The Destructo Doofuses Are Vandalizing America
Plus, "sadopopulism" and bluebirds vs. sparrows -- the struggle is real
Editor’s Note: Have a question about how to handle all your unbridled optimism? Don’t Ask Matt. He’s given up positivity for Lent. And also for the rest of the year, based on the year’s abysmal first-quarter performance. But do Ask Matt all other questions at askmattlabash@gmail.com.
Dear Matt,
How many shoes have to drop? Court orders carry the weight of requests that end in...."pretty please” in Trumpworld. Vladimir Putin’s demands that Ukraine be left open for evisceration at a date yet to be announced is on the line. Our communal health is being directed and manipulated by a drug addict (addiction never ends) who has no professional medical education or practice. What’s next? Existential despair is a natural reaction, but it is not helpful. Anger without a chance to have healthy anger make changes is unhealthy. This is not what I was taught in civics class. We aren’t prepared for this.
Flagrante D.
Well, I’d been feeling pretty glum about the barrage of nonstop sex-crime reportage (Trump and Musk waking up each day — if they ever sleep — to bum-rape the country). But now I feel like a million bucks. Thanks for the pick-me-up, Flagrante! (Uplift is a two-way street. Get to work on your side of it.)
I’ve always admired our British friends. Not only for their top-shelf cuisine and matchless orthodontia. (I’m trying to be diplomatic, since Trump has spent the last two months making enemies of all our old allies.) But because of their patented stiff upper lip®. Their historic national willingness to say, “What’s for lunch? Oh, a shit sandwich? Do you have any chips and a pint of bitter to go with that?” As Churchill said in the House of Commons in 1941: “The British nation is unique in this respect: they are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.”
I always figured if I turned anything besides American, it’d probably be Japanese. Not only because I was suggestible as a wayward youth to the infectious and perhaps slightly racist Vapors’ song, “Turning Japanese,” but because I like maki rolls and occasionally opening my kimono to show the Slack Tide interns what a samurai sword looks like when you peel off that sensual silk. (Only kidding — Slack Tide does not have an intern program.) But I think we’re all turning British now, by necessity, if not by choice.
Because since Inauguration Day, I wake up every day not only bracing for the worst, but figuring it into my schedule, the same as I would popping vitamins or doing my morning Zumba. Though I vaguely remember a simpler time — let’s call it “mid-2024” — when I still had outside interests, besides just fretting over how Trump and his boss were vandalizing our republic. And I still have them. But writing about those now almost feels……trivial.
And this is the power of authoritarians, whether budding (The Destructo Doofuses, Trump/Musk) or fully-fledged (Putin). They make you reckon with them whether you have any desire to or don’t. To deal with their constructed reality instead of a possibly apolitical one that you might choose. Because all authoritarians are, at heart, bottomless narcissists. Narcissists are forever insecure. And the only thing they’re more insecure about than you talking negatively about them, is you not talking about them at all. Which is why they seek to fill your every waking moment with their chaos. Even if you reject who they are and what they represent, you no longer have the luxury of not processing what they’ve wrought. And so, the conscientious citizen feels guilty for merely living their own life, blithely indifferent to the authoritarian — for going on about their day as if he doesn’t matter. The very same way it’s difficult to feign indifference to wildfire that has just scorched 500 acres of surrounding woods, and is now licking at your door. You might have built a wonderful home, and you might still be a 3-D person with all sorts of interests that don’t involve wildfire. But the wildfire doesn’t care. Its sole interest is in further consumption, to feed itself. To turn the life you’ve built into flame and ash. To make you not only reckon with its destruction, but to conscript you as a fuel-feeding part of it.