I need to get some copy out the door today to Mike and Jeff. Meanwhile, I’ve been required to participate in a distracting little dust-up with the desk at King Features. Before it’s over, I might end up pulling my byline off the Sunday story I told you about last time. I hope it doesn’t come to that but that’s the publishing business, people have different ideas about it. It’s all good, we’ll work it out.
Today, for what it’s worth, here you have my two cents on the Colossus of Queens and the gravely disappointing outcome of the only poll that counts. What is there left to say, really? The world watches, stunned, as America beshits itself, and the hope of the free world shifts to Western Europe. I didn’t think The Trump Show had the votes but there’s no denying it did, more votes than ever. America returned a man with a chaotic mind to power, a babbling old shitposter, and now it’s the revenge of the fascism nerds, red hats overrunning the cool kids’ table.
Last month, Scott Patterson, a Canadian police-officer friend of mine, earnestly concerned for our country’s wellbeing (as Canadians often are, kindly enough), had an unhappy premonition about the American race to the bottom: that we might have a ways to go before there’s no place to go but up, and only then will we have an opportunity to turn it around, start rebuilding who we are as a people. You might be right, I said, Trump could conceivably win no matter how much I doubt it, but MAGA is a dead-end ideology. We’ll bury it next month, I said, or we’ll bury it four years from now, or 20 years from now, but, like all reactionary political movements, it fails in the end.
I doubt the pro-Trump vote turned on the state of the economy, as many pundits are saying. The economy’s in quite good shape and has been for at least the last year, despite the partisan media drumbeat to the contrary. One out of three voters participating in this so-called bad economy didn’t care one way or the other about electing a president, that has to mean something. I get that the economy’s bad in certain places, the ones where people never get ahead for a whole variety of reasons, not even in boom times, but those are hardly the people who put Trump so comfortably over the top.
No, I think America just wanted Trump, was eager to sign up for his brand of chaos because we live, now, in a society largely made up of non-readers, which is to say, passive learners. Voters across the spectrum are grossly maladapted to screen technologies, devices that rewire how the brain experiences cognition, how it experiences emotion. That started a long time ago, of course, with what we so quaintly called the boob tube without knowing how true that would be shown to be. TV, Making America Dumber since 1955™ Now we have these diabolical little screens in our pockets to further meet the demand for entertainment that excites the emotions, the non-reasoning regions of the gray matter. A serial criminal returns to power on he’s Jehu, she’s Jezebel, nonstop nonsense running on a loop, people gorging on it as if they’re a bag of bones just stumbled in out of a wilderness to that Thanksgiving table we’re all about to set. Kamala Harris was hardly my dream candidate, but I did like her dignity, her basic human decency, she had that working for her. She’s a good person. That would have been enough for me. I’m easy to please. Give me four more years of decency in the Oval Office.
As it turns out, I’m in the minority. More of us want to be excited by reruns of The Trump Show, even if they are falsely billed as all-new episodes in the 2025 channel guide—the Project 2025 channel guide. See it on a screen near you in these here United States of Amnesia. Someone once said that by the time you’re 50 you have the face you deserve, the face you made for yourself by making it every day. The same is true for the brain, that’s a fact. That’s science. Remember facts? Science? The organ physically adapts to what you put in it. Once you’ve made it into one thing, it’s the work of a lifetime to make it into another.
Voters who find this vain shell of a man entertaining outnumber those of us who find him pathetic, but before he’s done venting his rage on our country, I suspect a great number of his voters will get shy about copping to their enthusiasm. They will, one day, distinctly remember having been somewhere else on Election Day 2024.
How does a mind this defective get a foothold in the nation’s life? I have a theory, not sure how good it is, that we were psychologically primed for this sort of demagogue by the Cold War. Specifically, by the myth that America won the Cold War. We didn’t win. All we did was prevail economically, which, you know, talk about the American way of looking at things—money as the measure of everything—who does that sound like? Trump may be a symptom of the particular way in which America did its share of the losing. The loss wasn’t economic for us, as it was for the Soviets, but spiritual; not in the religious sense of the word but more like the fiber of a people, a vulnerability at the core of things. The Soviets, of course, got the double whammy, economic and spiritual exhaustion, which is why the Russian Federation is what you see before you today: starts a war on its border, can’t staff its military, can’t build its own weapons, gets its prison population wiped out, needs to go for help to the likes of impoverished North Korea… man, when the Russians lose—they lose! Us, we may have exhausted our souls in the war, yeah, but look at all these shiny consumer products, they make you happy, don’t they?
Okay, if that doesn’t impress you, here’s another theory that makes at least as much sense as the approved abracadabra. Let’s imagine we live in a moral universe after all. Not the moral universe they beat into you when you were a kid and your neural pathways were fresh and being formed and now you’re stuck with it. More like a law of nature, or the machinery of the cosmos itself, a not-so-golden rule of blowback, a karma, whatever you want to call it. What if you simply can’t get away with slaughtering a few million Vietnamese because you have an upside-down idea in your head? An upside-down Cold War idea, you follow? What if you can’t impose tyranny on Guatemala, tyranny on Chile, tyranny on Iran, crimes like that, because it stores up a measure of misery for you to one day bring down on yourself. Think about it: For you to one day bring down… on yourself. Well, if that’s how it works, Trump is positively delighted to be the agent of our comeuppance, even at his advanced age, the slump-shouldered sack of nuts. That was pretty much his campaign, wasn’t it? Give me power so I can get revenge. Well, watch out, red hats, everybody is dispensable to this sociopath.
Ever the optimist, I expect that, in the fullness of time, Trump’s incompetence will be the key to our salvation. Until then it’s just, you know, on we go we go we go, the hoopla, the hoopla. The oil & gas donors promoting willful ignorance on the climate, the religionists who want women put in their place like they were in this or that ancient text, small-c christianity, whatever you want to call it—those voters won. They won, we lost, and, unlike them, we know a fact when we see it. As patriots, we’re not the sort to unleash mob terror on the Capitol, or to celebrate (or pardon, as he will) criminals who do.
The victors in this election have never known the difference between waving the flag and flying the flag. Let us now, more than ever, fly it.
Now the resistance begins. We engage, on every lawful front, the present MAGA peril.
Tony DePaul, November 7, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
