Sociopathic Dada Governance

The function of politics is to avoid talking about government. All of the symbols are screens and barriers. The thing you’re talking about exists for the purpose of keeping you from talking about something else. The statement, “Nothing is more important than X, and we must focus all of our attention on it,” means that Y is important, but inconvenient, and X is manageably meaningless.

California is in sharp and obvious decline. Our infrastructure is garbage, we’re losing population, and we can’t build anything. A state with astonishing beauty, stunning natural resources, absurdly fertile agricultural regions, and an uncommonly inviting climate is shriveling into a condition of manufactured stagnation. Result: the governor of California is a rising star of the Democratic Party, traveling to the Reagan Library this week to go head-to-head with the evil Republican monsters. It’s like watching Jim Bouton make the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. Failure is success.

He’s going to show America the correct way to govern, you see. The kind, responsible, decent way.

Then, in a few weeks, he has a debate scheduled with the mean governor of the state where you’re not even allowed to say the word gay!, which is rapidly gaining population. Take that, Rethuglicans! Stop banning books by saying that second-graders shouldn’t have sexually explicit discussions with teachers, Nazis!

The governor of the state that people are fleeing is confidently going out to do battle with the governor of the state that people are fleeing to, absolutely certain that he enters the battle in the stronger position.

Newsom’s I-still-call-it-Twitter timeline is a thing of wonder, an absolute masterclass for sociopathic clowns. He goes hard at Iowa Republicans, and he absolutely drops Greg Abbott for his viciousness, and he rebukes Ron DeSantis, and he has important thoughts about the hateful Republican Nazis in Virginia, and on and on and on.

California? Has no thoughts on that.

The absolutely naked subject-changing is obviously conscious, which is fascinating: he knows himself and the results of his own work, so he urgently points at an off-stage villain. Aware of his extremely clear failures, he blusters and preens about unrelated topics. Sociopathy.

It would be impossible to exaggerate how completely California is governed by Democrats. The governor is a Democrat, and the lieutenant governor is a Democrat, and the attorney general is a Democrat, and the secretary of state is a Democrat, and the treasurer and controller are Democrats, and both houses of the state legislature have veto-proof Democratic supermajorities. So the governor of California mounts a daily performance in which he’s battling Republicans. Notwithstanding his national aspirations, the performance is so absurd it rises to the level of dada performance art. It’s like Xi Jinping blaming failure on the opposition.

This is the state of play. Q: Why are the freeways in such poor condition? A: OHHHHHH, WHY ARE YOU CRUEL TO TRANS CHILDREN!?!?!?!? There are marriages like this, and they end with restraining orders and years of therapy. Hit you? What are you even talking about, honey? We’re a loving family, officer.

This exact act of sociopathic look-over-there-insteading is on nauseating display in Canada this week, and my proposal to Canadians is that we achieve some financial efficiency by consolidating Sacramento and Ottawa into a single government, since they’re already completely the same. I have many more thoughts on Ottawa’s disaster than I’ll bother to share, on the assumption that all the neighbors have already seen the big car wreck on the street, but the sociopathic pivot sets off all of my well-honed Californian political alarms.

The House of Commons gave a standing ovation to an actual soldier of the Waffen-SS, so the people who relentlessly smeared the Freedom Convoy as a Nazi movement that marched behind the swastika — because Hitler was a big fan of medical freedom and limited governmental authority, obvo — now say that we should avoid politicizing this unfortunate accident, and isn’t it really just time to move on? I’ve thought for years that Justin Trudeau and Gavin Newsom are the same person with different quantities of hair gel, but the cold shamelessness of the moment is still quite something to see. We gave a standing ovation to a literal Nazi, but let us not allow Putin to win by remembering this or ever speaking of it again.

It is unfortunate that Vladimir Putin made us applaud this Nazi. But anyway….

The level of failure is just the water we swim in, and it no longer surprises. The callousness of the cheap manipulation still shocks. They know that you see what they’re doing, and they still expect that they’ll get away with it. This bloody knife right here? The one in my hand? Yeah, it doesn’t exist.

The one consistent reality is that we have no consistent reality. Calling this behavior disingenuous is like calling a tangerine a tangerine. We live in a discourse that exists to prevent discourse.