Losing Medicaid, Winning the Grammys
how much longer can you go on doing things the same failed way you've always done them?
How are they still doing this? How?
You cannot be unaware of a particular strain of American progressive, the ones who are hyper-fixated on pop culture and a purely symbolic politics, the kind who simply cannot understand any political issue without converting it into some trivial analogy that connects to their childish artistic tastes. Everything that can be understood about politics, for them, must be understood as a vague battle of good and evil as represented in some facile fictional comparison. They may have gradually absorbed the notion that comparing Trump to Voldemort is embarrassing, but that’s still how they understand him in their hearts, as something fundamentally unreal and thus fundamentally unthreatening. You may fairly object that no one professes to fear Trump more than someone who makes webcomics about Baby Yoda defeating him. But that’s precisely why people are into those theatrics, right - because they create psychic distance from the fear, deaden the pain. Ask people. They’ll tell you that stuff is a coping mechanism. And what I’m saying today is that, ten years after a President Trump entered our culture in a real way, it’s time to stop with the coping mechanisms. It’s time to stop hiding in pop culture. It’s time to force yourself to marinate in the grime and the despair of this moment. It’s time to really feel it in all of its awful corporeality. Because the other way didn’t work the first time.
Perhaps it’s time to stop trying to cope.
Go through social media, your Instagram, your TikTok, your “X.” Search for terms like “justice for Beyonce.” Click around. See for yourself the intersection of meaningless pop ephemera and our supposed resistance to an administration that is tearing every aspect of our social safety net up by the roots. See for yourself. Take a look at the output of our recapping class, the sites and newspapers and magazines that run pieces about who served lewks at the Grammys last night. See how they’re making (another) Kendrick Lamar award victory into some sort of liberatory moment. See how they stuff political meaning into an event where the core activity is (literally) millionaires handing each other golden statues. See how they forbid pointing this fact out using utterly unconvincing arguments about racism and sexism. Go look around. See for yourself. Come back and tell me that I’m lying, when I say that the internet is drowning in this shit - the insistence on warding off the ugly news of politics and policy, the horrific spending cuts and insane territorial aggression, by investing utterly misguided political meaning in the bored upper class machinations of hideously wealthy celebrities. See. For. Yourself. And tell me if I’m lying.