Support this blog by visiting Jim’s
Patreon Page!
I hope you’re enjoying these horse latitudes of the political year, when
the seas suddenly turn glassy and the Berning sun begins to roast all the diverse
and inclusive hands on Hillary’s deck, who wait in anxiety for the first
sign of a fresh breeze to push them toward landfall, while, meanwhile, full
fathom five below the dead calm waters the leviathan Trump waits in his
comfortable darkness, circling forward, circling back, solitary, malevolent,
content in his bulking grievances, patiently waiting his moment to rise and
smash his rival.
Things go eerily quiet and still before the California primaries. At this
stage, the two major parties have discredited themselves so thoroughly that a
necrotic stink wafts around the election of ’16. Who put that road-kill
possum in Hillary’s podium? Why does Donald look every week more and more
like a lurching Golem? The parties are rudderless. Their leaders range the
decks like wailing revenants. It’s as if the mortal remains of Millard
Fillmore and James Buchanan have come from the grave to eat the brains of
Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Reince Priebus. The rectified essence of every
zombie fantasy churned out of Hollywood seeps through the capillaries of the
dying political establishment, as it stews and ferments and waits to be loaded
on the garbage barge of history.
Hillary threw a “hail Mary” after the Oregon debacle, proposing that
husband Bill would become some kind of economic czar in her inevitable “turn”
at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s when you knew her crusade was doomed. It
raised such a snickering in the media that the sick tropes of HBO’s Veep
show looked like press releases from Proctor & Gamble’s PR office in
comparison. Bill did such a great job at repealing the Glass-Steagall Act,
maybe this dynamic duo of lawyers (“two for the price of one!”) can work on
eliminating the anti-trust laws, the First Amendment, and the writ of habeas
corpus — and then America can become a fullblown banana republic.
Trump has evidently been working on that smile of his: the slitty eyes,
the weird horizontal lip stretch under that baleen of head-gear, the perfect
expression of his white whale-hood. The crew from the ghostly GOP Pequod
still doesn’t know what the heck to do about him. They rock above the depths
in their flimsy dinghies, harpoons drooping, waiting for the sea to boil
below them and their boats to splinter.
That will precede a more general splintering to come of the republic,
first by demographics, then by territory. The most exceptional thing about
the US has been the rapidity of its rise and now fall in the roll-call of
empires. We barely had time to put together a coherent culture that
historians of the future (enjoying ratatouille with fresh rat by firelight)
could identify, and now it’s all percolating into a dreadful maelstrom in
which one catches glimpses of the Kardashians, PT Barnum, Betsy Ross, Davey
Crockett, and Eleanor Roosevelt amid the detritus of broken Tupperware and
flapping pages of the Affordable Care Act. What a goddamned mess we’ve left
to posterity.
Something is in the air that tells me Hillary will be dumped by the
convention in Philadelphia in favor of Uncle Joe Biden, biding his time
practically next door in Wilmington. Speaking of turns, isn’t it Delaware’s
turn for a president? He’ll be a respectable place-holder, and he might even
get elected, though the party will dissolve before he’s done, just in time
for Texas to secede from the Union and set the tone for California, Oregon,
and Washington State. Before you know it, the political map will look like
1861 again.
Donald Trump will be forgotten before Thanksgiving. He will leave a
bizarre mental imprint on the life of the nation-that-was, something like a
bad acid trip. And then the people of North America may actually have to
start grappling with the problems induced by a failed banking system,
population overshoot, climate instability, and the lost boundaries of social
behavior.
