The F***s Knew How To Google

Be Soft/Be Hard/Be All The Things

Seeing that “how to change my vote” was the top search on Election Day, and kept climbing into this week, shows that the Idiocracy has landed, and hard. (As reported by The New Republic, from Google Analytics.)

This was many things, but it was also a test of values, and the majority failed the test. How about these louts Googled “what was january 6^th?” or, “are women REALLY dying?” before they voted? How about these wankers just Googled “donald trump” before they voted. Black women have been at the raw end of social system failure for centuries longer than our disaffected white men and women have, and they sure didn’t have to Google “how do I change my vote.” I agree with whoever said, “Because an ideology has a majority, doesn’t mean it is right.”

Meanwhile, the garish appointments are no surprise. Of course it’s this stupid and bad. But read Timothy Snyder (and the other key historians and philosophers, not the shock soup of news and information) to understand our moment and how to be. I’m working now to put down my shock and personal feelings as best I can. Because here’s Snyder saying we’re no longer in a post-electoral moment, but rather a pre-catastrophic moment, including how to actually understand the appointments.

The pain of this learning zone we are in includes recognizing that a vast portion of the red half of this dang country is stone ass backwards.

How they got to this point, the point of Googling “how do I change my vote,” is the tired story reporters and liberals sorted through like a musty knitting basket all those years of Dopes in Diners we had to put up with after 2016. Structures of fascist power (from the historians), how it grows, and how the good forces of anti-fascism must contain and defeat it, is all we should have been gabbing on about through those years. We did not have that time. We needed pattern recognition badly, not social worker diner insights. We were patronizing our would-be Oppressors, and now they’re back in.

It’s not news to either side that the rich got way too rich, that for too many, good jobs with purpose and dignity got gone, that drug addicts lurch our streets in ghoulish devastation, that shoplifting has whole miserable aisles locked shut at drugstores and Targets and hardware, and that housing costs shot out of sight into the sky. Add of course the climate chaos of normalized extreme weather events going off like Nolan’s Dunkirk but all over and all the time, and you have a disoriented electorate ripe for the picking. Sure Dems could be dinged for telling folks that statistically, crime is down, when you can’t buy shampoo without assistance. Sure Dems might sound bookish when they say that amongst nations, the economy is in fact great, when thirty-somethings are living 4 to an apartment and don’t know what the question “Who’s your doctor?” could even refer to.

But only one side was weaponizing these truths for kleptocratic power gains, while Dems were doing the stodgy dry work of trying to fix it. Of course a charismatic carny barker strongman could stir up the discontent of the masses using the usual rhetorical devices of the populist (see Professor Jen Merceica), all within a country that just wasn’t prepared for this. The appeasement ethos of trying to feel the pain of the Trump voter, when our whole study should have been how to contain the rising and recognizable populist threat, truly has no place now.  

An exhausting aspect of life is that many things can be true at the same time. There is truth to be had, but no safety, in the liberal guilt-think. Yes the plight of the angry working man is relevant, as is the unequal funding of systems of education, the extraction industry of social media attention-mining us bare, NAFTA, feminized schools, automation, Russian lies and GOP Jesus––but let’s just stop. Let’s put some ice on that intellect for a moment.

I’m not spending a second trying to unwind the worlds of the MAGA voter. That’s not how being The Opposition works. We’ve just been beaten by the dopes while trying to address these systems of social failure. So let’s put eyes on each other, not them, for strength, for strategy, and for joy. Let’s study, defend, and disrupt for our own. Let’s seek art because it is oppositional. Be protective, because it is oppositional. Be loud and in truth, because it is oppositional.

If this next era is going to suck, you might as well enjoy one liberation: you are no longer the liberal elite. You are The Opposition. The f***s knew how to Google.