On the Ethics of Dumpsterfires
If there’s any word to describe 2016 that will see itself seared in our collective memory, it’s the word Dumpsterfire. Indeed, where shitshow no longer serves, only dumpsterfire can suffice. And in 2016, apparently, everything’s a dumpsterfire.
And the diagnosis we’ve all decided on is that Trump is at the center of this national Dumpsterfire.
But the thing about diagnosing something as being on fire is this: when things are on fire, generally not being on fire is a fucking privilege — the fucking privilege of not being on fire.
The Dumpsterfire diagnosis is philosophically flavorful to me on three levels.
First, the word dumpsterfire itself is simply delicious. I’m someone notorious for letting memes linger in my imagination far past their social digestion. (O shit whaddup!) I appreciate the appeal of using dumpsterfire in everyday conversation. And because it’s fun to use, everyone is using it and so most people reading this know of its memetic virality even if you have no idea what memetic virality is.
Second, the reason we need words like shitshow and dumpsterfire is because we need words to express our displeasure at something in failure state. We know shit should not be on show and that dumpsters should not be on fire and so calling things shitshows and dumpsterfires to others demonstrates our recognition that things are not how they should be.
When I was in high school, teenagers delighted in the power of labeling to signify social distance between students. Maybe you experienced this yourself. Most people do.
Anyway, other kids took delight in telling each other that they were something they should not be. That they were, perhaps, shit on show. Generally, however, as few are lexically precocious, we often see teenagers trade in cliched insults. Where I grew up, if you were marked as coming from a family in failure state, you were called trash — white or ghetto, depending on your skin color.
Yes, rural Pennsylvania contains multitudes.
At 30, I still identify as white trash. That’s how I was raised. Not by my family, but by the jury of my peers who saw in me someone who could be called trash because the state subsidized my lunch.
I knew from kindergarten onward that I would never be human. My peers had decided I would be trash. That’s it. That’s how it was. That’s how being poor is.
So the third reason I love the word Dumpsterfire so much is its symbolism: a Dumpsterfire is trash on fire.
And, of course, Liberals think this is all so funny.
“That’s the thing about crowded planets,” she said. “You can’t just yell fire and not offer anyone an exit strategy.”
If I had to be honest, it’s been hard for me to finally concede the moral cowardness of Liberals. After all, I identified as a Liberal for most of my life. Like most college-educated people my age, I can admit I cried when Obama gave his DNC speech. I cried again when Obama won the 2008 election. But then somewhere between 2008 and 2012, something happened and things just stopped being so great between me and Liberals.
I don’t remember what that thing was.
Oh, wait, yes I do!
It was the economy crashing.
Remember that?
That crash coincided exactly with my college graduation. Which was, in its own way, a cosmically sick joke to play on the kind of scholarship kid media celebrates for having pulled herself up from bootstraps to affirm the validity of the American Dream.
But in 2008, practically everyone I knew who didn’t fall into this world from a jackpot vagina was panicking. As we all learned fairly quickly, finding employment during a recession is actually very difficult with no experience. And by the time the economy supposedly recovered, employers learned that they could treat all young employees like shit now because the hiring freeze created a sizable reserve army of knowledge labor, all accruing huge interest on their student loans every day they’re unemployed.
All in all, a fun game of suck-a-dick for millennials.
I’m not going to mince any shit here. I’m 30. In the 12 years I’ve been an adult, I’ve watched my peers become depressed, attempt suicide, develop drinking problems, and nurture antisocial coping mechanisms that manifest in thrilling ways at unexpected times. I’m not going to pretend that this doesn’t exist.
That’d be reductive and convenient. I’m not here to play dumb. I’m here to wage war.
So speaking on behalf of millennials who for reasons unfathomable to me are being blamed for their own crap inheritance, let’s get one thing crystal clear: everything we’ve ever built as a people is prone to a circlejerk of fratbros stuffing envelopes of fake money into bigger envelopes of fake money and calling it financial innovation.
And the guys who concocted this cocked-up system openly advise the President on how to deal with it and men paid by it are given authority to regulate it. They spin strategy for Hillary Clinton and broker as easily with Goldman Sachs as they do Saudi Arabia. The fact that these men are paid with tax money is the government’s official statement that American citizens rank well below the perverse concerns of CitiBank and J.P. Morgan in national priority.
Because maybe that’s the thing about dumpsterfires: only things that get thrown out as trash get burned.
Everyone else is just having a laugh.
Donald Trump is a flaccid twinkie tainting the civic forum with his hydrogenated vitriol. Undeniably fascist, he is dogwhistling for more police, racial profiling, deportation, and even, as of last week, perhaps assassination. The man is thirsty for the Fourth Reich. What more can be really said about Donald Trump than he is, without hyperbole, a human shitshow.
But the dumpsterfire that surrounds the shitshow of Donald Trump includes the wall-to-wall coverage of everything the man says and has said at him. Despite spending not a dime on airtime himself, Shitler has managed to convince all the usual media suspects to jump in and get a taste.
I don’t think there’s a way to put this fire out. It’s automated, fueled by years of us handing over everything there is to know about ourselves to the hurt machine.
Haha, that’s right, this Trump shit is actually your fault. I know the media you read wants to blame it on poor white people, but hear me out: maybe Trump is your fault.
The conductors of this dumpsterfire know what you’re reading. Conversely, they also know what you’re not reading, which to them is probably more important. They know you care a lot about Game of Thrones recaps than you do the ice caps. They know you don’t give a shit about the poor. If you did, your cookies would tell them that you’re buying books like Desmond’s Evicted or Quinones’ Dreamland, but you aren’t. No point lying about it to me. The machine knows you better than you know yourself. Besides, even if you did buy them, Amazon would know they’re sitting on your Kindle unread.
No, everything you do and don’t do online is telling publishers everything they need to know about us. The sad democracy of tracking is that the media we get is the reflection of who are are when everyone is looking. They know exactly how we dispense with our attention.
We get the media we deserve.
At least when they were all printing physical newspapers, the publishers had no idea which headlines you were reading. Now the publishers know not to bother wasting the effort on human interest. It knows you don’t care.
When we talk about a Dumpsterfire, what we’re really talking about is the spectacle surrounding the shitshow of Donald Trump. The media wants you to think this dumpsterfire is caused by ignorant Trump supporters who would know better if only they consumed better media.
But you know what? I’m willing to bet if you checked Matt Yglesias’ tracking cookies, you’d find out he doesn’t give a shit about the poor, either.
So when I reflect on this, I consider here that maybe Liberal pundits have been morally unleashed by the advent of ubiquitous tracking. After all, publishers know that all that matters to their readers during the era of Dumpsterfire journalism are hot takes and cool tweets. Publishers know from monitoring everything us elite readers do online how little of a shit we give about housing poverty or food insecurity or medical bankruptcy or underemployment or drug epidemics or any of the concerns right now destroying the lives of the poor and fueling the rise of Trump.
Did you watch The Bachelor last night, though?
Tracking has freed journalists from the traditional concerns of journalism, which at one point included critical analysis of events. Now we suffer endless thinkpieces which go about as deeply into the social problem of white nationalism to discern that Trump’s a dumpsterfire and his supporters are all trash.
A golden age.
Consider how the press covered this week Trump’s assertion that the only way he can lose Pennsylvania is if Hillary Clinton cheats. Now, I live in Trumpland. I actually know Trump has no ground game in Pennsylvania unless you count some eccentric goons dropping off shipping containers with his face on them in parking lots of furniture stores.
But why bother to send a writer to rural Pennsylvania when you can just make a mockery of what we look like during a Trump rally on CNN? Isn’t that more efficient reporting? Saves time so staff can spend more time snapping off their Stranger Things reviews.
Who cares what white rural Pennsylvanians think? They’re trash.
Hot takes. Cool tweets.
But then you don’t have to ask difficult questions about what’s in the Dumpsterfire when you’ve decided that you’re only responsible for laughing at it.
Which is actually kind of funny when you think about it — didn’t some dead white guy once say rich people not giving a shit about the poor is always how the fire starts?
