Blarghing on.
Whenever I come back to blogging after a while away, I feel compelled to explain my absence, as any authentic blowhard asshole always does. Not for your benefit, Constant Reader—since, according to my extensive in house AVERAGE POST REACH metrics, you don’t functionally exist—but for my own, because this incessant need to express myself publicly is nothing if not also an exploration of my own dumb mind at any given time. My current weird BLARGH'ING CRISIS of FAITH has predictably resulted in the usual rambling complaints about the news, but reduced to vaguely coherent text messages to a friend, or lengthy introductions to my fantasy football league weekly recaps, because I am the absolute worst fantasy football league commissioner you can imagine. But lately I’ve avoided proper essaying at all cost, and so this space has been rather quiet. What follows is actually not much of a proper essay, in that it is not meant to persuade or explain and it doesn’t have any of the usual neat conclusions and nothing really explicitly unifies the back end with the start. But it is reflective of the goings on in my mind about the last couple of weeks, and what else do I have this website for, really? So here we are.
One thing keeping me largely shut up here, recently, is the nagging feeling that anything said in opposition to our current national fiasco is just more idiot grifter bleating from, like, Twitter's Krassenstein brothers.
If you don't know who the Krassensteins are, I suggest not finding out, and skipping to the next paragraph. In short, they are Twitter-prominent Trump critics whose astonished, boilerplate, HOW DARE YOU responses to Trump's tweets way too often get algorithm'd to the top of Trump's Twitter replies, and also they used to run some sort of internet scam, I guess. Apparently this incessant anti-Trump tweeting is making them money, somehow? It's all very confusing. The point is, all you need to know about the utility of Twitter is that the most famous Tweeter in Twitter history is Donald Fucking Trump, and a couple of idiot Floridian-by-way-of-New-Jersey brothers have ridden his coattails to Stupid Prominence. (The utility of Twitter is minimal, I'm saying! What the fuck possible good is it that I have three ready sentences to offer on anything from the Krassenstein idiots to GAME THEORY THREAD guy? This stuff shouldn’t be in my head, but it is! Never tweet!)
But that's not what's keeping me from proper essaying--that would be too dumb! Something else keeping me away is the feeling that The Trumppening is actually *way worse* than any of us think it is, even though so many people think it's really quite bad. There are plenty of things that happen all the time that reinforce this feeling, and I'll get to one of those just below, but a key thing I think we're all reliably missing is the extent to which Trump is a product of this culture, rather than the other way around. Nobody wants to hear about how Trump is an unsolvable, intractable result, rather than a mere boogeyman to be vanquished. We have built an *entire consumable culture*--in media, news, sports, movies, politics, TV, et cetera--around the idea that experienced reality should be unique, non-transferable, personalized, agreeable, and, most of all, is automatically VALID, but never externally, objectively verifiable. The sentient narcissistic screaming yam we have for a president grew in this fucking garden, after all.
Have I said this better before? You bet I have!
“Trump hasn’t taught America anything, because every lesson he has to offer would require a societal self-recrimination so complete as to lay bare the bankruptcy of the whole rotten enterprise. America taught Trump everything he needed to know, everything we need to know.”
https://www.timesxbob.com/home/2017/9/20/its-always-been-thus
I honestly thought, when Trump first started in on the whole "let's end birthright citizenship" thing, that it was one of those things he says that just kinda vanishes into the outrage-ether after a couple of days. I expected that the overwhelming majority of people would simply laugh off the idea that humans born in this country wouldn't necessarily be citizens simply because Donald Trump decided it. It turns out I was wrong! This idea has some fucking purchase, apparently! This is what I mean when I say that I think things are actually way worse than we think they are.
This has caused me to really think about, for maybe the first time, what it is about birthright citizenship that I find to be so inextricably American (in the good way, I mean). It is very much tied up in what the ostensible promise of this country is--that people, by virtue of their natural human rights, are not born as subjects of some governmental authority, but rather as individual citizens, free and sovereign. The Constitution makes no claim on the life of the citizen, it only outlines the rights that the government cannot rightfully infringe upon. Birthright citizenship is wholly philosophically consistent with individual liberty--the government stepping in and declaring that someone born here is not a citizen is a violation of logical and philosophical consistency, if nothing else. The United States government loses its legitimate claim to govern if it can determine that a person born within its borders has none of the protections of citizenship simply because the state has made an arbitrary determination about that individual, and about something entirely beyond that person's control. If citizenship is contingent, dependent upon the whims of the tyrant in charge, then it is not citizenship at all, but subjugation.
The 14th Amendment fulfilled the promise (a promise explicitly, textually rejected for 70 or so years) inherent in the Constitution that all born here are free, not subjects of the state. The glaring inconsistency baked into our founding--that all men are born free and equal, but, uhh, only *these* men, actually--was finally resolved with the 14th’s acknowledgement that birth, and life, are what confers liberty, not the state.
Trump saying that he would undo that promise strikes me as so fundamentally antithetical to what America means that I (stupidly) expected there to be an immediate and overwhelming rejection of that idea. I literally do not know what people are proud of, when they express pride in this country in the same breath that they demand an end to birthright citizenship. It is inextricable from the experiment! It is one of the primary pillars on which the legitimacy of the government rests, not something to be casually ordered away.
So, I wrote all that birthright citizenship stuff last week, and then we had an election and the whole thing kinda went away, at least until the next time Trump needs it to get the base all horned up. Very much related to all that, though, in the way that things are actually way worse than we think they are, is the Senate election that took place here in Virginia this week.
Corey Stewart lost to Tim Kaine, and it wasn't very close at all. Kaine garnered 57% of the vote, while Stewart got just 41%. The media called the race right as polls were closing at 7pm. There was much rejoicing, because Stewart was a terrible candidate for senate, just as he was very nearly a terrible Republican candidate for governor just last year.
Jamelle Boiue—who I have seen but not approached in Wegmans, because I am a weirdo but not that kind of weirdo—wrote a quick piece for Slate in which he says that "far-right" candidates have no future in Virginia because the GOP hasn't held statewide office since 2009, and because Stewart got fairly trounced.
(We will set aside the PROBLEMATIC fact that when Jamelle says "far-right" in this context, he seems to mean just white nationalist. There exists a "far-right" politics that is not white nationalist, as there exists a white nationalist politics that is anything but "far-right." But, whatever! That's not why we're here.)
Reading that piece, or listening to anyone else (understandably) crowing about Stewart's resounding defeat, I feel rising within me a despair and a rage that surprises even myself. Yes, he lost. But Corey Stewart is someone who has associated himself with Unite The Right organizer Jason Kessler, gives public speeches praising the Confederacy, shamed "establishment Republicans" for their condemnation of the Charlottesville Neo-Nazi parade, and invented out of thin air sexual harassment allegations against his opponent in the closing weeks of the campaign. He is all but an avowed, proud white nationalist--and 4 in 10 people who voted in this election voted for him!
This is a fucking emergency! This is not the time to be glad that he lost by 17 points, this is the time to freak out that this fucker got 40% of the vote! Any number of different things should have disqualified him in the eyes of, like, 90% of the electorate. Something like only 10% of the population holds explicitly white nationalist views, if you believe the polls. Our "party politics" has descended so far into hell that we don't even notice this shit, though--that someone like Corey Stewart got anywhere near the Senate is catastrophic. We're not talking about someone whose bigotry has to be intuited or assumed based on dog whistles and political positions that benefit a certain some over a certain other. We're talking about explicitly abhorrent views being either endorsed or willfully looked over simply because his opponent is of the other political party.
In our current politics, Republicans seem incapable of recognizing even the most obvious absolutely disqualifying traits of people within the party. Again, I'm not talking about the soft, alleged hidden racism of years past. I tend to roll my eyes when I hear or read some woke asshole talking about how "conservatism has always been racist, the GOP has always been a white supremacist party," too. But skepticism about "liberals'" claims about the RACISM lurking in every tax break and gentrified city block must not blind people to actually disqualifying positions.
In another case of a seemingly ignored electoral emergency, Brian Kemp should have been overwhelmingly defeated in Georgia, no matter what you think of his opponent. As Secretary of State, Kemp improperly purged hundreds of thousands of voters from registration rolls, failed on multiple occasions to secure the state's voting system and records, and in the closing week of the campaign accused his opponent of hacking the state election system (without evidence and on the official Secretary of State’s website!) and attempted to tie her to the militant New Black Panthers. (Listen to this episode of Reveal for a fun primer on Kemp's incompetence and lack of a discernible ethics: https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/who-gets-to-vote/)
His opponent was a perfectly well qualified former legislator, party leader, and civil and voting rights activist. She has a progressive politics, but she is no fucking revolutionary--the point being that Kemp's actions and incompetence should have overwhelmed any partisan qualms a reasonable voter would have about Stacey Abrams. Politics is a dirty game, but there must be *some* minimum standards. Those standards should be higher than some no-account banana republic, which is what Georgia looks like when the person who oversees the election wins the highest office in the state after years of voter purges and staggering incompetence and no accountability in the face of security threats and almost comical abuse of state power. But, uhh, there was an R next to his name, so, whatever, I guess.
Even setting aside the individual cases like Stewart and Kemp, though, and for all the talk about record midterm turnout—where the fuck was everybody? Fifty percent midterm turnout is pretty good, yes—but holy shit, haven’t you been paying attention the last three years? No matter what good reasons (and worthless excuses) there may be for many people not voting, the fact remains that tens of millions of eligible voters simply decided not to vote, as though the President hadn’t just put out the most overtly racist, fear-mongering national campaign ad in modern history. (Yes, it was worse than Willie Horton.) They decided not to vote, even though the President is the head of a full-blown cult of personality who just lies literally all the time (and now more than ever) and has the undying devotional support of at least a full third of the country. They decided not to vote, even though it is effectively the only meaningful, concrete way to voice opposition to the most obviously unqualified president any of us living have ever seen.
We obviously don’t recognize the true depth of the rot in the system that Trump’s ascendancy and cultural dominance suggests. If we did, Corey Stewart would not be getting 40% of the vote. If we did, we wouldn’t be seeing record high midterm turnout of fifty percent, but of 85 or 90+ percent. If we did, there would have been an actual “blue wave,” not because the Democrats deserve it, but because that is the only remotely rational response to this situation. If we’re going to fix it, we’re going to have to actually start with Trump and the enabling, Trump-apologist and rationalizing, increasingly reality-disconnected GOP, both in Congress and in the “conservative” media. Instead, the path to Trump’s re-election in 2020 has never been more obvious. It’s the exact same path he walked in 2016, and the same one he walked in 2018.
In the meantime, when the President and his pliant, sycophantic hangers-on tell obvious and insidious lies, the reaction is just more stupid absurdia, ad infinitum. He will not be defeated with more rot, with more lies, with any of the tools he wields to such dramatic effect. Only the boring truth will work, repeated over and over again, in the face of their nonsense, over and over again all the way to the ballot box.
Maybe I should’ve written this last week, I guess.
