May Confirmed that America is Turning into a Heaping Dumpster Fire

It is not good for the brain or a person’s emotional psyche to cheer for a bad sports team. There is little to recommend about the experience of weekly disappointment or perpetual playoff heartbreak or the general self-imposed Stockholm syndrome that comes with resigning yourself to becoming the metaphorical battered housewife of the Dallas Cowboys or Toronto Maple Leafs. The time spent rooting for perspiring players whose names most people don’t care to remember isn’t so much wasted as it is strangely spent. It might feel better — or at least less upsetting — to have allocated those hours upon months toward, say, basket weaving, but then there is also the question of where all those shoddy baskets would go. At least the enervating, useless clutter of mentally rearranging a busted or injury-riddled lineup for maximum effectiveness has the decency to linger in your head.

But the part of this that is truly a bummer is not the futile attempt to feng shui the janky deck chairs on a rapidly tilting cruise ship, which is standard irrational sports fan stuff. More than that, it is a fan’s moral duty insofar as it involves taking the situation they’ve been handed by the powerful and generally pretty craven people sitting atop that situation, and then trying to make the best of it with the (mostly) nonexistent agency and leverage that fans have. It is not ideal that everything about being alive in the United States at this moment is at least a little like this, but this opens the conversation of whether there really is anything that could puncture the toxic but broad impossibility of accountability for our sadistic and shameless ruling caste. This past month solidified what it means to live in a country that is transitioning from a sort of staged-managed ersatz democracy into a purely authoritarian nightmare.

This May began with the Biden Administration establishing what they unironically call the “Ministry of Truth.” Republicans already believe their inability to say the n-word on Juneteenth without consequence is Literally Orwellian, so it seems politically realistic to expect them to acquiesce to a government agency that directly rips off 1984. Realistically, this needless bureaucratic appendage will end up presenting explanatory slideshows about how to spot Russian trolls or will create a certified government account that retweets unhinged right-wing rants with the caption, “not a good look.”

Two days later, an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito was leaked, making it clear the Supreme Court will strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey decisions that have largely maintained a federal constitutional right to an abortion. This is one of those occasions where it is useless to spend time reacting to blue-check lanyards sharting out smooth-brained takes, or relitigating the 2016 or 2020 elections, or rehashing Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Anything that anyone could possibly say during this nauseating period feels insufficient and grasping. In no way does the Democratic Party deserve to be exonerated from this absolute and final failure, but this is an unspeakably awful mass violation of women, worsened by the fact that the immediate political solution to this is, at best, foggy.

Red states have begun prosecuting women who have miscarriages, placing legal bounties on women seeking legal abortions, banning contraceptives, or enacting a host of draconian measures, but there is really no telling what comes after this. For the last 40 years, even as their opposition party engaged in bold frontal assaults on basic decency, Democrats made an ultra-abstracted assumption that Republicans would never overturn Roe v. Wade because they would suffer immense electoral backlash and would lose a crucial fundraising and mobilizing tool. But we are living in the post-overreach era. There isn’t anything the conservative movement has made explicit about its vision for society that can be considered too extreme for them to pursue. They control the Supreme Court, most federal courts, and most state governments. I don’t know if social progress will be rolled back in drips or in a deluge, but it cannot be assumed this won’t happen.

And now we are back to the really bleak part of caring about the team that doesn’t care, which is the hollowed-out complicity it forces upon those who persist in caring. It would be a stretch to say the Democratic Party actively tanks, but they aren’t built to win, either. The fans of Team Blue could take Democrats up on its increasingly flagrant dare and stop caring, or they could also adopt the perspective that conflates a certain well-credentialed administrative cynicism and technocratic savvy with actual foresight, and consign themselves to whatever plan is or isn’t in place, for as long as that plan is operative, or just legible. Neither is a great deal.

It is not much fun to parse and puzzle over and pine for a political party that seemingly exists to do nothing, especially as they continue to gaslight its fanbase into believing there is no hope beyond half-measures and preemptive capitulation. Pete Buttigieg, in response to the nationwide infant formula shortage, said on “Face the Nation” that, “This is a capitalist country. The government does not make baby formula, nor should it. Companies make formula.”

For something that everyone agrees is either dying hideously or is actively and deservedly already dead, the American Dream™ seems to be in robust and luridly purple health. Yet, the defend-Democrats hysteria has somehow exceeded the post-2020 primary peak. Pointing out that this administration, and preceding Democratic administrations, have been a willful failure is somehow doing the work for Republican smear merchants. Preserving basic civil rights was the ostensible point of all these decades of strategic hopelessness on the macroeconomic front, or it was at least a mechanism of crude discipline to muster votes, so now the Democrats are left with nothing outside of, Get a load of these other guys!

Then, after the dreary 10 day period that featured two national-profile mass shootings — one targeting a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo that was live-streamed and motivated by the “great replacement theory,” and one in Texas that saw 19 children slaughtered — I was morbidly curious about how cable news pundits would react. There was something terribly grim and pre-defeated about their unanimous conclusion: There’s nothing we can do! We don’t have the votes! It was pure insanity. They plunged into tendentious spiels about Biden assuming the role of “Consoler-in-Chief” and “drawing from his well of pain to heal the nation.” Biden is this nation’s sin-bearer, born to take whopping L after L for America.

Media surrogates for the Blue Team have spent the last two years blundering toward the barely latent subtext that, given nothing was ever going to change for the Democratic Party’s exertions, fans would do well to relax and find a way to enjoy watching a team whose leaders remain determined neither to step aside or do anything to improve it — and who also really do not appreciate being yelled at about any of that. The jargon and justification are all too familiar, and there is nothing but this kind of conjecture to think about. Everyone squabbling over the failures of the Biden Administration is essentially recriminating every failure of the Obama Administration.

Now we’re really left to absorb bad news after bad news after bad news:

• Climate change will cause mass displacement, if not mass death, of life on this planet.
• Child-eating oligarchs rule the world with a shit-eating grin.
• There’s this thing called Monkeypox now.
• Supreme billionaire sloplord Elon Musk is mired in a sexual harassment allegation that involves $250,000 in hush money and a pony for some reason.
• Chantix finally got to Ray Liotta.
• We exist at the depraved whims of right-wing criminals, ghouls, vampires, and outright psychopaths.

In the absence of a team worth rooting for, fans are encouraged to find their own perfect bite of this particular shit sandwich, and are also tasked with seeking enjoyment in a more abstract sense. The only hope, here, is that no one actually has any idea what’s going to happen, but we have free will to change all of this because we don’t know the future. This acceptance, while it may be cope, is also cathartic. I used to spend a lot of time doom-scrolling until I realized I’m only turning myself into an angry and anxious and impotent wreck. The future does seem predetermined and doomed, and as each accumulated crisis increasingly destabilizes our present and our assumptions and preconceptions, it will all be harder for any force to control.

A “hinge” point is coming sooner than we anticipate, and that’s when change can happen, good or bad. This change will probably not come from a revolution, but from a movement. While the George Floyd protests were eventually corralled and controlled, there was very real and justifiable anger that caught the establishment completely off guard. There is just no politically productive way for anyone to express it yet.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that we have time. Not enough time to just tune out of the news completely and become willfully oblivious, but enough time to detach ourselves from this overinvestment in this online infotainment spectacle and find interests and synergies that give meaning in our lives and build connections to others.

All we need is a community. It doesn’t even matter what this community is centered around, but that it is full of people vaguely pointed in the direction of caring for each other, and others, and growing. After that, the rest will fall into place as necessity dictates.