A little over a week ago, I took to the streets alongside millions of other Americans. And like those same millions of others Americans, I reflect to myself now, “What comes next?”
The answer is invariably, “We keep finding ways to connect with real people.” It will not be easy and it is an answer we must each answer for ourselves.
People wonder how the most powerful man in the history of the world felt when confronted with millions of real people engaging in a unified voice. He took a pretend video of himself in a pretend fighter plane, wearing an oxygen mask incorrectly, and dropping pretend shit on the American people. Set to the stolen refrains of a 35 year old homoerotic blockbuster.
If this seems a bit relentless, it certainly is. But more than anything, it’s inauthentic, a hollow howl. David Foster Wallace once explained “irony tyrannizes us all,” his words conveying his dismay at how he found irony corrosive to our shared connections and our own emotional growth. He described it as dethroning the things we value but ultimately not offering a substantial replacement.
Wallace passed away nearly 20 years ago but his words remain remarkably prescient. We are nearly a decade into an onslaught of the first social media candidate, who continually pumps the newscycle with callous outrage and deliberate fraud. Everyday, we are advised not to condemn this assault, but to inure it -- get used to it. We are told that there is no ground truth, that our leader is immune to the foundations that held previous tenants — that this represents a new natural set of expectations, instead of a deliberate construed attempt to hold an audience in a spectacle of disbelief.
There is a mythology that the Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, that capitalism and the free market overcame a command market. This is patently false, a simple lie that covers up a much more complex truth. A new phase of this struggle began, one that has seen the rise of a new weapon, the intentional use of misinformation and the bifurcation of our shared concept of reality.
Cynicism is like a biological weapon, a parasite that causes its host to relinquish their sense of humanity for a docile helplessness of rage and despair. “What crawled up your ass and died?,” you’ve probably caught yourself wondering of some people, well, now you know (I kid, but only just little.) This is cynicism, a weapon that has been used to great effect in the KGB and its outlets in the Russian press and foreign operatives (one very famous example being the false story that the CIA had invented AIDS and set it loose in Africa.) Putin, himself a KGB operative, has used those same tools to great effect, first in cementing control and then in maintaining his autocratic rule in the Russian regime. Similar tactics are being spread by regimes throughout the global far right.
The foundations for the Russian state today were laid by the forced austerity and sell-off of Russian state assets in the late 1990’s, which gave a frontseat to the criminally connected, who had cornered the black markets in the waning days of the Soviet state to become even more fabulously wealthy. Many of those same or similar criminally-connected greedheads now look to crash the American empire, pick up the pieces at a firesale, and turn this country into another despotic failed state.
Going back to the analogy of irony as a form of tyranny, this plan only succeeds on the basis of which the populace agree to be held captive. Their plan can never win so long as enough of the public does not accept corruption as a given, does not accept to being force-fed a diet of stale pablum, does not accept more and more of their rights being taken away from them as the natural order of things.
Trump and his collaborators have been described as weird, this doesn’t fully capture the magnitude of their malaise. They lack a depth of soul that can imagine a broader vision beyond a precarious grasp of control through intimidation and fear. As they lash out for more and more, they find their mouths full of ashes, their triumph ultimately unslaked and unsatisfying. I would offer that if you are incapable of finding happiness in little things (evening walks, a home-cooked meal, befriending a stranger, learning something new), you’ll never be happy at big sweeping things (obliterating an entire third of a national monument.) It’s a black hole, and you’ll just keep zeroing out things to try and fill it in the rest of your life.
Going back to the Cold War, one thing I marveled at as a child was how much the Soviets admired Ray Bradbury and saw his idyllic depictions of his Indiana small town as a reflection of their own small town life - there are many Russian film adaptations of Bradbury’s work. The Czech people had a wall, called the Lennon Wall, where they graffitied images and lyrics of the Beatles faster than authorities could remove them. The Cold War was actually won by bootleg cassette tapes and pirate radio, expressions of human freedom that crossed closed borders. We’re so quick to forget, but that victory was a cultural revolution, a revolution of ideas.
Ultimately, the current regime will fall in the United States because they offer no compelling dream for the future, only stifling resentments of the past. We yearn for, and deserve, better. This era of the Cold War will be won by the actions of millions of individuals believing in, and acting on, real change in the lives around them, breaking the chains of cynicism and despair.