Just For Show

How everyone from our Jan. 6 rioters to our gender-language police have turned America into an unreality show

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”  - Philip K. Dick

Until she became a permanent burr under the saddle of her morally rudderless and perpetually shameless party – the same party I’ve always belonged to, incidentally - I didn’t have much use for Liz Cheney.  The Wyoming congresswoman was a bit neoconnish  for my taste. Or more than a bit. One had the sense that if say, Liechtenstein stepped wrong, she’d want to put boots on the ground and make an example out of them, just so that Luxembourg wouldn’t get any big ideas.

But in the last two years, in taking on the nihilists and seditionists of her own party in all its MAGAtarditude, she’s shown that she has real huevos, as our Latinx hermanos would say. (They would say “huevos,” I mean, not “Latinx” – no Latinos actually say “Latinx” unless they are professors of ethnic studies or have MSNBC contracts.) This is not to say that others in the GOP don’t have balls.  Minority Leader and Trump Starburst-sorter Kevin McCarthy has balls aplenty. Trump’s, in fact. In his mouth.  Just a day ago, when asked if Trump was responsible for the events of January 6, McCarthy suggested that “everyone” was responsible for January 6.  No, sorry Kev, I wasn’t any more responsible for that than I was for the George Floyd riots in 2020. I was on my couch that day, watching the droogs who people like Kevin McCarthy lied to invade our Capitol over many hours on live TV.

My wife tells me that if I wish to keep the family-friendly vibe we seek to cultivate here at Slack Tide, I probably shouldn’t lead with a fellatio joke. She’s a wise woman, and makes a fair point. But since nobody else seems to care anymore, and does whatever they want, whenever they want, I think I will, too. This is America 2.0, after all.  Culture critics of the nineties and early aughts used to compare us to a bad reality show. But these days, we resemble an unreality show, with everyone in denial, going their own way.

Like all of Washington last night, I watched the January 6th primetime hearings, and even re-read the transcripts this morning. (I suffer, so that you don’t have to.)  Unlike many less politically-engaged Americans, I was not disappointed that even regular networks like NBC preempted their entire three-hour bloc of Law & Order spinoffs to cover it. (This would include Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Organized Crime, and Law & Order: Meter Maids.  Our politics aren’t all that’s coasting on fumes.)

I don’t want to say the hearings were worthless, because they weren’t.  There was plenty of interesting and troubling information now handily collected in one place.  And yet, I couldn’t help but feel Liz Cheney and her diligent colleagues on the select committee were trying to scandalize me anew, with largely more of the same, when I’d never stopped being scandalized by the old.  After all, it was the first time in my lifetime, or in the lifetime of any American, in which a sitting president of the United States tried to overturn an election to hold on to power that he was no longer entitled to.  Which is beyond unethical, it’s un-American.  That said, I doubt the hearings will change a single mind. Because the people who were watching tended to already believe. The people who don’ t believe were likely watching Netflix.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bludgeon you with some comprehensive blow-by-blow. If you want to read those, there are a couple thousand other places you can go on the internet today. Though here were some highlights for me:

* Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr - selected after Ur-Trumpster Jeff Sessions didn’t prove Trumpy enough for Trump’s taste -  saying in a taped deposition: “I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the President was bullshit.”

* Taped testimony from the president’s daughter and advisor, Ivanka, saying Barr’s statements “affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying.”

*  Promises of future testimony from White House staff (there will be five more hearings this month) stipulating that “the President did not really want to put anything out calling off the riot or asking his supporters to leave.”

*  Promises of future testimony that “aware of the rioters’ chants to hang Mike Pence, the President responded with this sentiment, ‘maybe our supporters have the right idea,’” and that Mike Pence “deserves it.”

* Having just met with Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Rudy Giuliani at the White House, who were espousing  having the military seize voting machines and brainstorming a do-over on elections, a little more than one hour after entertaining his crew of crackpots, Trump sent out his Twitter call to come to Washington on January 6. (“Will be wild,” he promised/threatened.)

* After the violence did kick off on the heels of his “Stop the Steal” rally, Trump placed “no call to any element of the United States government to instruct that the Capitol be defended.”  And while he made zero effort to talk to his Secretary of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security, and gave no order to deploy the National Guard or to work with the Department of Justice to deploy law enforcement assets, an alarmed Vice President Pence, on the other hand, did each of those things.

* To that end, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, described his conversation with Trump’s wormy chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on January 6:  “He said, ‘we have to kill the narrative that the Vice President is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative that the President is still in charge and that things are steady or stable or words to that effect.’”

I could go on and on. About Sean Hannity and then-Trump flak Kayleigh McEnany disparaging the January 6 craziness to each other in a way they would never do from their reality-suppressing  Fox bunkers.  About rioters caught on camera saying, “I’ll lay my life down if it takes {that}. Absolutely. That’s why we showed up today.”  About the testimony of Officer Caroline Edwards, who at one point found herself knocked unconscious, and who described trying to hold the line at the Capitol as “an absolute war zone:  “It was carnage. It was chaos……..There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up…..I mean, I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell.”

And yet, going on nearly seems like gilding the lily, as did, to some extent, the hearings themselves.  For they aren’t telling us what we don’t know.  But rather, just piling on more vivid specifics concerning what we already do, what we saw unfold before us in real time.  The enduring scandal isn’t just what happened, but what has continued to happen: the blinkers that roughly three-fourths of the Republican Party has chosen to fit itself with, unable to acknowledge the sheer heinousness of what their once and perhaps future standard-bearer put the country through.

We don’t especially have to wonder what Trump was up to on that day, because he’s been telling us on a near-daily basis since he left office.  In other words, he’s still doing it: sowing seditious seeds, stoking the public’s paranoia, bankrupting trust in the electoral system, generally poisoning the well. Embracing division over unity isn’t just a component of his brand, it is its entire reason for being.  And a huge chunk of the Republican party not only looks the other way for this behavior, they actively cheer it on, since Trump hates the people they hate with even more ardor than they do.  They are less like conscripts than co-conspirators.  Which is why Trump, the very day before the January 6th hearing, felt completely comfortable pronouncing on Truth Social (his ironically-named social media company):

The 'Unselect Committee' didn't spend one minute studying the reason that people went to Washington, D.C., in massive numbers, far greater than the Fake News Media is willing to report, or that the Unselects are willing to even mention, because January 6th was not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.

Trump, therefore, maintains the psychological advantage that  all truly shameless people have over those who are plagued with something as inconvenient as a conscience:  not only is he not ashamed of his misdeeds, as many of his media supporters were in the moments after the riot, before they snapped to and went back to manning their partisan barricades. He is actually proud that so many were willing to throw their lives, their freedom, and even their country away for his fool’s-errand loyalty test.

It could all be enough to make a morally superior, self-satisfied progressive sit back and gloat. Though they shouldn’t.  For their reality denial, too, has been on recent display, evidencing the same kind of insanity that in some measure, helped give way to malevolent forces like Trumpism.  (Every extreme action causes an equal and opposite extreme reaction.  “We’ll see your Antifa, and raise you some Proud Boys.”)

While this might feel like an abrupt subject change, it really isn’t – consider it all of a piece. Just the other day came an article in the New York Times about the latest abortion debate.  Except the debate isn’t about whether abortion is taking a life, or a fetus is actually a baby – that’s old hat, so nineties.  Rather, the new debate is whether referring to a “mother,” or to a mother as a “woman,” is unacceptable gendered language.

Thus, the American Civil Liberties Union, which used to stand up for free speech, but now seems a helluva lot more interested in twisting speech into unrecognizable balloon animals, states: “Abortion bans disproportionately harm: Black Indigenous and other people of color. The LGBTQ community. Immigrants. Young people. Those working to make ends meet. People with disabilities. Protecting abortion access is an urgent matter of racial and economic justice.”  Missing from the purported victim’s list?  Actual “women”  - remember those? The people who - aside from a couple dudes who traded in their factory-issue equipment for artificially-constructed vaginas – have actually borne children since the dawn of time? The ones we celebrate on Mother’s Day?

As the Times puts it, “Driven by allies and activists for transgender people, medical, government, and progressive organizations have adopted gender-neutral language that draws few distinctions between women and transgender men, as well as those who reject those identities altogether.”

And so, “pregnant women” have now been elbowed aside for “pregnant people.” Some state health departments are now offering “people who are pregnant” advice on “chestfeeding.”  A writer of an editorial for a medical journal was pressured to use “human milk” instead of “breast milk.”  Last year, the Biden administration even put out budget documents, according to the Times, “that reflected the gendered discourse of progressives and referred to ‘birthing people.’”  Even calling abortions  “a war on women” is now next-to-verboten. Since as one transgender activist stated, “it’s really difficult to be present in a movement that is so incredibly cissexist.”

This line of reasoning, of course, doesn’t resemble reason at all. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, preposterous.  It’s a further descent into collective delusion, another sad new episode of our unreality show, in which the wishful fantasies  of over-politicized mouth-breathers become contagions that infect the rest of us. The lies we tell ourselves now become the lies we tell everybody else.  And subscribing to said lies becomes the price of entry to join the club, whatever political club that is, whether that is chestfeeding dudes, or election truthers/insurrectionists.

It all puts me in mind of that loather of euphemism and language corruption, George Orwell.  I’ve quoted other parts of his seminal essay, “Politics and the English Language” here before. And since it’s one I try to return to at least a few times a year to keep my system clean, I’ll do so again, as it pins the tail on the fantasist jackalopes who keep inundating us with their politicized untruths:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing……In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible…..The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

I couldn’t agree more. Even if Orwell seems kind of bitter. Maybe his mom didn’t chestfeed him.

Bonus Track: Here’s Chuck Berry covering a 1940 song by Tampa Red, “Don’t You Lie To Me.” He originally recorded it in the sixties, but here’s a funked-up version he did for Chess Records in the seventies, which sounds more like The Meters than Berry: