What am I going to do if he wins again? I asked myself this question earlier in the summer after the first debate. I didn’t watch it (too anxious), but I immediately felt the ambient political crisis, radiating in waves through my feeds. I am not a politically sophisticated person, but it seemed like B had “confirmed the political narrative” that had developed around him: that he was too old, too mentally furry, to effectuate the gargantuan task at hand. T has always maintained his myth of vigor via the Foghorn Leghorn syndrome: loud sound as a stand in for coherence, or accountability, or wisdom. Bluster is all. I don’t know if the relatively quick trade out for H was the correct choice or not. I do think at that point in the election calendar, there was little else the D party could have done. And while I do think that running another woman ineluctably triggers the vast reservoir of misogyny in U.S. society, shared, I’m sad to say, by all genders, the instant contrast between the rage-faced, verbally incontinent king, on the one side, and the Type A, corner-office queen on the other, is stark.

I agree that there are meaningful policy distinctions to make along the political spectrum, but none of this ever altered my opposition to T, who conveniently encapsulates every human impulse I abhor and who proposes policies I consider wrong, both economically (tariffs) and morally (mass deportations). There’s more to it, but I’ll spare you.

How would I go about persuading my peers to not vote for T? I don’t know. Some people argue that no one can actually be persuaded, but I feel like that’s wrong. People can change their minds. It just doesn’t happen often. It doesn’t happen smoothly. It is usually not the direct result of a well-informed, rational conversation or argument. But people can make a turn. After T won the first time, I resolved that I would never again interact with a T-voting person. But then I quickly realized how lonely I would be, that I lived in the Land of Progress, and that my little bubble of like-minded, aspiring professionals was tiny and not nearly as homogenous as I might hope. And further, that my fleeting hope for always agreeable peers was slightly antidemocratic. What is democracy if not the hell of other people? Politicians spend all this time trying to get people to vote, and then they vote incorrectly and for all the wrong reasons.¹ I’m not the best political thinker, but I’m not the worst either.² I wish there were something I could say that would change people’s minds, but we are literally watching different channels, reading different books, thumbing through different memes. We almost speak a different language.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself in Chicago attending a lesbian rally for H. I was neither a host nor a contributor. I was just tagging along with a friend, but I was happy to be there, so far from my usual climate. Those lesbians were fired up, and I found this exciting. In my day to day life I am as apolitical as possible, both as a professional prophylactic and as an expression of personal sensibility, and also, yes, as a kind of defense mechanism. I think the phrase is “conflict-avoidant.” Even so, I am not immune to eloquent political rage, which is what the speakers exhibited. A couple of people there asked me what it was like living where I lived, and I said that it was mostly fine but that it occasionally grew awkward, usually when a peer decided to do an in-person re-post of some right-wing meme, a hand-off in the relay race of ideas. For a while this took the form of Hunter Biden fentanyl jokes having to do with contaminated money? (I don’t know. I am tempted to google it but I don’t care.) It takes the form of “well they say that there’s never been a hurricane that started in the Gulf.” It takes the form of the guy showing me “this year’s scariest Halloween costume” and the picture being a Biden mask. These people are eating from an entirely different salad bar. A more combative person might begin arguing. I instead treat these moments as I would a tic from a person who is obviously, helplessly, psychologically compromised, and start politely scanning for the exits.³ Perhaps I am part of the problem with my reluctance for immediate intellectual confrontation. I am writing this on my little blog, after all.

I do know that I am tired of the discourse, if we can even call it that. Discourse implies some kind of organization of the rhetoric, where instead it’s just a daily primordial stew of new ingredients reacting to one another in a fractal manner. I am tired of the T show, and the people who continue to watch the T show seem self-compromised in some way, as if in a cult or in the late stages of an addiction, an inner struggle tied up inside their particular circumstances, and not really having anything to do with me. How do I help them help themselves? Etc.

Perhaps I am just a smug, aspirational, paraprofessional, yuppie reboot who is both too polite for aggressive lefty rhetoric and too Episcopalian for the pro-wrestling, redneck stench of the modern right. That might be true, but also I think both sides are still wrong in specific ways, aside from the fact that they offend my tastes. I’ve never listened to the Joe Rogan Experience for a couple of reasons. One, podcasts are like audiobooks. If I’m going to let someone whisper in my ear, I better like their voice. Two, Joe Rogan was the host of Fear Factor, a show that was on in the evenings when I worked at the NBC affiliate in Birmingham, and I found it revolting. That show, if you recall, was about people performing weird stunts in order to get money, which turns out to be a good description of contemporary American society, or at least a portion of it, the online portion of it — doing weird, revolting stunts for clout, online attention, with the hopes of spinning that straw into gold. The Hawk Tuah girl is instructive here: she made an ostensibly offhand joke (conveniently under the eye of Sauron) that went viral and now she has an agent and makes media appearances. It’s the American dream: do or say something that would appall your grandmother but which can be monetized via its appalling attention. We used to make widgets; now we make wisecracks. Anyway, I don’t really care. Get that money, queen. Or whatever the kids are saying these days. (Having teens at home makes me feel old, linguistically.) Anyway, I assume the Joe Rogan Experience is just a continuation of Fear Factor: people motivated to say appalling stuff in his presence for the hope of it becoming a vector of attention and consequently an engine of money. And one reliable way to do that is to stoke everyone’s worst impulses, their darkest paranoias — a fear factory, if you will.

Fear Factor went off the air, but now the air has been replaced by this new show, this seemingly inescapable show, that’s everywhere always at once, and I guess the question to pose to myself is: can I escape the show? This feels irresponsible; it feels like I should pay attention. A thousand tote bags cry out: This is not normal! But the show is slowly making me insane, slowly corroding my sense of proportion and ability to move about the physical world, slowly taking away my ability to do anything outside the show. Entertainment, if that word even suffices, at an industrial scope and scale. Move those jokes down the conveyor belt! We’ve seized the memes of production, but we are still alienated.

1. I know that inflation was bad, but it’s getting better, whether you feel like it’s getting better or not. And what did you think was going to happen when all that pandemic stimulus hit the streets?

2. Precious few people seem to vote for a president based on that person’s foreign policy experience or plans, though that seems to be the area where presidents have the most actual control.

3. That old saw about not talking about politics, religion, or your personal income in social situations: good advice!