Original Skin.
We are watching it unfold in slow motion. Like the stock market starting to fall in the Spring of 2000. When prices started to go down so fast we couldn’t believe it was happening. So we focused on digesting what was going on. And ignoring what kept happening next. As if it couldn’t get any worse.
The pounding that we are feeling in our heads is more than emotional anxiety. It is also quite different than the poor loser angst that the bullies and fucktards accuse us of. Seeing that dry leathered blond Kellyanne (she is our Angie Dickinson as Mickey Rourke playing one last chance political dance) argue about the mandate that Donald has proven without a doubt to have won — so successfully mind you that he is suing those who would wage a recount to ensure there was no Russian tampering with the electronic balloting machines in the key swing states that seemed to disproportionately favor Donald versus the analog old school ones that she did much better on.
No, this pounding you are feeling is an assault on reason. The more you plug into the Internet and addict yourself to its endlessly personalizing feed of interesting new information from the sources you have friended or followed, the more cognitively impossible it feels to acknowledge that perhaps facts don’t matter in choosing your president and how he or she will run your country.
That is it, isn’t it? The smarter you are, the more painful it becomes in the depths of your cerebellum; the skills you have developed over the years at processing information (over the Internet, from newspapers and magazines, from conversations with your friends and colleagues) are now as archaic as the ridiculously monotonous factory jobs that Donald saved at the Carrier plant in Indiana. That he kept a thousand of them here and not in Mexico. As if it fucking matters. When we are all being swallowed up by the same vectors and algorithms that they are. And we suddenly feel guilty about those autonomous trucks carrying 85000 bottles of beer from Colorado to wherever. Maybe we were too quick here in Silicon Valley to celebrate the end of monotony and drink to the future of networked optimized capitalism over Absinthe at the Battery. Maybe the alt-right was right all along and we should suddenly get sheepish about our own technology imagination and thereby force “our fellow americans” to suffer the same rash of suicides in Foxconn USA.
But most of us here in Silicon Valley were too busy deciding what mid-level bureaucratic digital change agent title we were going to get in Hillary’s e-cabinet, right?
Or else we have so much fucking money that we don’t give a fuck about Donald and his band of merry corrupt angry dickless homophobic men. Including Thiel. And a billionaire woman heiress. And a black doctor whose first and last name when said enough times quickly enough becomes, conveniently, “Benson.”
My boys tell me to respect the Presidency. They are teenagers. Educated. Privileged. Smart. Opinionated. “Get over it” they say. “Give him a chance,” they advise me.
I can see how the entertainment value of it all at first seduced them. And now starts to morph into a kind of unspoken fealty. Donald is OG because he is the President and that’s that, and it’s time to stop crying over spilled milk.
And I play the role of the helpless aging liberal shaking my big fist in a small white Marin community not really doing anything other than complaining about Donald’s lack of decency and moral conviction. And his record of shysterdom and misogyny and kitsch, not to mention the recent Bannon-as-Goebbels campaign propaganda machine.
All I have left, all we have left, is the non-violent resistance of refusing to trivialize. It’s like freedom, where the moment you stop believing in it, it’s gone. Like today when I thought about Donald sitting in Bob Kraft’s box a few years ago and wondering how perhaps he wasn’t really that anti-semitic after all…
Stop. It will get worse. The pain you feel now will be seen as a balm for what you will feel soon. Like the stock that goes to zero. Which you hold all the way down. Hope is a bad strategy. People never change the way you want them to. Difficult conversations become more difficult. They don’t ease up.
We were laughing while he was stoking fear.
We will be afraid when he starts to laugh at us.
Whatever you hold dear will become threatened. Whatever you think is safe, will be compromised. Your inalienable right to control your body. Your ability to pray to whatever God you wish. Your freedom of expression. Your text and email records. Your bank account information. Your property.
They will take it all from us because they want it for themselves. Because they hate themselves, because they hate us, it doesn’t matter. He has already emboldened countless acts of ugly raw entitlement. Do we really think these will die down? That he and his cast of opportunists will suddenly give broccoli florets to a pack of rabid emaciated dogs who have been fed raw meat these past months?
Last night I had a dream of going to some hip urban skateboarding sneaker fashion awards ceremony with my 14 year old. I thought we were going to a big fancy theater, but instead we wound our way down corkscrewing highway underpasses towards an LA aqueduct. As we drove our car down, we kept getting passed by white paraplegic skinheads in wheelchairs.
One of them stood out. The only thing left of his body was a small patch of his cheek. Everything else was prosthetic. I felt so bad for his suffering. But he didn’t care about my feelings, his eyes were fixed below as he raced as fast as he could to the bottom.
