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Stop Saying America Has Always Been Like This
Note: the way this Substack works is that every public piece has a follow-up piece for subscribers only containing all the screaming I restrained to make the free one nice and civilized and not have to argue reality with sea lions in the comments.
This essay accompanies both The Good, the Pretty, and Fear Itself and What’s a Panama?
(I got massively sick again, and them slammed with blizzard after blizzard after depressive episode after deadline. This winter wants to kill me, I swear.)
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Is there any real point in yelling into the Universal Void-Equipped Vomitorium that the internet has become about a thing many, many unconnected people say every day?
Not really, I guess.
Am I going to do it anyway?
I mean, have we met? Of course I am.
Now, when we all found out that Trump had gone ahead and bombed Iran, killed its leader, seemingly without any plan whatsoever other than YOLO, did I shake my head like I was a hundred fucking years old, which is what it feels like these days, and think about all the other times my country bombed the shit out of another one and either kidnapped or killed their leaders?
And when that video of the violent cartel enforcer caravan going by the street name “ICE” cheerfully murdering Alex Pretti started going around LITERALLY FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO IN MEDIA TIME, did I think: well, now people will care, because that looks like a very nicely-groomed white man with a concealed carry weapon they shot in the back and not literally any other kind of human person, because all the other kinds have been getting killed for some time now and/or the whole time?
Sure did, friends.
When everyone, even conservatives, started actually finally (temporarily) pushing back against the sweaty, meth-blistered, right-wing romantasy the White House instantly pitched to their eager agents in the press room, like the President, with all the authority that office still drags with it, presenting to the public as fact, a full narrative of who is to blame, who is innocent, and what the victim was thinking and doing, let alone a totally fabricated one, is anything like a legal, normal thing to do, did I think: Wow, so even Renee Good wasn’t enough for the Great American Id, because white doesn’t fix woman and queer in that shrunken, desiccated hive-mind, but now we can actually see and understand very clear high definition video? No nasty nicknames like AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) for Alex’s entire demographic this time? What a shock, view and behold how shocked I am.
And then, when the phalanx of Renfields, Wormtongues, and groveling Trashcan Men that have ruined everything for everyone received permission from their masters to, very gently, poke at the edges of the utter reality-shearing fugue state that allowed anyone anywhere to ever believe Donald “Father of All Bombs In My First Month Because Big Beautiful Boom-Boom So Fun” Trump was the candidate of peace, a sentence I can’t even write without cringing it’s so pants-eatingly stupid, did I tap my feet to a nasty song I’ve been forced to listen to all my life?
Yeah, of course. We here in Garbagetown are not, as they say, brand new.
Did I then go online, see people being genuinely horrified and trying to figure out what to do about it, and start splatting into their replies yelling about how they shouldn’t be surprised because America has always been like this for everyone who isn’t [insert demographic here] and if they weren’t so privileged they’d know that?
Despite the existence of yesterday’s not-at-all-funny essay about Baby’s First Foreign Intervention that I definitely did write (carefully not including that very sentiment) no I fucking didn’t because it’s one of the most unhelpful, unproductive, pointless, performative, actively harmful to any kind of movement toward getting out of this eternal shit-shower sentiment I can even think of and I’m beyond tired of hearing it.
Even if it’s kind of true.
