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Worrying is so 2016. Sure, we may be staring impending doom in the whites of its radical right eyes. Sure, our futures may be even more insecure than they were even a year ago. A certain amount of panic might be an understandable or even intelligent response. But you and your friends just don’t have the mojo any more to work up a good unbroken worry sweat all night long.
Yeah we’ve stopped brooding about future disasters. The effectiveness of doom-scrolling, endless warnings, and pandemic freak-outs has proven to hover at around zero. Doom, it appears, impends whether you freak out or not.
To look at it slightly differently, if you spend a healthy chunk of time worrying about something, when it finally happens you’ll often breathe a sigh of relief. The waiting really is the hardest part.
And now, it seems, the waiting is over.
At least it’s over for those who have already invested their time in righteous angst, who have already understood that untrammeled capitalism shuttled us all on to the wealth-inequality doom train. For those who saw the demise of American democracy coming almost a decade ago.
A major reason for the mass capitulation to the exhaustion of American reality is that the current president (Trump, for those keeping score at home) won the popular vote. He didn’t win a majority or anything, but he got more votes than Kamala Harris. So the American people chose their favorite doom flavor and there you have it. No matter what happens, it isn’t like people didn’t ask for it.
They asked for it by voting or by not voting. We’re going to get what’s coming to us. Whatever that may be.
So now the thing to do is hunker down with your friends.
Get by with a little help from your friends. Enjoy the view on the ferry to hell. Don’t worry, be happy.
These days, who your friends are is going to make all the difference in the reality of your daily life. If you’ve got MAGA friends, you’re going to have MAGA emotions, make MAGA choices, come up with MAGA interpretations of events, and have MAGA worries. Unless you choose to stop getting by with your MAGA friends, your moral trajectory in life is going to be MAGA-ized.
If you have anti-MAGA friends, you’re going to have anti-MAGA emotions, make anti-MAGA choices, come up with anti-MAGA interpretations of events, and have anti-MAGA worries. Unless you choose to go MAGA, your moral trajectory in life is going to be determined by just how anti-MAGA you and your friends are willing to be.
Because, at least for awhile, you’re going to be able to get by without being very anti-MAGA at all. You and your friends could get by okay, maybe even pretty well. Maybe even better than the MAGA folks.
Choosing to quell the anti-MAGA in you could leave you drifting down the Mississippi of Mark Twain’s youth, smooth and calm and beautiful, as free from worries as a day at Disneyland.
And why not? You’ve put in your time of dread and anxiety. Why not focus your attention on the other side of the coin for awhile? On the good side? Why not let the vibe just shift?
I’m asking the questions, not prescribing the answers.
No one really ever knows how to save the world, even the ones who think they do. Some, like a young man who recently blew himself up in a random parking lot in a random small city with a random manifesto attempting to do a random livestream that didn’t work – have decided that the world really isn’t worth saving anyway.
And since none of us really knows how to save the world or if it’s worth saving, maybe it’s time to cop out. Compromise. Engage in moral capitulation.
I mean Mark Zuckerberg copped out. And he’s so rich he must be a genius, right? The fact that he inevitably looks a moronic deer in the headlights in any photo ever taken of him doesn’t mean he isn’t uh, super smart or something. Does it?
Big corporations have compromised, you know going along with their big corporate friends to get along. And Republicans have completely capitulated. So completely that it’s as if they never had any morals in the first place. Because, perhaps, the remaining Republicans did not in fact have principles in the first place. Maybe they just liked hanging out with their Republican friends enjoying immoral activities.
So at what point does a person or entity become complicit? How many rationalizations does it take? If the courts don’t stand up against the collapse of American democracy – who will?
But – surely the threat will end without any action on the part of you or your friends? At the midterms right? Also – you have kids. Wouldn’t be smart to risk anything while you have kids. Right? Also – you need to keep working. You can’t lose your job. You need it to survive. What good would it do to lose your job? Besides, it’s not like you could make a difference anyway.
Unless you have friends.
Unless you and all your friends, all of them – oh well, maybe it’s better to just get by. After all, it’s just immigrants they’re after. And maybe you think the immigrants are victims but…
You might be right. The survival of you, your family, your friends, your community – that survival might amount to victory in the long run. Maybe you lie a little, cheat a little, steal a little, make a few compromises here and there and live to tell the tale of outlasting something that you never thought you’d have to witness.
Maybe you just get through a daily life that seems completely unmoored from previous reality. Maybe your neighbors and former friends make awkward Musk-like Nazi salutes (“Heil Trump”) and you keep your own counsel about it. Maybe you see American citizens kidnapped and deported to Albania for no known reason. Maybe you see people rounded up and put in concentration camps (detention camps are they called?) because they call themselves the resistance. Maybe you see pro-democracy activists beaten to death. And maybe you say nothing.
It takes a lot of fortitude to be a silent witness to atrocities.
Maybe you have that fortitude. Maybe you survive because you make friends with a corrupt regime official who can be bought off – like so many other corrupt officials who neither believe in nor condone what they’re doing – but who don’t care to be unambiguous about their disdain for who and what they work for.
On the other hand, you could flee. You could vote with your feet. But when? How? What would be the trigger for leaving? Doesn’t it make more sense to give America another chance? I mean it’s not like America is going to enter a prolonged economic downturn or anything. Right?
So maybe the people who once openly declared how much they hated Trump should just do their work, whatever that work may be, under Trump’s supervision. Or the supervision of his loyalists. How bad could that be? You and your friends can just laugh at him, quietly, behind his back. Why not get co-opted by someone who hates you as much as you hate him?
The thing is, every little choice you and I make, is undoubtedly rational enough.
Can a bunch of rational choices lead to an unacceptable destination, though?
You could ask the so-called ‘mainstream’ media that question. Supposedly, they followed their rules and their coverage of the Trump phenomenon was, at every step of the way, in line with defensible journalistic protocols. And yet, the mainstream media failed at every defensible step of the way and continues to fail. Inadvertently perhaps, the mainstream media continues to print and broadcast lies as truths worth examining. The mainstream media never had to embrace Trump and his lying friends; their resistance to the lies just had to slowly wear away.
Maybe the media and the government, and everyone else just got trapped by their own norms and innocently fell prey to those who didn’t adhere to those norms.
It’s all very dramatic, especially for women who face life and death situations in their pregnancies – life and death situations that wouldn’t have occurred in 2016. It’s all very surreal.
But if Trump wants clemency for people who beat police officers on a certain January 6, are you really gonna risk your job, your finances, just because some police officers end up dying over some surreal falsehoods. I mean, how are you gonna do what you want to do if you start throwing away opportunities on behalf of the working stiffs who were trying to protect democracy? Get outta here!
Besides, the original go-to strategy of the anti-Trumpers, mockery and laughter at the bumbling stupidity of those who supported him – didn’t work. It’s not that there isn’t abundant stupidity and credulity surrounding Trump; it’s that it isn’t funny. Villains (Elon Musk) aren’t funny, even if they do occasionally host Saturday Night Live.
To Trump’s credit perhaps, his will is stronger than the will of almost anyone who worked for the government before, and he triumphs, in part because he believes in himself and his myths more than almost anyone else does.
And, after a few months of tariff whipsaws, is it any wonder that people seem to be in a rave-like trance these days? The whole show is disorienting.
What can you do really?
Like the war in Ukraine. It’s not your fault Russia invaded a democracy. It’s not like you can stop Russia. One of the most powerful men in Russia, founder of the mercenary Wagner Group, couldn’t stop Russia. It’s not your problem, right? Maybe some of the more extreme administration folks are right. Maybe we should adopt the opposite of the domino theory.
The US used to think that if a country in the world lost its capitalist democracy, that it was a falling domino that would cause a cascade of threats to the US. Maybe we should flip that and say let them all fall; we love to get buried under collapsing dominos! Yay getting buried! We’ll have a golden dome and prove that old wives’ tale about no nation being an island completely wrong! Yay yay yay!
Maybe we have to just keep going and forget democracy and allies and our history and just tell ourselves and our friends that nothing can be done. What is happening is the will of the people.
Of course, if we did remember, we’d remember that, improbably enough, sooner or later people like Putin, and Trump, and Hitler, and Assad, and Hussein, and Ghaddaffi, and Amin, and Pol Pot and so on – they lose. They have to lose. They have no choice but to keep going until they lose. You can walk away or you can be eventually defeated. Or die. People like Putin and Trump can’t walk away. So they have to lose or die.
Which means that no matter how much people who kiss up to either of them may loathe themselves and each other and their ass-kissing colleagues and friends – they’re going to end up on the wrong side of history.
It’s implacable, inevitable, improbable logic – all that self-loathing will be in vain.
So how far are people like you and me willing to go in our self-loathing or pleasant complacency? I mean, does it really harm anyone if we buy a Tesla? Isn’t more important that it’s an electric car and better for the environment? I mean there’s a cost to everything isn’t there? Doesn’t the one factor outweigh the other?
And is it really an atrocity to sell the US government to the richest man in the world when after all it’s been slowly going up for auction since Citizens United.
My life is important to me and your life is important to you and so it goes.
Maybe my life isn’t a masterpiece, nor yours either, but it’s still important to us. We each have our needs. Could be that sacrificing the ethics of the US government for corruption is a fair enough trade. Maybe it’s worth it. Maybe if we can all get through with our mediocre lives intact, then corruption can be considered our friend.
Is corruption (our own and that of those around us) the friend we will all get by with a little help from?
Or do we need to get pretty fed up?
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