As though, for the first time I saw my country
And, with a pang of recognition, knew
It is all mine and nothing can divide us
It is my soul, it is my body, too
Iris Dement, “From An Airplane”
Everyone’s lost their damn minds. Americans stalk their local chain stores or Arby’s—once thought neutral ground—with an insatiable need to talk politics. Usually in the most asinine and conspiratorial ways. A co-worker at a sister-store across town just got fired because she couldn’t shut up about how evil Trump was. Even after repeatedly being asked to cool it. After being told to leave and not come back, she supposedly stood there for another 20 minutes wanting to argue and feed. Customers come into our place and, seeing our masks, condescend with “Ah, they’ve forced the face-diapers back on you. Don’t it just make you want to kill somebody?” (Um, I don’t know you…) Even the seemingly well-adjusted folks with kids & families, who it’s usually a pleasure to see, are dropping like flies. Small talk about the son’s first months at college segues into fears about the vaccine. “The school’s making everybody get vaccinated. I won’t let him do it. On religious grounds. You know the vaccines have aborted babies in them, right?”
Actually I wouldn’t call it fear. The faces confessing their newly-found lost-ness all betray a positive delight. The same gurning smile, a demented twinkle in the eye—like an overdosed tweaker enrapt in private seizures at the end of the world. My old boss had the same look when, on slow days, he’d lecture us (captive audience) on unbiased new sources like Ben Shapiro, etc. Some of my co-workers probably shared his views. But there was some subconscious pleasure he got in watching us squirm as the conversation turned more and more to monologue. We just had to sit there and bear it, grinning in turn. It’s the same look my mom gave me one day as she calmly explained, “Ok, in life sometimes you can choose to take the blue pill or the red pill”… It reminds me of the opening to The Wild Bunch with the kids torturing the scorpion with fire ants. Some of the kids look ecstatic, some look away guiltily. But across those guilty faces sometimes winces a twinge of pleasure—involuntary delight in cruelty. There’s something similar but more in the faces of real-world adults. They’re confessing in a way—perhaps desirous of censor or punishment—but it’s also something like an invitation. “I’m showing you this side of myself—you too can join in these Satanic delights…”
I’m reminded of that NYT documentary called “Freedom to Die” or something. It interviews terminal Covid patients in rural Oklahoma towns. They still largely cling to “Just the flu, bro” sentiments. Most of these articles, etc. are their own form of liberal cruelty porn. I mean, if you lived in a dying Ozark town making shit wages your whole life, and a fancy reporter from New York came out just to watch you die, what would you do? Apologize to the man? A little bit of stubbornness and self-pride in the context is understandable. But this NYT doc was one of the better ones at least.
The patients are exhausted and near-delirious as they prepare for the ventilator—perhaps a one-way trip. But broach the libidinal topic of politics, and the spark returns. Their focus sharpens. The cameraman-outsider zooms in for the money shot: “I’m a libertarian. I just think it’s about freedom. And what goes in my body should be a personal choice.” Make no mistake about it, current vaccine mandates are a deep breach of the kind of liberty this man values. And that liberty is one part of the patchwork of freedoms that separates Western democracies from what’s worse. Different prerogatives and conceptions of liberty are now coming to a head. Even the morally necessary decision to prioritize saving as much human life as possible has its downsides. Yet dying Covid patients declaring they’d do it all again aren’t defending conscientious choice in the abstract. Conscience and reason take reality into account and adjust accordingly.
Rather, what passes for freedom nowadays (with the linguistic weight of the Revolution) moreso resembles atomized consumer choice. I’m reminded of the “Have it your way” Burger King ad campaigns of old. “You have the right to have what you want, when you want it. Because on the menu of life, you are Today’s special. And tomorrow’s, and the day after that…” I hope twenty years later that language’s evil is apparent. I flash on recent videos of customers assaulting Burger King workers over mask mandates and out-of-stock tenders. That Burger King freedom spoke deeply to a certain type of male Boomer deciding where to feed his family. The sentiment resonates still. And this psychological consumer notion of freedom as choice and control (older and much broader than this one stupid ad) still festers in the Ozarks and my customers who won’t shut up about China Joe.
I think the value of any freedom probably lies in how it’s exercised. And I’m afraid that freedom, so essential to our heritage, has gotten twisted. It’s now the freedom, or compulsion, to do the wrong thing only, no matter what. America is still an open country. The highways are calling. With a couple grand I could hop in my car, drive anywhere I please—even start a new identity if I wanted. But there’s no where left to go. Freedom means things like engaging thirstily with satanic social media—posting specifically the most incorrect and evil misinformation on Facebook that you can find. It’s the same nihilistic sentiment that makes a fella cheat for no reason, just because he can; makes a parent lay a pinch of unneeded cruelty when reproaching their child; makes a customer wild out on a worker just because even when there’s nothing left to gain. The polarized, perverse agon of the political sphere is almost too obvious to mention: conservatives owning the libs by doing their opposite (and vice versa), both dancing in a St. Vitus lockstep down to hell. Worse though, on local, individual, and interpersonal levels, the cruelty is becoming the point.
I recently read the account of a kid purporting to be a survivor of the Stoneman Douglas school shooting. His dad had always been rabidly “conservative.” But lately he was getting deeper into it, into the real hot and heavy shit. He started sharing fringe political videos with his son. Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing Stoneman survivor David Hogg over gun rights, that sort of thing. As months passed, he started questioning official narratives of the shooting. Eventually he became convinced the whole thing was a hoax —specifically accusing his own son of being a “false flag” actor and “in on the whole thing.” This was posted on the subreddit r/QanonCasualties. I have no idea if the story is true. Reddit is infamous for people gratuitously making shit up for likes and “karma.” But it resonated with me. “Politics” is sometimes secondary in these conspiracy theories. They are often a way of expressing the psychotic interpersonal cruelty that’s endemic to American life.
Certain similar stories repeatedly pop up. A child watches their parents who they financially rely on get sucked deep into rabbit holes. They want to push back but can’t because they’re dependent on them. Like drugs or alcohol, this politico-sickness seems to be causing a mass national case of co-dependency. Two drowning individuals or groups pulling each other down—enabling each other because they both need it. And I don’t think that’s a cheap psych analogy—it scales all the way to the top. The thing about co-dependency is that it’s kinky shit. It’s basically BDSM play. But instead of leather and candles, it’s with people’s identities and deepest psychological needs. You end up all screwy and hurt. In my experience, these conspiracies and the reaction to them (both intended and real) play out as sordid little sadomasochistic dramas. They feel so gross that I’ve cut out several people entirely because I just don’t know how to be around them anymore. I don’t want to play that game anymore—it hurts.
The family is where these dramas play out most often. And it’s a particularly disgusting place for it. Parents and children engulf themselves in incestuous dramas of betrayal/ control. And I don’t know where something like that ends. We’re seeing these fantasies of control and submission play out at large re: the pandemic. In their hysteria, anti-vaxxers hallucinate visions of dystopia and a “bio-medical fascist state.” But, with their refusal to vax, they also petulantly hold the country back from a controlled endemicity. They’re edging in the interim while scientists pooh-pooh with facts and logic. There’s something perverted too in the late-night talk-show “trust the science”-style vaccine liberalism. (That Colbert clip was really weird.) But they’re at least purportedly on the side of reducing human misery. Vaccine mandates will probably work and should be pursued aggressively. But they come from the rational part of the brain. The sickness—these games of control, submission, and domination—will fester in the national psyche long after the pandemic ends.
The shared, “objective” reality that binds us has its shortcomings. Engaging in it is akin to sharing a mass worldwide hallucination. And it works well enough when times are good. But during empire’s end it can just as quickly turn to nightmare. When our shared delusion turns sour, starts cracking at the edges, the animating energies can feel like mass psychosexual perversion. But it’s either accept collapse or play the game. I don’t think the ur-liberal, with his facts, reason, and Fauci Pop Funko alone can convince the country-at-large to either vaccinate or remain a democracy. There’s mystifying libidinal energies afoot. Fighting to remain in the realm of democratic reason is front and center. But, barring that, what’s left? To forget what we think we know and engage again with contingent, human fucked-up-ness.