“I don’t know if it was just the shock of September 11, or some millennial sense of “we’re through with history and now we can sit back and coast” or what it was, but somewhere back there, we were transformed into a nation of pants-wetting fraidycats, with no more curiosity than it takes to sit on the couch sucking down straight high-fructose corn syrup and watching the latest episode of THE REAL OOOH SHINY!!! And what’s worse…somewhere along the line, a large chunk of American decided that was just fine, and wanting anything more was somehow weird, or dangerous, or wrong. And another chunk of people decided that those folks were somehow more real, more authentic, more to be valued, and went on validating them. If you want an epitaph for the 00’s, here it is: this was the decade we let stupidity become a valid lifestyle choice.”
– 31 Dec 2009
The sad thing is, at the time I wrote that ten years ago, Obama still had a seat in the White House, a Congress with 59 Democrats in the Senate and a House majority, and three years to go before Election Day. I don’t think any of us realized that would be the political high-water mark of the decade on the first day. Birtherism was still a ways away from being fully mainstreamed by cable news and reality dickbags, never mind losing first the House and then the Senate – and then, ultimately, the country. The last four years, really, has been running to stand still. Lose as little as possible, try to stop things getting materially worse, hope against hope to get a win in 2020 knowing we have one more shot, maximum. This nation won’t survive four more years of active bullshit.
The enemy is bullshit. And the bullshit, honestly, is what laid us low. Russia and China don’t have to be better than us, they don’t have to beat us fair and square, they just have to drag us down to their level and wait for us to founder. And they found willing accomplices in the useful idiots who have built a politics of bullshit for a quarter-century. Stupidity went from being a valid lifestyle choice to the only valid lifestyle choice. Reject science, history, logic and reason in favor of what the cable news tells you truth is, revised nightly. And with so much sewage in the air, it becomes impossible to fight through without being drowned out, and ultimately people just give up.
I mean, hell, I gave up myself. Oh, I still make sure I vote every chance I get, I try to put my money where my mouth is for the sake of certain charities near and dear to my heart, I’m liable as not to walk up to the table of some org feeding the homeless in a public park and hand them a hundred dollars cash before turning up my collar and stealing away – but all the cable news channels are blocked on my TV. I still don’t watch SNL or Last Week Tonight because I still can’t laugh at this shit. BBC World Service has been deleted from my car radio since November 9, 2016. I unsubscribed from the very channel I created in our friends’ Slack group for political discussion. I just can’t deal with it any more. I spent seven years getting two degrees in political science that in retrospect were worse than worthless, because nothing I was taught matters any more. Key, Sinclair, Wildavsky, Fenno, Folkways of the US Senate, Congress Reconsidered – all balderdash in the 21st century.
A solid grounding in the nature of SEC football rivalry and the forms and norms of Continental Championship Wrestling is all you need to understand American politics now. You can be openly delusional about your place in the world and the reality around you, you can substitute belief for facts, and you can update what’s real on a daily basis and deny anything and everything you said was true last year. Weaponized ignorance in service to wealth, in perpetuity. I don’t know how it’s possible for a country to survive embracing that, because sooner or later the real world will mark your beliefs to market. By this time next year, we’ll know how it went – and we’ll have the UK as an example of what happens when the wheels are about to come off. The die is already cast; the problem is living with waiting another eleven months for it to land.