The Un-Trousered State
Trump's naked corruption is no longer shocking -- just part of the scenery
For as long as there’s been social media, I’ve generally abhorred it. Streaking seems to have peaked in the seventies, when every Tom, Dick, and Harry un-trousered themselves to let their glistening nodules and stiffened giblets (as Tom Wolfe called them) out for some air. When a streaker did a 50-yard-dash behind David Niven at the 1974 Oscars, Niven uncorked one of the best ad-libs of all-time, saying, “Isn’t it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?”
Which was a prophetic description of Twitter, three decades before it was inflicted on the world. Twitter turned online America into intellectual streakers — if “intellectual” isn’t too generous a term. But while I spent much of the twenty-teens writing overheated anti-social-media screeds with titles like “The Twidiocracy,” the last few years have seen me succumb. Not to Twitter, which is still like taking a long hot soak in donkey dung. In fact, it’s even worse than it was a decade ago, as the only thing Elon’s White Supremacist Emporium is good for is maybe as a dating site to meet fellow Nazis, finger-sniffing conspiracists, or future felons who will someday gain Trump pardons and eventual appointments to his administration.
But when Substack Notes came along a few years ago, I caved for three reasons:
1. My general erosion of standards. Like those ‘70s streakers, I came to think: “Who needs pants, anyway? They’re stuffy and constricting, and this is a free country in which my uglies have the right to dangle freely.”
2. I don’t do much advertising — maybe the occasional Super Bowl ad or Times Square billboard. But even though click-through rates are notoriously low on all social media, Notes hits the direct-marketing bullseye, since people who are already on Notes are more likely to subscribe to Slack Tide. (If you have not, why not? Quit being lazy.)
3. In the hyper-speed world of The Revenge of Trump era, if an atrocity happens on a Monday, I don’t expect it to still be relevant by a Friday, when I might be writing. Because there will have been 20 more atrocities since then. Which could be the Trump administration’s theme: “You think this is bad? Wait ‘til you see what we do tomorrow. Or later today!” So Notes is a good way of ringing the atrocities bell without having to dedicate an entire column to any given one. Because someday, when my future grandkids ask, “G-Daddy, what did you do while the republic was failing?”, I want to be able to look them in the eye, and say, “I wrote really salty paragraphs that a bunch of people who already agree with me hit the like-button on.”
And so, this week, I dutifully held forth on everything from MAGA meathead/Trump henchman Bill Pulte being selected to run our national intelligence agencies (into the ground), to CBS firing Scott Pelley and their capitulation crapshow, to Trump hitting on/trying to demean CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, to our first orange president also being our first gay president.
But then I dimmed the lights for a slow dance, in order to write this more somber Note, one which attempts to square where we are now with the hangover we will have to reckon with as the unimaginable no longer requires imagining:
Matthew 6:34 says, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Translation: don’t borrow trouble, when you’re already stocked up on the troubles you have. So it’s perhaps foolhardy to mull over what the truth-and-reconciliation portion of the program looks like while war crimes are still being committed every day, often several times a day.
But this is part of my concern: