The Enervation Election

choose the other one

I spent the weekend in a tent in the mountains, keeping meat and milk in a bear locker without needing to bother with ice, feeling grateful for a good sleeping bag. The northern end of Sequoia National Park, and the national forest to the north of it, looked like this:

At the risk of sounding like Chance the gardener — I like to watch, Eve — the moment of death and incipient regrowth seemed remarkably on point, and I pulled off the highway to photograph the metaphor.

Our late-stage behaviors overlap, flashing warnings about a declining republic. An empty figurehead runs to replace an empty figurehead, senile mumbling giving way to dimwitted babbling, surrounded by script-reciting mediocrities in positions of great and disregarded responsibility. Debt explodes. The treasury is looted.

Wars begin, drift in no particular direction, and shamble to an end, replaced by new wars. The fetish for constant war is matched by the decline of warmaking institutions; war becomes an industry and a shabby habit, not a purpose-driven emergency task.

Extravagantly performative sexual behavior is matched by declining sexual connection and a collapsing birthrate. “Sexual liberation, our deceitful mirage, ends in lassitude and inertness,” said the scholar who isn’t at all sexually conservative. Mutilating your body is high fashion; mutilating your child’s body is higher fashion than that.

A cast of huge movie stars released a video last week to promote the Kamala Harris campaign. Spend a few seconds watching the miniscule portion of this you’ll be able to put up with before you get bored or vaguely repulsed, but first get the image of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in your head, or Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert:

Watching the brightest stars in the Hollywood firmament now is like watching…paste. Dry paste.

So we have what looks a lot like end-stage political degradation, end-stage fiscal crisis, end-stage military decline, end-stage sexual degeneracy and the growing loss of family, and end-stage cultural enervation. The President of the United States is significantly and quite obviously dumber than the average wage laborer, and movie stars are shabby and unappealing. The culture is boring. It feels like death, or like something that would be lucky to finally get to die. We’ve found all the dead ends. “I’m gonna cast my vote for Kamala Harris and then go see the new Mark Ruffalo superhero movie,” the culture said, moments before losing consciousness.

Against all of that enervation and obvious institutional and societal diminishment, we have a remarkable group of people who make things, have actual thoughts, and aren’t boring. Watching Donald “I threw in an extra chicken nugget” Trump in the company of people like JD Vance and Elon Musk, I see life: wit, engagement, will, intent. I have political arguments to offer, but they seem too small at the moment to bother making. A culture of dullness and decline is competing with people who still have a pulse. Voting for Kamala Harris feels like cultural necrophilia. You’re voting for the downward trend. This election isn’t Eisenhower vs. Stevenson or Reagan vs. Mondale; it’s the culture of life and creative energy vs. the rotting corpse of the decrepitocracy.

So:

Choose the interesting people over the calcified war-addict dullards, and we’ll go from there.