This is when it started.
Minneapolis, on the road in a strange city for a conference for a product we hadn’t deployed yet, no idea what I was doing and trying not to catch a sinus infection for my trouble (too late, it arrived as I left), and I was suffused with a darkness that couldn’t just be put down to encroaching Minnesota winter. It was the slow creeping realization, with two weeks to go, that we could fuck this thing up and that I had no plan for what if we did.
And we did. And I still don’t.
We got here well before November 8. We got here for eight years of Bush the Younger, when all of this choose-your-own-reality nonsense was pioneered. Stop acting like Bob Corker or Megyn Kelly or anyone else on the right is somehow heroic in the face of this outbreak of insanity, because their dumb asses drove the monkey to the airport every day for seventeen years. When “who you want to have a beer with” was somehow privileged as the only fit criterion for choosing a President, that paved the way for “no qualification whatsoever.” Purple Heart band-aids and Swift Boat documentaries and racist panic about Muslims and Sharia law proved that you don’t even have to pretend to have a winking association with facts as long as you fit what the Fox News demo wants to believe. And worst of all, we let a President get elected in the 21st century with fewer votes than his opponent. That should have been a fucking tornado siren for American democracy, and if it had been a Democrat who benefited, you can rest assure the GOP would have moved heaven and earth to undo the result of the election – because they spent eight years moving heaven and earth to undo the election of a black man with the temerity to win both the electoral college and the popular vote, twice.
That’s why it’s a waste of time to fret and wring our hands about preserving the norms and standards of our political system. Because those were shot to shit seventeen years ago. Once you say that the person with the most votes doesn’t win, you may as well hang it up. You don’t have a democracy any more, you have China without the organizational planning. A world where every single bill takes a 3/5 vote to move just because one side says so, a world where you can block a Supreme Court nomination for a year without consequence so it can be handed over to the useful idiot of a foreign power – don’t waste time worrying about what resistance and opposition and scorched-earth defense is doing to American political culture. The damage is done. It’s been done for years. We didn’t do these things before because nobody did. Then one side broke the seal, and it’s time to accept things are different now. You can’t un-ring the bell and it’s pointless to pretend we somehow could. We’re never going to have not elected Trump. We already burned the house down. Now we’re just arguing about how impolite it is to put the fire out if it hurts the arsonists’ feelings, when we’re not slobbering all over people covered in gasoline who are bemoaning how fire debases us.
Because this has been a long time coming. The people who were turning firehoses and dogs on protesters in Birmingham in 1963 are still alive. So are their children. None of this ever went away. We just pretended it did because we knew it was wrong and we were content to say “this has no place in society.” And then when people persistently whispered “yes it does,” one side chose to indulge them for the sake of votes. Since Lee Atwater helped the Bush family go full redneck in 1988, the GOP has managed to win exactly one popular vote – but they’ve gotten a President in three times, and every time it was to our further detriment as a nation. The Republican Party willingly let itself be led by rednecks – not conservatives, rednecks – and now we live in the United States of Alabama and we’re pushing back hard. Five years ago, we thought – I thought – if we could just hold on and wait for the Old Ones to die off, we’d finally be able to get somewhere as a nation. More fool me.
And now matters are worse. What we’ve institutionalized is the idea that the best thing is to be as big a dick as you can, all the time, to everyone, and it will pay off in the end. If you don’t believe me, look around Silicon Valley, where an endless parade of assholes builds their advertising Panopticon out of your personal data without oversight or consequence or the balls to face an open market, because there’s always some dickhead on Sand Hill Road or Pioneer Way willing to prop his Allbirds on the desk and shoot another five hundred million dollars at a Stanford dropout with a fifteen year old brain. Our future is ever bigger businesses doing whatever they want and insisting on “personalizing” everything so that you can have your miserable life just the way you want, and never mind anyone else who might be driving you or delivering your food or standing on the same train platform. We wanted a classless society? We got a society with no class.
Two weeks in Ireland confirmed my worst fear: I didn’t want to come back. I am sure Ireland has no end of problems of its own – the Repeal 8 march on the Saturday after we arrived should be evidence of that – but Ireland didn’t look at a leadership position in the world and say “let’s let the worst people in our country shoot us all in the face” the way Britain and America did. Maybe there was a time when Ireland was hopelessly rural and backward, but it sure looks from here like they’ve managed to crack the code of having all the important stuff the 21st century has to offer without simultaneously giving in to the 19th or disappearing up your own asshole like area code 650 does. Maybe it’s not practical for us to spend between six and nine years establishing residence and obtaining citizenship, but there has to be something I can do here that gets me separation from Palo Alto, separation from Silly Con Valley, separation from the United States of Alabama and the redneck mental defectives that make it so. And if I can find it, I might just about have three more years left in me.
I don’t have seven.