34 for 45. With a Bullet!
How guilty is guilty these days and where Donald Trump is concerned, does it really matter when half of America wants to woodchip the other half?
At the Ultimate Fighting Championship fights, number 302 to be exact, on Saturday June 1, 2024, former President Donald Trump entered the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey and into a land that time, apparently, forgot. That is, forgotten was the long record of continual loss and massive bungling, the multiple attempts to subvert both our social norms and the democratic process, and the go-as-the-wind-blows school of performative politicking.
Remembered, like in the Tod Browning film Freaks, was that Trump was “one of us,” kind of a fuck up, and there was no more proof needed than the standing ovation the attendees gave him on entrance. About the only place left in America that doesn’t involve country music, monster trucks, pro wrestling, or a MAGA rally, is where this is likely to happen.
Trump for his part, looking like a 77-year-old man who just got convicted in a historical criminal trial…that is wan and out of sorts, seemed surprised. Then, like the title character in The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., by evening end, reinvigorated. The Fourth Estate, since the conviction, has waffled between pronouncements of doom and those that claim little has changed, all reaching for some version of The Big Meaning.
Which is perhaps why it all seems so…fruitless. Put another way, there’s nothing “Big” about any of this. No more or less than General George Custer’s last chapter. Best case scenario if you’re a Trumper? He gets elected and spends the next four years “owning” the “libtards.” If you’re a Never Trumper, he loses, both the election and all of his subsequent trials, and we spend the next four years waiting for him to die.
[F]or a few years post Trump’s incarceration, his death, or the end of his political ambitions there will be agita. This may or may not include violent insurrections or further attempts to overthrow the government.
However, his end, like all of our ends is inevitable, the only issue being how much he can break, or fix, depending on your political proclivities, before he does the expected and dies. So all of this breathlessness, from both sides of the spectrum, is as boring as anything else he’s introduced us to over the last eight years. And you see this is the key to The Entertainment Presidency: every act gets old on a long enough time line.
Trump, like the aforementioned AH is sui generis however, also like AH, the issue is not the individual, it’s those through whom he makes manifest a willingness to let them be, truly, themselves. Sure, for a few years post Trump’s incarceration, his death, or the end of his political ambitions there will be agita. This may or may not include violent insurrections or further attempts to overthrow the government.
But what will linger, a lot longer, in our continuing festival of brotherhood, is the knowledge and understanding that our compatriots in this grand experiment of democracy, are confused enough to believe that the solution to their personal problems is the extirpation of the remainder of us from American public life.
“I love Trump’s policies on immigration, government spending and the environment,” said one MAGA supporter in response to the assertion that most Trump supporters are so regardless of policy issues. Issue that they are more or less in the dark about. But even his recitation of 2016 reasons why he likes Trump, in the face of Trump’s own positions migrating off of his previously held takes, doesn’t convince that there’s much real energy behind his love affair with Trump.
Like there’s very little we can do to drain the belief pool that forms the substance of Trumpian dyspepsia, there’s also very little that can, or will be done, to stop the forward march of their favorite bête noires of social issues from trans rights, women’s reproductive freedoms and racial justice issues. We are, correctly, stalemated into the shittiest of purgatories that, at this point, as we watch members of the global right wing commiserate with Trump’s dismay at being tried and convicted like a commoner, we probably can’t even escape from with a change of venue.
So while, if the song and the PSAs are to be believed, speed kills, so does stasis. Which is where we are now, where we have been, and where we will be. Until at least Trump dies. This never-endingly unpleasant place of nothingness and balance where everything, despite changing, never really changes.
It’s a perpetuum mobile and is it just a standard feature of late-stage capitalism or, in a larger sense, is it just how we are?
So the Prudential Center is alive with cheers for a dead man, while said dead man feels a little less so because at least the cheers are proof of existence. His, specifically. The public, this public offers him the validation that he needs for this show to keep going on and the total public uncomfortably settles into the graying funk of shit that’s stuck somewhere in a land well past its sell-by date.
It’s a perpetuum mobile and is it just a standard feature of late-stage capitalism or, in a larger sense, is it just how we are?
With all of the post-conviction cries for armed insurrection, the extra-judicial killing of members of the judiciary, the faux outrage, the real outrage, is it any wonder that the party and the people that Trump presides over, as well as all of the rest of us, are tuned way too tightly now?
It’s not. Nor a wonder of any kind. It’s just us hankering for something, anything really, that makes us feel like things will eventually be okay. Which is the biggest lie of them all since it is fairly obvious that things will never be okay. But I, for one, am completely okay with that.
About 20 years ago, before the show was shut down on account of a guest later murdering another guest, The Jenny Jones Show had me on. It was supposed to be a hoot. Which is why none of the more senior staff wanted to do it. Like the main character in Tadeusz Konwicki's A Minor Apocalypse, I was chosen for the job of figuratively setting myself aflame on national television on that garbage scow of a show because any larger of a personality and the appearance would have been overshadowed by who it was. Any smaller of a personality and it would not have registered at all.
I was, professionally, perfectly mediocre, and therefore well suited for the job. Something I knew instinctively.
So I flew out, ready to go laughing into the maw of middle American horror. However, something strange happened and that was, while sitting in the green room, I started to grow…horrified. Jenny made an appearance, took one look at my face and knew.
“These people are fucking morons right?” I don’t know where she is today but she was totally right that day. And when finally it was my time to play “the expert” on a show whose theme was “People Who Hate Their Race” I had to yank down the Wizard of Oz’s curtain. Just like Peter Finch’s character in the film Network.
“There’s no reality to…any of this!” I said, waving my hand over the assembled gathering of people who were just glad to be “on TV!” I shit on the show, the premise and our involvement in the hypnotizingly distracting issue of “race” in America.
They thanked me, directed me to a waiting limo and sent me back to the airport and California, unsure of the actual impact I had made.
Tuning in to the show when it was later aired I watched with interest. Things really do look 10 pounds heavier when viewed on TV and I waited to see if this was no more or less true when I was on. But…surprise, surprise: my segment had been excised from the show. Extirpated, if you will.
Cassandra that I was, I was just…erased.
As I will be now. Well, okay, I tried to warn you America.
About what? Eh…nothing. Forget about it.
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. At last count there were 59 reviews…so yeah…GET AT IT!!! Every one helps. Or so they tell me.
And to juice the system a bit: if you leave a review? And you can prove it was you? I’ll send you a…GIFT…of some sort. The offer? Only good for THIS next week!