I don’t know quite how to reckon with the extent to which we are traumatized and exasperated through being terrorized by the stupidest shit on Earth, flung by the stupidest people on Earth. You think about how dull-witted the average American is these days, and then think half of them are as bad or worse, and it all starts to make sense.
My lovely bride is fond of saying “the question isn’t how smart are you, it’s how are you smart,” and I find no fault with that. I’ve known people who would struggle to read this post but know how to manufacture a semi-automatic firearm from bare metal, who would struggle to balance a checkbook but can instinctively do the calculus required to drain ten 3-pointers in a row, who can single-handedly take down an entire pub on trivia night but cannot make it past day two of any in-person programming course ever. I absolutely endorse her position. However, it comes with a contrapositive, which is “how are you stupid,” and we are afflicted with multiple overlapping stupids. Always have been, honestly, but it goes a long way toward explaining how we got here.
There’s the “I don’t know anything about politics/I don’t care anything about politics” form, which is absurd when you consider how many of those people have opinions on how the BCS should have worked or how the College Football Playoff should be constituted. There’s the people who treat politics as spectator sport, assuming it will never have a material effect on them. There’s the generation of boys with failed parenting who think entirely in Call of Duty, Joe Rogan and racist Twitter accounts with Roman statue avatars. And there’s the Democratic consultant class permanently trapped in amber in 1995, convinced that the mythical white working class male vote is the only thing worth winning and trying to run back the business-conciliatory New South Governor as the sole hope of the Democrats.
But there’s one particular brand of stupid that is driving me out of my mind, and it’s the stupid of Republicans who think they can keep shaking hands with the devil without consequence, that this will all go by the boards when Trump is gone, that normal service will return and there will be no consequences or any repercussions for what they have done. It’s just business. All in the game, yo. It would be unproductive and unseemly to hold anyone to account. The American people want us to move forward.
Horseshit.
The reason we are in this position now is because we never move forward. We never completed Reconstruction, in the 1870s or the 1970s alike. We never held anyone to account for the Iraq war and the credit crisis of 2008. We never held anyone to account for January 6 and the malfeasance that followed. We never held the media to account for harassing Joe Biden off the ticket because of age and incipient senescence, only to pretend nothing was wrong with a transparently worse case. We never held Big Tech to account for the things they enable.
We never paid the price, never asked anyone to, and as a result the bill has grown astronomical. And it might well cost us a nation. We cannot flinch from making this right if we ever get the opportunity. We can’t shrug off a mob of paramilitary killers sent to wreak havoc on an American city. We can’t wave away the kidnap and deportation of American citizens. We absolutely must not allow “mistakes were made” to be the extent of the repentance. No forgiveness without contrition and reparation. Red America, in its lands and homes and minds and television networks and blogospheres, must be occupied and de-MAGA-fied or else we’ll be right back here and worse in another decade. Just long enough for the Democrats to struggle to pull together a fix and then lose.
Because that’s the stupidest stupid of all: the memory of a goldfish that says why should we worry about measles, or polio, or Y2K, or anything else that we once fixed and hasn’t been a problem for so long that people assume it’s the natural condition and doesn’t require constant vigilance.
You know, like democracy.
