Cultural Vertigo and Political Exhaustion

The single most obvious cultural reality about the current moment is that we’re inundated, every day, by signals telling us that [X] is [Not X], the don’t believe your lying eyes messaging that forms the hardened core of media and political product.

So.

I recently described a moment in which I watched two highly alert LAPD officers as they urgently scanned the street for traffic violations, but managed to not notice the small army of zombies quite openly sucking on crack pipes twenty feet away from them. Here’s the map from that post, showing where:

They were right across the street from MacArthur Park. I lived in this neighborhood, not recently but back in grad school, when I needed to be able to pay rent on a TA stipend. Nothing in Los Angeles is less obscure than the reality of MacArthur Park, the great beating heart of a set of overlapping criminal industries. The open prostitution in MacArthur Park isn’t separate from the drugs: it’s how the addicts pay for it. Businesses in this neighborhood, even the old and locally famous business, are struggling to hang on. Bodies turn up from time to time. The despair isn’t hidden.

This observation from a few months ago is both correct and so crushingly obvious that you couldn’t possibly help to avoid arriving at the same conclusion if you just went there and looked at the place (click the link to play the video):

Everyone in Los Angeles knows this. The squirrels know it. MacArthur Park is a dangerous, filthy, depressing shithole full of homeless encampments, drug dealers, gang members, drug users, and prostitutes, the latter two categories overlapping quite a bit.

So ICE raided MacArthur Park today, and the sociopathic mayor of Los Angeles framed the raid this way:

A wonderful park full of children, a clean and safe and happy place, and then the GOVERNMENT attacked it! fOr nO rEaSon!!!!!! I marched right down there and demanded that they stop being mean!

Look at the replies. No one on the planet is the slightest bit fooled by any of this batshit crazy gaslighting. It’s not even sort of plausible, and so not a single living soul can be found who believes what the mayor of Los Angeles says about her own city:

The replies go on and on and on:

This woman is out of her fucking mind, and has been for years. Remember that as an entire historic neighborhood in the city she governs was vaporized by wildfire this year, the empty shell of the thing called Karen Bass walked around beaming at everybody and telling them that hey, great news, it’s our moment to SHINE!

And, among many other easy examples:

The facial expressions never match the moment. The message never meets the conditions.

There are several glaring examples of this pod-people weirdness to offer this week, starting with the responses to the flooding that just killed children in the Texas Hill Country, but I mostly feel unable to wade into that sewage. The institutionally aligned status groups that signal as “left” in America while fighting to protect their privilege and their sense of superiority have developed an affective disorder so severe that it begins to resemble mental illness. They speak with no ability to perceive the reception.

Over and over again, people signaling in media and political space trip over the most obvious obstacles, saying things that no sane person could believe — but not noticing the disconnect. You fucking MAGAts all DESERVE to die, because you’re not committed to KINDNESS like we are! As a response to rescue teams pulling dead 8 year-olds out of a river. This is mental illness, not politics, the Cluster B Society roaring to a crescendo.

Spend five minutes of your life with the executive editor of The Atlantic today as she explains the terrifying rise of political violence in contemporary America.

It’s Trump, of course. He made America return to its old condition of brutality. The son-of-a-bitch even smashed into an innocent bullet with his Nazi ear! And now the whole country is awash in right-wing violence.

Now, Control-F:

A Bernie Sanders volunteer opening fire on a bunch of Republican congressmen: not mentioned.

Watch the framing throughout. This happened:

And then Trump sent his fascist troops into Los Angeles to attack it and do violence against all the peaceful protest, as The Atlantic helpfully explains:

I don’t have to tell you that Trump seems particularly eager for such opportunities to come his way. His record speaks for itself. (See also his deployment of thousands of National Guard troops and some 700 Marines to Los Angeles in a show of force against protesters there.)

Trump ended all the peace in Los Angeles by sending the military! The Atlantic caught the devastating Karenbass virus, which attacks the cerebral cortex with deadly efficiency.

I endorse this view:

Looking for sanity elsewhere, we discover that the Epstein client list, which Pam Bondi had on her desk and was reviewing….doesn’t exist. We swear!

Reality floats away. The anti-information climate is becoming a psychological Fukushima disaster, toxic and spreading steadily outward. “It’s disengagement time,” yes, but then the next challenge is to try to find reality under the noise. Disengage without disengaging: break free of the madness-inducing machine without burrowing and hiding. I’m personally not finding that easy to do, but whatever. Onward.