No I haven't lost my marbles. Well I have, obviously, but that was true long before this week's exercise in mass cultural suicide that was the 2024 Presidential Election.
When the inmates first took over the asylum in 2016 it felt more complicated. America, we've always been able to believe, is a great country and Americans are a great people and when bad things happen there is an unfortunate and immovable structural reason for it. The electoral college is dumb! Jerrymandering distorts congressional results and disadvantages Democrats! Confederate States make it so much harder for minorities to vote!
So when Trump won in the electoral college but not the popular vote, it was easy to lean on these to explain how a country most of us want to think the best about could still be saddled with a comically incompetent, racist, buffoonish molester in the White House. By a significant margin most of the voters in 2016 had in fact picked the mentally stable candidate, but were let down by a few thousand morons in some key states.
But 2024 is an apocalypse of a different order altogether.
Of the people who showed up to vote, most of them looked at the chaos of 2016-2020, the absurdist campaign rhetoric coming out of a clearly sundowning brownshirt and said Yes, let's go with that option, please. It is no longer possible to pretend that this is a country of good people merely trapped in a failed system, because the people who didn't vote this time around - and there are at the time of this writing perhaps ten million of them who took this year off after 2020 - clearly also looked at all of that and said, Sure, whatever.
Don't give me Bernie Sanders' timeless grifting about a Democratic party that has failed workers and driven them into the arms of the Republican party. This election featured one side which actively campaigned on wanting to make things worse for working people: A tax plan everyone with more than three braincells has been able to see would only benefit the Tech Bro Billionaire Class (which openly colluded with the Trump campaign), gutting the services ordinary working class Americans depend on, the mass deportations of innocent people, tariffs that will make just about everything ruinously expensive, and an open desire to kill the planet and ban life saving medicines and medical care. Opposing them was the side which has spent the last 4 years forgiving student loans, expanding critical services to vulnerable people, and championed regular human beings and the rights of everyone to live in an equal society, all while overseeing the quickest economic recovery in American history.
But sure, do go on Bernie. There's already been a revolution and it turns out the "Jews Will Not Replace Us" crowd were the winners.
The lesson from this election could not be more clear: The American People, as a whole, will either actively or passively fuck over the health and safety of their families, friends, and fellow citizens for a whiff of an illusion that they'll save a buck or two, and they don't care how ignorant, selfish and uncompassionate they are doing it. Western Civilization as a concept - an alliance of secular humanist governments bound by the rule of law, respecting the rights and liberties of individual citizens - is over. Its heart has been ripped out.
I don't know what will follow it, but if you're Queer, a Woman, Disabled, not-White, or even a straight white dude who wants the planet to still be habitable when your kids grow up, it is now your moral duty to understand and operate in this reality - that you are surrounded by people who will eagerly feed you to the fucking wolves because someone has promised to make gas two cents cheaper. That's the price they've placed on your lives.
There is a clarity and simplicity in that truth that, while less comforting, is much more straightforward than maintaining the delusion we've been living with for the past two decades that the American People are capable of being better than that, despite evidence to the contrary.
Observant readers may see that this is the first update I've made here since pretty much the last election. Every couple of years I come back and write a thing and then rhetorically ask "am I back?", and then I never am. Am I back this time? Who knows. Perhaps even more astute readers will remmember that the title of this page - Mayblossom Senility - comes from Hunter Thompson's 1970 screed "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved", which I will leave you with for now:
My eyes had finally opened enough for me to focus on the mirror across the room and I was stunned at the shock of recognition. For a confused instant I thought that Ralph had brought somebody with him — a model for that one special face we’d been looking for. There he was, by God — a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature … like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s family photo album. It was the face we’d been looking for — and it was, of course, my own. Horrible, horrible.
Good luck, everybody. I'm glad you're still with me here, at the end of all things.
