I feel like I've been very clear about this the whole way: I would prefer not to pay any attention to politics this presidential cycle. But right now I'm starting to feel like those people who told themselves they could just opt out of the whole COVID pandemic, including refusing from availing themselves of the available prophylaxis and, well, it turns out sometimes the problem is bigger than your intention, whatever you imagine your willpower to be. It really doesn't matter how hard I plant my feet or clench my core or grit my teeth, a tornado (for example) is windspeed and airborne debris; it doesn't want to shred your skin with gravel, impale you with the bumper of a 1986 Toyota Tercel and carry you 12 miles away into a Del Taco parking lot, it's just how it works, how it is. So you considering your level of determination when attempting to defy it is a simple category error. The right response to physics is other physics (like a storm cellar), not proving your depth of feeling, in any particular direction.
Of course politics is not a natural disaster, but it sure is starting to take on the contours of one. There's a tsunami-esque feeling of both inevitability and impending ruin that you can only ruefully nod your head at and annoy your loved ones and coworkers with "you know, I knew this was going to happen" right before you're all under 40 feet of rushing ocean brine where there used to be a Walgreen's like 10 seconds ago. There's almost nothing to be actually done. All of the institutions and protections are under threat, things like environmental regulation, medical privacy, reproductive rights, basic Fourth Amendment guarantees against a police state, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and yeah, not to freak you out, but even the actual, non-metaphorical Walgreen's. It's dire.
Everything is a 24-hour news cycle except, apparently, this idea that Joe Biden has to quit the race for president. It started as a sniffle and gentle cough amongst TV and print media types who have whatever the opposite of an immune system is to this type of content, but it started to metastasize into something genuinely scary when it spread to the donor class. And from their positions lodged tightly in their patrons' colons, it was the easiest thing in the world to transmit the bug to select panic-prone Democratic politicians, who started to openly coalesce around the idea that maybe it really should be Joe-ver.
I've tried and tried to pretend this didn't affect me. Then some fucking dingus tried to shoot Trump.* Nobody cares that he appointed a suckling hypocritical avatar of nihilism JD Vance as his running mate, probably not even Trump. Campaign seasons are usually boiled down to one or two events and they have already happened: Biden shorting out during the debate and Trump getting shot at. And it's barely mid-July. This is officially Too Much History. I keep trying to offer my polite no-thank-yous, but apparently the space that exists outside of news cycles now is down to just those parts of the Amazon where the low-contact indigenous peoples still hide out. But I'm not even sure about that, I mean, what are intra-tribal politics even like? These are regular humans after all. It's probably way harder to start a whisper campaign about your opponents being secret pedophiles or whatever when everyone literally knows everyone else, but I'm sure someone has given it a shot.
And this Biden thing, I said to myself in the beginning I wouldn't take it seriously unless/until Obama got involved and um... uh-oh. And also Biden got COVID this week, just to bring us all the way back full-circle to the stupid points I was making back the first paragraph, which feels like it was 186 years ago, because that's just how time works now. I want all this to be over, but we already know some other goddamned Momentous Thing is going to happen. The Democratic convention isn't even here yet. Tonight Trump makes his own convention speech, which I'm sure will be measured and conciliatory, which for him means only calling for the forcible internment of his perceived enemies, not their outright deaths.
I don't know, man. I try to be hopeful, but that will only get you so far. At some point, you actually have to do something to protect yourself. I guess we could all consider moving to Canada. We know they have room, but eh, I'm not sure the longterm prospects are a whole lot better. They get twitter up there too, you know.
---
*if you imagine this is the part where I make a joke about his aim, I want to very seriously point out that not only am I an anti-violence absolutist, but if Trump had been seriously harmed or worse, it would have been a disaster. The conspiracy-theory worm-brained redpills are already having a gross field day with events as they actually went. We avoided by inches an extended period of retaliatory injury and death amongst entirely imagined foes and an even more chaotic election, probably more violence and death on election day. Trump is a dangerous idiot deserving of a lot of things, but being shot in any part of his body is absolutely not one of them.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment