#27: WELL, that was fun, wasn't it?
Death By Consumption
11/5/24 - 11/11/24
Everyone have a good week? Anything notable happen?
Honestly, I typed a bunch of stuff here, but what's left to be said that hasn't been said by 8,000 other people at this point? We're all about to fall off the cliff together, I guess. We'll see how it goes! It's sure to be horrific, but after the shock of the first few days, I've mostly settled into a few delusions that I'm clinging to. The first is that Trump and the freaks around him are staggeringly dumb and inept, and tend to get distracted by in-fighting and posturing — there's a chance he has a massive falling-out with Elon in 6 or so months, and then, instead of cratering our economy and deporting anyone whose last name ends in a vowel, we just watch the world's two biggest assholes tweet insults at each other all day. A boy can dream! The other delusion I'm clinging to is that, unlike the first time, he was elected by making specific economic promises to the non-millionaires who voted for him, which uhhhhhh we know he has no interest in actually following through on. So maybe he'll finally have his emperor-has-no-clothes moment with all his fanboys? (I know, I know, we've been saying that for a decade now and it hasn't happened, but I called these delusions for a reason!)
The one thing I've done a better job of so far, as opposed to 2016, is not letting myself get swept up in the day-to-day drama of all of this. There was no reason for me to learn the names of all the little worms who came and went from his orbit, and I'm refusing to do so this time. Why should I bother learning all the terrible beliefs held by some new evil woman with the world's ugliest haircut and makeup, if she's only going to get fired or quit less than a year in? I don't need to ever know her!
Instead of doom scrolling all week, I managed to keep myself more sane than this same week in 2016, by focusing on more substantive things to read, some of which I've collected below, followed by a few things that were suitable distractions for my quickly-rotting brain.
Adam Tooze on Bidenomics — in the London Review of Books
This was written just before the election, and in retrospect was a warning sign, with its focus on Biden's pivot from his early-term economic policies to his later-term attention to rather bloodthirsty foreign policy. It's a dense, quick overview of a lot of extremely complicated issues, but it feels like a mostly-accurate summation of whatever these weird past four years have been. Forgive me for quoting at length:
Advocates of adventurous monetary theories such as MMT once earned clicks by arguing that American democracy must overcome its deficit fixation. There is precious little sign of that in Washington today. But that doesn’t mean that America’s huge fiscal capacity is available for constructive governance. On the contrary, constructive spending proposals like Build Back Better were swept off the table as ‘unaffordable’. The tax credits that halved child poverty during the pandemic were revoked for being too expensive. Imaginative proposals to provide the World Bank and the IMF with new capital – among other things to compete with Chinese lending – were reduced to trivialities by Congressional in-fighting.
"Exit Right" by Gabriel Winant — in Dissent
If you want a much angrier analysis of the Biden years, there's this! Tooze's piece above nodded at the idea of austerity, but Winant goes all-in on it, pointing out that even though the official narrative of Biden's policies is that he got us out of the Covid slump without technically instituting massive austerity, he basically did do that. And regardless of what word you want to call it, good luck trying to explain "no, it's not austerity!" to the millions of people who had their benefits revoked:
By the middle of his term, Biden had become a de facto austerity president, overseeing the lapse of welfare state expansions, including not just the loss of the child tax credit and temporary cash relief but the retrenchment of SNAP and the booting of millions off Medicaid, all during a period of unified Democratic control. Gradually, Biden largely dropped the demand for progressive social policy and focused his fiscal discussions instead on the deficit—a repetition of the same posture that had condemned the Obama administration and created the opportunity for the rise of Trump in the first place. Emblematizing this capitulation, Biden decided to cave to corporate wishes for the pandemic to be over as a matter of public policy—particularly public policy that enhanced workers’ labor market power—even as it continued to rip through Americans’ lives. In place of earlier progressive ambitions, Biden offered an economic nationalism more or less borrowed from Trump and a new Cold War liberalism.
"How America Embraced Gender War" by Jia Tolentino — in The New Yorker
All that isn't to say that this was exclusively an economic election — we obviously saw some of the absolutely more horrifically racist and sexist campaigning in modern history, and there's no doubt that had an effect as well.
Abortion was the second most important issue among all Harris voters, the most important being “democracy.” For Trump voters, the economy was the top issue. The funny thing is the pretense that we can separate these concepts. Without the right to choose, women are not full participants in a democracy or an economy.
As Jia is so clear-eyed about, a massive aspect of the election hinged on this divide between men and women, but just because Trump won — with a healthy amount of (mostly white) women, no less — it doesn't mean the fight is over. It's just going to get more personal for everyone:
Trump’s return to power—his imminent control over the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, the coming dissolution of the very idea of the government providing any sort of guardrail against corporate power, carceral violence, and environmental destruction—is the beginning of a political era that will likely last decades. So much of it will be worked out on a level that the ordinary person mostly cannot touch. But this particular part—the politics of abortion, the struggle of who gets to determine when and why and how a person has a child, the question of who and what a woman works for—will also be negotiated at home. In her study of marriage “Parallel Lives,” the critic Phyllis Rose argues that “marriage is the primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults.” There is a reason that both campaigns have, in different ways, embraced the framing of their political fights as marital dramas.
"Notes From A Classroom" by Ian Williams — on Medium
This analysis of the election from a college professor's conversation with his students was obviously a very small sample size, but still revealing for what The Youth are feeling and thinking, both the ones who voted for Harris, the ones who voted for Trump, and the ones who sat this one out. Some learnings weren't surprising but are clarifying to see laid out so explicitly:
The second is that they really, really like podcasts. All of them listen to podcasts because they’re endlessly busy. Reading takes time and attention they don’t have. Or they don’t think they do. And when we discussed the appeal of podcasts, the performance of authenticity and truth-telling seemed to matter a lot more than the actuality. Joe Rogan may be a gigantic dumbass, but he performs that he’s curious, interested, and engaged. And, here’s the thing, he probably actually is those things.
In a past life, I wrote about pro wrestling for a meager living. I’m weary of Trump as pro wrestler articles, even as I wrote at least one, myself. But it is also true: the feeling of reality is better than the reality of reality. Or at least that’s some version of the truth. It feels true to me, and that’s really what matters. I like that truth.
And when it comes to the 21st century media — both the collapsing of the mainstream and the rise of the alternative (both good and bad) — there really is no politician who understands the media and how it's changing like our lunatic king:
My rough thought is that part of what makes half the population recoil from Trump is exactly what makes the other half believe anything he says: he is media. He gets it at an animal level. Fine, I’m not the first to say that. But the discomfort, and I’m setting aside his monstrous policy platform for a moment, is that we look at him and we see ourselves. We see the swirling, schizophrenic (Jameson’s sense here) morass we’ve created. I can’t stress this enough: we made him, through affirmative and passive decisions over decades. That can and should make us uncomfortable.
Honestly the whole piece is good, even though the ending is somewhat bleak and depressing and probably will upset some people who (rightfully in some cases, I would agree!) are in a "fuck the men who support Trump" place right now. But I do agree with his thought that we have no choice but to figure out how to get at least some of these men to stop thinking like this. But, man, how did we let things fall apart to this level?
When we did a week on feminism, I asked what did feminism offer men. Nobody said a word. Not the men, not the women, not the non-binary student. Not the feminists. Not the students who are skeptical of feminism as traditionally presented. No one. This outright shocked me, because I remember in the 1990s it was an article of sooth, in my circles at least, that feminism offers a myriad of new possibilities to men. That they no longer had any inkling of that fact isn’t their fault, it’s ours. The answer is obvious: you can be a different sort of man, a kinder, more generous one, than what you think you must be. Make it obvious. Most people want to be kind.
"Developments Since My Birth" by Wallace Shawn — in The New York Review of Books
I revisited this piece by Wallace Shawn (yes, that Wallace Shawn) from the final days of the 2020 election. It's bleak as ever, but sobering, and I think summarizes the appeal of him as well as anyone else's attempts:
In a world in which the rich want permission to take as much as they can get without feeling any shame, and many of the not-rich are so worried about their own sinking fortunes that they find it hard to worry about the misery of anyone else, Trump is the priest who grants absolution.
And, unfortunately, the kicker only hits harder 4 years later:
Personally, I have nothing to complain about in regard to my country. America has always been good to me, and so it’s really hard for me to believe that Donald Trump’s face is the true face of America. If I look back at my own life, I’d have to say that the sunny faces of the soldiers in postwar Europe, the friendly faces of the boys who lifted me up to sit in their jeeps, seem like better representations of the way I’ve been treated, and so for me those faces really do seem like the face of my country. But for those countless others, in the cities and towns of the USA and in countries far away, to whom America has not been good, the face of America has always and forever been the face of Donald Trump.
Tina Brown's Newsletter – on Substack
Tina Brown started a newsletter, and it's just as gossipy and kooky as I was hoping it would be, which meant her post-election email was a must-read the second it appeared in my inbox. Come for her description of "that fateful day in June when a cryonic corpse shuffled up to the debate podium," stay for her blaming "woke dogma" for most of it, and make sure to read to the end to see her play out her wild fantasy for what happens next:
On his way out the door, should President Biden pardon both Trump and Hunter to end the cycle of prosecutorial vitriol? And then, in an inspired post-Empire gesture, Hunter Biden should run for the Democratic nomination. He has it all – an insane back story, a redemptive comeback, a name everyone recognizes, and in a sleazy, disreputable way he’s hot – remember that unforgettable porny picture of him smoking in the bath?
The world always disappoints, but Tina Brown never does.
Martha (2024) — on Netflix
The world's actual favorite billionaire felon is pissed about this documentary, which is so funny because my takeaway was that it felt like she had too much creative control over it. The end, in particular, feels like the kind of fluffer video you play for the shareholders of your company, not put in a documentary.
It's funny that Martha's main problems with the film seem to be its quality, which is classic Martha, more concerned with aesthetics than anything — but, as always, she's right! It's a poorly made film, with some insane choices throughout (why do we get strange drawings of moments of her life, seemingly at random?). But, honestly, I didn't really mind any of it. Thanks to Martha's unbelievable levels of charisma, this mediocre film is a very fun time! She's more vulnerable than I've ever seen her, handing over private letters to her ex-husband and her prison diaries, while throwing off a handful of very cold and cutting lines in her interviews, settling scores with people from decades ago. (Which resulted in this fantastic headline.)
In summary: Martha Stewart has always been perfect, James Comey has always been annoying, and Netflix has always put out mediocre work, but I guess we have bigger problems to focus on right now.
"Disclaimer" — on Apple TV+
What a colossal waste of time! I resented every minute of this show, and yet I still had to know how it ended. I won't spoil it if you care to sit through this 7-hour slog, but I will say that it felt as if the "twist" was supposed to turn the focus on the audience, to condemn us alongside so many of the characters. And if that was the purpose, then I consider it a total flop, because I felt like I was on the right side of this story all along. Not a single character in this show acted like a normal human, to the point where I started to wonder if the final twist would be a Matrix-like revelation, that this was all a simulation gone wrong. Why did anyone do anything they did in this show? I'm still so confused! (There's an absurd scene near the end where two characters are racing to the hospital in separate Ubers, which is supposed to be tense but had me dying. If someone's going to do something bad at a hospital, just call the hospital to warn them! No need for all the Uber theatrics.)
This was a mess from beginning to end and I will immediately be forgetting Alfonso Cuarón ever had anything to do with it, for his sake. But really, shame on me for watching it.
The Night of the Hunter (1955) — on Criterion
This film was famously so torn to shreds at its release that director Charles Laughton was never allowed to make a second film, and yet over the years it's become known as one of the greatest films of all time — a French film magazine ranked it #2, just behind Citizen Kane. So I knew I would be in for some crazy shit.
It tells the story of a serial killer preacher, played by Robert Mitchum, who targets a widow and her kids, trying to get the stolen money their bank-robber father left behind. Even 70 years later, in both style and substance it feels experimental, so I can see why audiences might have reacted so harshly at its release. But even in 2024, we found ourselves saying, "How the hell did they do that?" at some shots. And, really, now more than ever we need to force Hollywood to re-learn the art of lighting. The shadows in this film! It's not concrete yet, but I'm working on a theory that all the bullshit in our country can be traced back to when movies stopped caring about lighting.