It started with Windows, frankly – and the learned helplessness that went along with it, the notion that things just broke for no apparent reason and that an ordinary person couldn’t be expected to understand what was happening.
Then Y2K, which people reacted to not as disaster averted, but as hype for something that wasn’t a big deal, thus giving them license to say that anything that didn’t affect them wasn’t a problem.
Then Sept 11, when Republicans trained the American people to believe that no sacrifice was required and that the only necessary response to calamity was to act as if nothing had happened.
And then there was the onslaught of “reality” television, in which manipulated triviality was presented as documentary if not aspirational, feeding the conceit that everything was done for show and nothing was sincere or meaningful – everything became performative. And then it took over politics, fed by years of talk radio bigotry brushed off with irony and “what, you can’t take a joke” bullshit.
And so here we are. We have built a 21st century where nothing is real, nothing is provable, and whatever you want to believe is your own truth. It’s healthy to lie in the sun all day as long as you smear beef tallow on your face. Tanning your ballsack is the key to restoring your potency. The majority of the federal budget goes to illegal immigrants, not Social Security and the “Department of War.” And a senile, deteriorating 79 year old bigot is a viable President, not a decompensating idiot who is no longer capable of functioning as an adult, let alone as one of the leaders of the free world.
We have met the enemy, and it is everybody else.