Everything is true and untrue when you’re drowning in opinions.
Opinions, man. Everyone has ’em, and nowadays, they tend to be more rancid than assholes. The internet is saturated with luridly forgettable observations like “energy is a vibe” or how Joe Exotica displays 5 Key Traits All Effective Leaders Share. In a sense, opinions are almost pointless to have. Who you think killed Kennedy doesn’t say anything about Ted Cruz’s father; it says everything about your affectations and your version of Truth. We’re rolling burbles of non-sequiturs and axioms, rising and falling like the tides, lending shape and purpose to our personalities. Our opinions determine our reality and also shield us from it. They also govern how we love, how we change, and how we feel in the present. …
Goodbye, Trump. Hello “normal.”
It might be difficult to tell with 25,000 National Guard troops warding off violent rioters or DC being declared a “Green Zone” or the FBI warnings of “armed protests” at every state capitol, but America is officially ready to be United. The hours building up to Joe Biden’s solemn swearing of the oath were mostly banal theatrical pomp about bipartisanship and healing — as if dozens of elected Republicans never abetted Donald Trump’s blowzy fixations and low-effort fascism until it incited a braindead siege. Biden has a pretty narrow and facile way of looking at a luridly busted society. If Trump is deemed fit to be impeached in disgrace, all the Republicans who thought they stood to gain from honoring his bleary and incoherent orders should be ostracized or jettisoned from office. But the damage that led Trump to treat the presidency as a slow-rolling malicious marathon of Entertainment Tonight gossip also proved it was jarringly easy to convince Blue America that our national politics isn’t really about anything other than the singular and obliterating dampness of a strange, petty man. …
Comparing and contrasting Trump to Hitler misses the point.
In the weeks since the election, it was tough to describe Donald Trump’s coup attempt as a coup attempt because it was fumbling and shambling and he posted skeins of bizarrely punctuated tweets that were basically “I WON THE ELECTION” followed by, “If I kill myself, no one would even care!” Since the god-emperor lost to the most mentally decimated candidate the Democrats could’ve run, he has been lobbing cartoon bombs at the columns of democratic legitimacy. Like all things Trump-related, it has been both hilarious and grotesque. The public life of clammy end-stage Rudy Giuliani has somehow gotten even weirder since his cameo in Borat: He did a press conference thing with soy sauce snaking down the side of his face, had a noticeable outrage pwomp in front of the Michigan State Legislature, and prodded an Indian woman to say “all Chinese look alike” in court to prove some weird point about voter fraud. Tucker Carlson was accused of being a member of the Pizzagate pedophile ring simply because he asked for any evidence of this “massive electoral fraud.” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany held various stilted press conferences in which she blinked rapidly and spoke in vague and heated terms about all the many serious things the Trump Administration would soon be looking into very strongly. Trump’s crack B-team of vampires resembled a federal jobs program for anyone who’s ever complimented him on Twitter: It was headed by Sidney Powell, whose idea of a fancy lawyer outfit is a leopard-printed cardigan. …
Barack Obama recently dropped his year-end list of favorite books, movies, and television shows, and judging by the outpour of thirsty comments, this ritualized enchantment seems to trigger a combination of unshakable reverence and anticipation as something like an automatic response. Adoring fans interject with gratitude for his recommendations then recede with the “correct” opinion about pop culture. Or they feel validated because he listens to the same Jhené Aiko album as them. Obama’s annual curations are a perfect amalgam of middlebrow, urbanite taste, but they have ascended into a reified bellwether for prim and preening liberal affectations — and it somehow becomes more omnipresent every time our claustrophobic timeline refreshes. Obama is typically personified as “the pop culture president,” mostly because of his chameleon-like ability to switch modes and tones to blend into varying popular mediums. He has danced with Ellen and cracked jokes with Jerry Seinfeld while driving around the White House grounds. …
Sorry, Taylor Swift didn’t crack the list.
When Taylor Swift dropped her two latest albums, folklore and evermore, to widespread fanfare and unanimous critical acclaim, I couldn’t help but suspect they wouldn’t have garnered such unabashed adoration if a less famous name was attached to these projects. Swift’s sister records host some quality meditations on what it means for a relationship to unravel or careen toward a fateful finality, which unfold in hazy strings, some subdued percussion, and a few quietly anxious builds. But after perusing swarms of rote defenses about them being The Perfect Quarantine Vibe, I realized this ostensibly endearing quality was preventing me from gushing over what will likely be recognized as Swift’s artistic opus. Much of the tracklist felt like limply resonating background Muzak, ever-fainter echoes of more resonate indie-folk/chamber pop, a second-rate preview of something I’ve already heard. This is hardly endemic to Taylor Swift, but a product of mass-produced commercial music in the streaming age. …
It took a trip to the suburbs to find the answer.
Golf is an aristocratic boondoggle. Anything John Daly can succeed at does not involve any serious athleticism. Undoubtedly, golf stans will respond to this assertion with rote, well-rehearsed diatribes about how this “sport” requires a delicate balance between impeccable technique and attention to detail; especially when husbands keep tabs on the elaborate backstories they tell their wives to explain why they abandon their families for six hours every other Saturday. “Golf is difficult,” they proclaim as if the difficulty of activity justifies dedicating thousands of hours to something nonsensically tedious and irrationally time-consuming. Sure, golf is hard. So is juggling chainsaws while passing a kidney stone. Building on its compounding pointlessness, golf has the vibe of suburban dullards aspiring to elitism. …
Trump may have lost, but America is forever remade in his image
If D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people, then it only made sense that Donald Trump was the demi-star of this enduring big-budget apocalypse movie. Americans, some in more notably more comfortable seats than others, were trapped together in a gilded theater, suspended in an eternal election night that was both prolonged and disorienting. This wild and sickening ride concluded with a pop and a hiss, with a delusional incumbent shouting “STOP THE COUNT!” as a nation watched his illusory leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Georgia vanish. This Dollar Empire is wheezing, and this was a choice between remembering the fonder, more “normal” times or going out screaming at the sun. Joe Biden’s victory is titular, an anti-heroic feat of grieving that seems beside the point. In what was billed to be a broad repudiation of Trump, a historically high Election Day turnout barely gave Democrats a mandate: They lost six House seats and appear to have fallen short of a Senate majority. …
A letter of resignation to “finding common ground”
There are many legitimate reasons to despise Joe Biden — enabling neo-fascism is not among them. In a nation beset by any number of ongoing, unattended, worsening calamities, many millions of Americans will turn out to vote more or less on “Do you like Trump or hate him?” Biden is a bumbling, right place at the right time failson who’s about the bare minimum the Democrats could do to be better than a racist game show host, but he isn’t an existential threat to American democracy. This is undeniably a garbage choice, but it shouldn’t be a difficult one. Diving too deep into the incredible clusterfuck that is 21st-century America will make you feel like your sanity is unraveling into a crazed state of constant self-gaslighting, where you think to yourself, “maybe Chris Martin was the best part of Graduation.” Blaming the state of this desperate and miserable present on general abstractions like partisanship or divisiveness is a cheap, if not downright evil, way of avoiding pinning the blame for our shitworld squarely where it belongs. I don’t believe the majority of Trump voters possess some seething, menacing hatred towards marginalized groups, mostly because it is both an unhelpful and gross generalization. …
In America, you can get away with venality and hypocrisy and wantonly disregarding human life for stupid and selfish reasons — but you can’t get away with being owned. Just days after mocking Joe Biden for wearing a mask in the first presidential debate, our big wet president’s lungs are dampened with the same big wetness that surrounds his face. OWNED! After months of spreading dangerous misinformation, downplaying the pandemic (which he admitted to Bob Woodward), incoherently peddling miracle disinfectant injections, slapdash attempts to reopen the economy, bum-rushing inconvenient answers from experts, disbanding the pandemic response team, brutally duffing any chance for contact tracing, abandoning plans for a national testing strategy, bullying staff into shedding their masks during White House meetings, and sacrificing Herman Cain to hold a sparsely attended rally in Oklahoma, Donald Trump tested positive for COVID-19 — most likely from the unmasked Amy Coney Barret nomination ceremony in the Rose Garden. This isn’t cosmic justice or Trump meeting some poetic fate; this is a perfectly stupid thing to happen to a man who has lived his life inside a curdled and childish belief that he can do whatever he wants, without consequence, forever. It is what it is. …
Vibing with fresh music from Flaming Lips and Fleet Foxes
How does one fight off the pandemic-etc. sads? This year has been a manic parade of pain, despair, isolation, rage, and loss — a colossal mind-bending fever dream coasting at a distressingly languid pace. On balance, 2020 is a singular strain of horror, yet nothing seems to bind yesterday’s events to today’s, or today’s to tomorrow’s. Positivity feels inappropriate, especially when our moods are largely dependent on who we are, what storms we’ve weathered, how we manage our emotions, and how we’re persevering through this infinite dread. In the backdrop of all this impossibly cruel and exacting darkness, where the depression is relentless and the fear is unending and the series of tragedies and un-events pummel our consciousness with callous impunity, the near-inevitable outcome is a volatile swerve between hope and nihilism on any given day. Experiencing the full spectrum of human emotion is both profound and stifling. But that which we allow becomes. We are witnessing a petulant, feckless administration evincing its standard-issue posture of overt and apologetic indifference toward a spiking pandemic and a plummeting economy. We cannot, however, allow ourselves to be submerged by the total influence of negative news. …
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