self-justifying as they feel universal. It's the defining feature of a hegemony. I went to a Banksy exhibit in Culver City this week and tried to figure out how a $10 ticket to watch an immersive video presentation contextualizing the work of an anticapitalist radical was actually the perfect way to neuter any kind of resistance message by turning art (an act of inspiration unbeholden) into Art (it goes on mugs, prints, T-shirts, NFTs, etc.). Where is the message and intent that is inoculated against becoming a thing hedge fund bros can't turn into a portfolio asset? I'm not certain it exists.
Conservatism is a default, but not a fallback position. We don't retreat to it; it's a resting state, where thought and action both settle in the absence of something radical and unifying. It only takes 50 senators of the wrong sort to stand athwart anything else long enough for the churn to abate and the particulates in the tank to settle back down to that resting level of still, slow rot.
All this sort of guy-trying-to-reckon-with-echoes-of-grad-school-decades-hence bullshit analysis might feel bloodless and useless in the harsh light of real, searing evil and a direct threat to literally anyone and everyone all the time. But that's because it is. Yeah, I'll vote and donate money and whatever else. I'm just not sure of what it will take to break the back of the This Is How It's Supposed To Go portion of our society. I still remember Sandy Hook. I still remember Columbine. You know what I don't remember? All the names of all the other schools and shopping malls and government buildings where this has also happened. We just stack the bodies of dead children like cords of wood, throw a tarp over them and talk about doors.
Nothing seems new because there's no movement, no space cleared for anything new. I'm certain you've read "this is actually how they want it to be" analysis somewhere/everywhere else by now. But I don't know, maybe Uvalde does change something. Acts are far more persuasive than actual persuasion. Maybe the change will be just a little piece of the creaking, gathering, repetitive narrative that has been used to drown out everything else. Maybe it's just that we break the stupid fucking insistence that all cops are brave and helpful and here to protect anyone. If we could just move one handful of dirt from this piled and piling insanity, maybe we can dare to hope for the landslide that will finally, mercifully and at long last, suffocate this whole thing. Then at least those of us who are left can plant something in new earth.
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PS: I'd like to point out that I hate this piece. Nothing I wrote was ever going to be good enough, and so this is not. The rage is impotent and discouraging, but that's because it always is.
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