Media Comment 2/14 – GOP Debate
This is death of the nation stuff. The Generalissimo shouting down the format, chuffed on his New Hampshire victory, looking more like an orange, overweight Mephistopheles than ever. And the crowd roaring, cheering and booing like a mob. I’m getting depressed.
It’s not every night that you can sit down and really feel that you’re watching history in real time. This is what we’re looking at in America, on a night when the Turks have massed their armies on the borders after a day of shelling and the Saudi F-15s are parked in lines at Incirlik. And Russia, there in the center of it all, and all the worst prognostications coming true faster than I can keep track of. All that, and this is the level of the discourse we’re offered by our candidates, this is what we have to choose from? And these people believe in what they’re saying? Or are they just pandering to the dead-eyed, opiate-and-laxative addled masses at their base, with their pastel dress-suits and hallelujahs?
I feel ashamed by it all, and being ashamed isn’t something I’ve done for a while. It’s like I gave up the ability to discern good from bad, that everything just got lumped together in a box labeled “shit” and forgotten about. Is it going to be the force of my contempt, finally, that pulls me out from the half-life? Is it pride of place, in the sheer scope of the country, in the shape and people of it, the miles and miles of highway cut dead-straight through vast expanses, Monument Valley in the snow?
Is this the best we can offer to represent us, half or more of us, the millions and the millions and the millions of us? And who are we, anyway? Because these people seem to me like aliens, in that I cannot fathom the shape of their subjectivities. What are you made from to be satisfied with or fired up by all this? Are we this distracted? Is this where what was once a place and a culture to be, at the very least, reservedly proud of goes to die?
An absurdity, with the commentary surrounding it serving only to clarify the degree to which discourse has collapsed.
I’d love to see a Trump Presidency, though, in the same way I love to hear glass shattering or watch things explode, that thrill of disruption and collapse. I don’t know what it would look like, but I’m fairly certain it would end on the flare of thermonuclears all up and down the I-95. That’s not the sort of thing a man should be thinking about on a nice night with his dogs around, but I’ve been feeling the pressure to think on a lot of things lately, and that’s been cause enough for my anxiety to build to breaking point.
It’s like something woke up inside me. I’m feeling for the first time in a long time the degree of disgust needed to get the engine running. It’s like this closed part of me has opened and all the words are coming out. It makes me want to spit. I don’t just dislike the culture I’m seeing on display – I’m repulsed by it. And not solely by the content of the thing, which is terrible enough to be sure, but by the whole gaudy presentation. The multiple screens and the metrics, the sheer quantity of data and noise that contributes nothing and encourages nothing but the most rote of responses, the flashes of a morbid instinct, a numbed awareness flaring dully through the fog of life, out from a haze of medication, alcoholism, destitution and depression. Tweet feeds and unfurling graphs, the search trends and the hash tags. It’s too much.
I feel like a regular Rip Van-Winkle. There’s a cliché for you to chew on. Seriously, though, I feel out of touch with the reality of it, the overproduced glitz of it and the constant ads, the endless messaging. I don’t watch TV, I spend all my free time watching the death of nations and the deaths of people and the wars slowing pulverizing everything ahead of them like glaciers or some morbid, enormous construction project conducted in reverse. It never changed, dirty men, scared and in pain, running at each other with weapons. The forces that kill have never changed, impact, pulse, flash, fire, and blast. Kinetics. Simple physics.
I was at a nightclub on Friday, sitting in a corner on a padded couch, working up to dance, when I found myself thinking of how fragile all those close-packed bodies looked. It came over me suddenly, the sense of how easy it would be to kill a person in there, how it would never be something they’d expect, how thoroughly unprepared and vulnerable they were. I shuddered then, knocked off the rest of my vodka, closed my eyes and tried not to picture the sinister curve of a Kalashnikov rising up and kicking bullets into the crowd. I know the feeling of it, the bang and evil flash of it from a shooting range in Cambodia, splitting coconuts apart down a long corridor, painted black. I hadn’t wanted to think about the Bataclan, but the bar was named Lubitsh and the lights were red and I couldn’t help it, the thought came in like a dart to puncture the mood of the evening, so that I was out again on the covered patio inside of five minutes, dying for a smoke for the first time in weeks.
It’s a morbid thing, and not one I want to dwell on.
I don’t understand it, what I’m after, even though I’m thinking about it and looking for it constantly, like an addict scrambling for a fix. I think I want to understand, because I know for sure that what we think of when we think on what’s happening in the world is colored by the media we’ve consumed, and that this culture has gone off the rails. Been made toxic. That all the intimations of decline that have driven the anxiety that has led to this particular arrangement of candidacies are indeed valid. We’ve gotten so far from what’s real, we’ve taken everything in the world that scares us and either hidden it away or amplified the sensational and unlikely. The news anchors breathless, playing the same seconds of blurry footage over and over, never anything visceral or upsetting, always rendering the facts through a haze of poor research and deliberate fear-mongering. What incentive is there for clarity or content anyway, when Rubio can stumble over a prepared statement on “Shia arcs” and be praised for his foreign policy acumen?
I’m not a perfect person. That’s for sure. And even though I make the effort to be apart from it, to hone the edge of my empathy into something sharp and close to the marrow, I’m still much nearer those laughing, smiling, half-clothed young adults on the dance floor than I am to an understanding of it all. How can I ever know what it feels like to be starving, to have your family and home wrenched from you, to die, or worse, die badly? How can I understand the fear you must feel, operating under the hand of god that is our bombing in Ramadi or living under ISIS in Deir Ezzor? You could watch a youtube video over and over and still be left with only a taste of it, and even that diluted and misunderstood. It’s always good to remember that your empathy has limits, that you don’t know everything, and wouldn’t want to.
I’ll end on something terrible. Watching the debate live, in the wild, complete with the ads and the cutaways and the data streams and the slick transitions, I couldn’t help but think on the propaganda organs of our enemies. How ISIS has coopted the American visual language in their HD videos and super-slick copies of Dabiq, shiny as a Marine Corps recruitment drive. It’s our macabre image in the mirror, a celebration of carnage dressed up real pretty, and their imitators have gotten into it too. I’ve watched enough of these now to recognize the logo, titles, and fonts of the Nusra Front – here’s a little picture of hell, one that encompasses so much of what I feel, am afraid to the bones of and deeply saddened by – dressed up as Hollywood, posted and immediately banned, mirrored, reproduced, distributed and whispered over in tiny closed communities online. Watch if you will, and maybe you’ll feel like spitting bile as much as I did last night, watching that debate (Trigger Warning:Horror).