Sympathy For The American Devil
What if all those whiny liberal thinkpieces weren’t hyperbole after all?
I remember the election like I remember everything else that I hate.
It was a disaster for liberals. It was a disaster for me. Between being piss drunk on room temperature Colt 45 and repeatedly asserting the divine foresight of my undergraduate political science degree I had neglected to notice exactly how many people I was texting about ‘hanging out later,’ and for once it was actually working because no sane human wanted to spend that night rolled up in a ball of their own meticulously nurtured progressive fury. The only died-in-the-wool white dude in the room kept apologizing to everyone while a girl directly to his left half-jokingly complained that she hadn’t had sex in a while, all of us slathered in the lights of a wall projector showing states flip red to CeeLo Green’s ‘Fuck You.’ We were California trash on international garbage night, when the rest of the planet pulled the lid off the can to see what was attracting all those fucking cockroaches.
Was this some kind of joke? Only sixteen months prior everybody had seen the same god damn thing: nine grinning tumors with near-identical platforms on the role of poor people in society shouting over one another as a tenth, somewhat aloof creature stood off to the side, bleating occasionally as it stared into an audience who would rather watch a race car explode or two homeless men crush each other’s noses with bricks. The other Republican nominees seemed confused on how to actually deal with the thing, much as their party had during its curious rise to prominence. Props were due to Carly Fiorina, then, who began her challenge of the seven foot tall winged he-goat with a rhetorical question about rural transportation infrastructure and ended it by prying off her bottom jaw with a fountain pen.
Soon every corner of the country would see the same series of images: as the former Hewlett-Packard CEO hemorrhaged blood onto the stage from her obliterated skull, the largely conservative audience gave a standing ovation — and the creature’s horns grew a visible four inches. Chris Christie nervously scratched his leg, but otherwise the debate continued uneventfully. Carson fired off a one-liner about coal miners.
“There,” thought every coastal liberal at once. “Now we can finally come to our senses.”
“Did you see the debates?” my coastal liberal mother texted me the following day.
“It’s so stupid. Coal is never coming back!”
Like all terrible things, the he-goat gestated in the belly of Appalachia. Not the Appalachia as described by national journalists, which seems like a far-off turd town to those whose daily routine involves public transportation, running water, or brown people. The he-goat came from places like Baileyton and Bull’s Gap — tiny population centers in the weak, vestigial arms of an Antebellum south that wasn’t actually located in the south and never really existed anyway. It came from Lovely and Tomahawk and Eton and a hundred other American nowheres whose main exports dissolved at the dawn of the technology age, their industrial engines replaced by teenage heroin deaths and QVC jewelry sales.
For the more poetic the he-goat was always there, nurtured by impotence, feeding off urban decay as hope left to find work in the city. A darkness eating away at the exposed muscle of the poor and the downtrodden.
For the rest of us it just lived in the woods, because it was a fucking goat.
By the time the he-goat had hit the national stage almost none of the reporters who originally covered it at the local level were still alive. One had driven their car into a boulder in the middle of the night, another peeled the skin off his face because he thought he was being eaten by beetles. Two more simply vanished, including an old friend of mine who had survived three embeds in Iraq and a central Asian military coup. He could slip away from war, but not the American political machine.
Most remaining written critiques were fluff, and those of substance tended to point out the same key things: that the he-goat’s political opponents at every level seemed to kill themselves or die in horrific accidents, that the creature never actually said anything other than the occasional goat sound, that the top Republican contender for the presidency was quite literally a biblical demon.
These articles were attacked relentlessly, lumped into a vast liberal media conspiracy perpetuated by progressive coastal Jews and armchair demonologists. Bill Maher aired a seventy minute special on the difference between the King James Bible and the Ars Goetia, noting how silly the left was for equating King Solomon’s magic ring with the (still fake) teachings of Jesus. He ended the special by dousing himself in lavender oil and driving a knife into his forehead. Tucker Carlson’s nightly program had transformed into a hour of bellowing thick black smoke from his mouth while the sound of fluttering moths grew increasingly close to viewers inside their homes. Callers would scream in indecipherable dead languages as Carlson nodded, eyes focused on nothing. Even newspaper articles seemed to bleed at the edges, while magazine images induced extreme aggression in young children and animals.
The only concrete evidence that the he-goat had played a part in small town politics was a lone article by Teen Vogue’s Lauren Duca, who had noted a spindly, gaunt-looking goat-creature appearing in rust belt town halls for several years before a successful congressional bid in 2012. The goat never attended a single session, neither voting on nor putting forward any legislation for the entirely of its terms — it was unclear what district, if any, it represented — yet Duca described a extreme sense of foreboding among congressional representatives about the ‘growing size and strength’ of a demonic associate they had never physically met. It was a crack job of reporting, exposing a bizarre cult of personality (and cult of, well, a cult) surrounding something protestant America should deeply, instinctively revile — a demon. A real one. Wearing a suit and ostensibly hobnobbing in the halls of power.
She should have won an award.
Instead at least 80% of Duca’s blood was replaced by, as the autopsy later described, ‘snakes.’
“Good riddance,” smiled conservative vlogger Tomi Lahren as she was dragged into hell by a giant skeleton hand.
The last months of the election cycle were the most ponderous and unnerving of the season. Because it was unclear of what the he-goat represented or even where it came from, Republican strategists had a distinctly difficult time setting up any sort of meaningful ground game in key swing states. How do you sell a shaggy, genderless goat-creature with a twelve foot wingspan to the undecided voter? Say it’ll bring back jobs? Cut taxes? Probably not melt their cat?
It was even more of an insult, then, that the Democrats seemed like they had literally nothing to work with. Hillary Clinton’s political dynasty and lifetime of service was marred by her high degree of being a woman, as well as a sophomoric understanding of contemporary media consumption. It increasingly appeared large swaths of active voters seemed diametrically opposed to a black president followed by a girl.
Even in the face of what was now understood to be the demonic prince Orobas, Democrats could really only point out that the alternative to a uniquely qualified presidential candidate was a hellspawn whose primary work experience was whispering forbidden secrets to long dead Mesopotamian kings. But voters knew that already, so it didn’t stick. Those voters just didn’t tell anyone.
Frustratingly enough, polling numbers predicted Clinton as the clear winner by massive, insurmountable margins that eschewed the reality of a growing unironic cult movement in the heart of small town America. Democratic voters were overconfident, vulnerable, complacent. As they celebrated victory on twitter and Facebook the right was tearing open graves and carving runes into live dogs. FiveThirtyEight, whose Nate Silver appeared to be posting from various spoofed IPs to avoid demonic incursion (it didn’t work), often placed Clinton in leads at excess of 40%. How could she lose? She was likable (she wasn’t), she spoke truth to power (she didn’t), she wasn’t a literal demon (true). We had to have this in the bag… right? Nothing bad could happen… right?
In another life, Orobas merely sulked impotently behind Clinton at the midpoint of debate two as millions of Americans tuned in. In this one it turns out that a human and a wet head of lettuce make the same sound if you tear them in half.
The right had already won.
To reiterate, election night was a disaster for the left. And not just existentially.
Even before the last states were counted Democratic strategists began spontaneously combusting across America —at their cocktail parties, in their cars, and on live roundtable panels across from their republican counterparts (all of whom seemed fairly unperturbed). Figureheads of the progressive movement found their homes swarming with flesh eating crows; Democratic senators reported a massive black dog devouring colleagues in the chamber, one that spoke in the voice of a man and could not be killed. Parasitic algae turned the waters of the Washington monument into toxic poison while the sun moved backwards across the sky.
It got pretty bad.
Yet in their posh two story apartments, on their college campuses and in their monied immigrant communities, we drank, had shameful sex, and were sad. It was all anyone could muster. Broken and defeated we checked our twitters and our instagrams and wondered how it could come to this; how society could abandon itself in the arms of an American devil.
“Think the world’s gonna end?” asked one friend as I sucked down another painful mouthful of Colt suds.
“Yep,” I responded.
And you know what? I was right.
