Nineteen years ago, I’d almost pulled up to the parking lot at my factory job, when shocked co-workers flagged me down in the street.
‘There’s been an airplane accident in NYC. Big one. Management wants us to stay home today.”
I drove the 20+ miles home listening to NPR coverage. Once home I turned on the TV.
I saw the second plane hit.
In that moment I knew two things to be true. This was a terrorist attack, and those buildings were going to pancake in a few hours. I hoped I was wrong in the latter point, but materials science was pretty clear.
Then we heard about the Pentagon attack, and the heroic self-sacrifice of the crew and passengers of Flight 93.
The skies became eerily clear over the next few days, as planes were grounded and the US grappled with new realities.
For a moment, those lost lives won America goodwill and shared outrage across the world.
And then we fucked most of that up.
The Patriot Act was a fascist foot-in-the-door. The war in Afghanistan was mostly righteous and ultimately mostly ineffective.
The Iraq war was idiotic and wholly ineffective in the long run. Saddam Hussein was a monster…in a region of strongmen dictator monsters. He deserved to be deposed. We did it badly.
Worse, fringe conspiracy theories began almost immediately with fake documentaries like ‘Loose Change’. They heralded what I’d feared back in the mid-90s: the fracturing of America, the lionization of ignorance, and the inability to discern objective truth from lies.
I saw it most clearly in the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, when I realized my Republican Party was more committed to staying in power than governing for *all* Americans.
And they were able to do so for the next sixteen years because too many Americans are too stupid and lazy to care…or even know.
In the wake of his own financial downfalls, Donald J. Trump was able to recast himself with the collusion of reality-TV producers and audiences (and a large cash inflow from Russian oligarchs).
Even now I have co-workers who believe the Trump hype to the point of cult worship.
His cult is the perfect intersection of their greed, ignorance, stupidity, and hate.
Greed, because whatever they’ve managed to claw together for savings and retirement, they’re afraid ‘other people’ will take away. They’re voting for the very lawmakers who want to do that, but don’t see the irony.
Ignorance, because they keep to a limited bubble of information sources which don’t offer true views of reality. These are people who might basically be ‘street’ smart, but are so under-educated they don’t have the tools to understand a complex reality.
Stupidity, because many of the rest *cannot* learn. They lock on to easy, visceral arguments that ‘feel good’.
Hate, because even if they can sidestep the above hurdles, they won’t…because they accept and sanctify their own suffering, as long as people they hate are suffering *more*.
It’s easy to blame Fox News and rightwing conservative movements for building this smoky hellscape of a slow-moving banal fascist dystopia.
But our entertainment and business culture was equally complicit, with mass-marketing and reality TV’s insistence on ‘perception is more important than reality’.
I got a close look at the phenomenon this week.
My coworkers *adore* a ‘local’ morning radio show. It purports to confront relationship cheaters with a Staycation Setup that tricks the cheaters into revealing the name of their paramour.
Someone ‘calls in’ to the show claiming they think their loved one is cheating on them (or angling for an age-inappropriate relationship.)
The radio hosts pretend to call up the cheater.
‘Hi, I’m representing Fake Hotel that doesn’t exist. You’ve won a romantic staycation, tax free and at no cost to you. As part of the penthouse suite package, we offer a personalized note to your loved one. What would you like to say and what is their name?’
Inevitably, the patsy says the name of their illicit lover on the air, the offended party loses their shit on the air, lots of cursing is bleeped out, the radio hosts offer (fake) relationship counseling, and my coworkers eat it up with a spoon.
I’ve told them this is all fake.
The shows might be helmed by local on-air presenters, but most of the content is canned & recorded by the companies that own multiple US radio stations. The ‘cheaters’ are voice actors, the cheating setups ludicrously unrealistic.
No one ever says, ‘No, we’re not interested.’
No one ever says, ‘There’s a pandemic happening, why do I want to go to a damn hotel?’
No one ever says the name of the person they’re supposedly with.
No one ever challenges the Fake Hotel, its location, or its business identification.
No one ever says ‘Cool, I’m in a poly relationship, can I bring my multiple lovers?’
No one ever threatens the radio station with legal action for slandering them on air.
I’ve told all this to my coworkers.
They say: ‘Hush, you. We don’t care if it’s fake, we just want the drama’.
When you have a country where 23% of the population wants bad cheap drama, it’s not hard to see how Trump wormed out of his destiny as a failed slumlord and used-car salesman in Queens.
Unfortunately, our country and our future is held hostage by him, and them.
We’re coming up on 210,000 Americans dead from a pandemic Trump still downplays.
White nationalist terrorists have infiltrated our police, military, political, and judicial systems.
Trump is just the blunt weapon employed by those terrorists (and a sympathetic Vladimir Putin) to cause chaos in America and armor its courts against progressive changes for another generation.
Anthropogenic climate change is here, causing financial losses, wars, illness, and deaths.
Reality is more important than perception.
The ‘Secret’ of the universe is that it doesn’t care what we think or feel.
So we have to care.