The Era of the Worst

grinds on, a little bit

One of the common themes in the early days of the Trump administration is elation: turning tides, swinging pendulums, some good news at long last. But I find myself grinding my teeth in daily anger — literally, and my dentist keeps trying to interest me in a weirdly expensive bite guard — over the fact that we ever got to this point in the first place. We’ve been living in a dystopian kakistocracy that was never inevitable or necessary. Now we’re beginning to roll it back, but why did it ever get to the point where it had to be rolled back? And how many hands are willing to join the effort, even at this very late stage?

Driving home from Trader Joe’s, this evening, where my wife would like you to know that I bought the wrong kind of cheese, I checked in with the midwit establishment and turned on NPR for a few minutes. One of the hosts — I forget which one, but it was the one with the condescending tone, the lazy assumptions, and the vocal fry, if that narrows it down — was accusing a Republican congressman of standing by passively and allowing the unelected billionaire Elon Musk to seize the power of the purse from Congress. Every syllable of the question was tendentious bullshit, delivered in tones of high imperial smugness.

The Republican congressman — I didn’t catch which one, but it was the one with a folksy “aw shucks” affect and a weak, capitulationist rhetorical style, if that narrows it down — tried to gently chew off the edges of the question, while very carefully edging his way around the laundry list of glaringly false premises that he didn’t wish to be impolite enough to mention. Well, vocal fry lady, heh heh, I’ll tell ya what, Elon flies those rockets real good, so let’s just give this young fella a chance. SHOVE THAT BULLSHIT QUESTION STRAIGHT UP HER ASS, I explained to the radio, and the people at the stop light next to me immediately began to lurch across the limit line before we got the green. There was a weird old man on Fair Oaks tonight, honey, maybe we should post a warning on Nextdoor.

We’ve been watching for close to twenty years, now, as the dominant regime of weak-minded slogan reciters has steered society, grinding down one institution after another. We’ve allowed the sweater-wearers to waddle the football into the end zone over and over again, afraid to throw a tackle as they ooze by us. Watching a Margaret Brennan “ask” her “questions” and get a polite response, or watching a David French warn in urgent tones that Donald Trump is very bad, as if this is the first time he’s ever thought of that theme, and be treated as a serious person, I keep feeling a sense of shame. For at least a decade, we lost to Mazie Hirono. We let Sheldon Whitehouse matter. We allowed Jim Acosta to…do…whatever shiteating circus act that was, for all those years. We let these fucking people get away with this. And, may God have mercy on us, a whole bunch of people are still willing to let them get away with it, as evidenced by the Trump administration still operating with a list of acting secretaries and directors, while the Senate diddles and shuffles their feet in impotent embarrassment. Oh, but I agree with my Democratic colleagues, Kash Patel is so extreme! These people make actual cuckoldry look relatively dignified.

And so we had the great inversion. The world upside down. I keep thinking about Debbie Wasserman Schultz “questioning” Matt Taibbi, in the style of those congressional hearings in which the interrogator says SO YOU LOVE TO SODOMIZE KITTENS, DO YOU SIR, IS THAT WHAT YOU’RE TELLING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE HERE TODAY, and then starts screaming RECLAIMING MY TIME when the “witness” tries to say that no, he doesn’t like that at all.

A: You’re the devil himself, isn’t that true?

B: No, actually I….

A: Stop interrupting! This is my time!

You’ve now preemptively seen all congressional hearings, and never have to think about them again. But Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as dumb and dishonest a human being as any you could ever hope to encounter, has been a prominent and powerful member of Congress for a long time. We’ve simply been living in a long historical moment in which the least impressive, least interesting, least capable people on the planet have had seats on the dais, while the interesting people sat in the lower chairs in front of them to be berated and degraded. Please regard that last sentence as my description of nearly every political, cultural, social, and economic reality that followed Y2K. By the way, Democrats have a brilliant new plan to Get Trump, and it’s apparently led by…Norm Eisen. It’s like the opposing team is actually decomposing, dead for a solid fortnight, but we still let them put points on the board.

Similarly, this gaggle of Weimar degenerates, scrummed up around a very calm man who represents the spirit of all the rest of us…

…reminds me that George Grosz called this painting “The Pillars of Society”:

The worst people rose to the top. We let them. We conceded ground to them. It’s been at least a decade since that choice became tedious and unsustainable.