The Impotent Omnipotent

Motive force doesn’t live within us. Our clumsy hands open and close without purpose, producing no outcome. The ability to act has to be trucked in across the border, brought from outside of us to fill up our emptiness. You can’t do anything without illegal immigrants. Hunter Biden: “How do you think you get food on your fucking table? Who do you think washes your dishes?” At the first and most basic level, this is a flawless expression of 21st-century progressive sentiment: How are we supposed to function without our servant class? “In this house we believe in kindness.”

There’s a moment in Gone with the Wind when Scarlett returns to Tara to find her father dead, her family gone, and the helpless slaves sitting around and starving to death. They tell her that the Yankees took all the food, and now they’re just so desperately hungry. And then Scarlett starts brainstorming: Well, pa drove the hogs into the woods, did the Yankees find the hogs? No, Miss Scarlett, no, we can eat them hogs! And what about the sweet potatoes, those are underground….

She saves them. Her presence ends their infantile hunger.

Margaret Mitchell, writing in the 1930s, was giving voice to the racial science of the period, the Dunningite certainty that the African child race would die off without white benevolence. The food was there, but no one told them. They couldn’t lift it to their mouths without being directed to.

This is what Hunter Biden thinks of you, and more importantly what he thinks of himself. We’re helpless, babies in grown bodies. How the fuck are we supposed to get food if the food-producing class isn’t here to hand it to us? Hunter needs lunch, but he can’t find a Mexican. “Who do you think washes your dishes?”

But this message is everywhere, or everywhere that people are wonderfully progressive. Donald Trump is saying that he wants to deport our productivity, our economy, the working part of our communities, our entire ability to function.

”Vegetables would rot in the ground.”

Me want carrot, me see carrot, WHERE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT!?!?!?

Ohhhh, so hungry. Dish is dirty, who wash dish.

The subtext screams so loudly through the words that it barely counts as subtext. The progressive message, bleeding through masking words about kindness versus bigotry, is a message about exhaustion, helplessness, functional impotence. It’s the noise of a society that built a technocratic managerial class — ironically, out of the explosion of productivity that followed the Second Industrial Revolution — which became so large it flooded the otherwise empty factory floor. Everybody is an HR executive, directing and hectoring; no one is a producer, so we have to ship some of those in.

Tiredness, helplessness, performativity. Workspace as a theater of cultural display, a place to perform symbols of status-derived compliance.

Jacques Barzun, diagnosing cultural exhaustion, described “the desire for action in a stalled society.” (“Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.”)

Impotent and exhausted, helpless to make food or build anything or wash a dish, progressive institutions self-depict as the indispensable global fountain of life itself.

This strikes me as not an accident, psychologically, as the growth of helplessness (and the perception of that helplessness) marches alongside increasingly strident displays of symbol-power. Why do children in Africa live or die? Because of Rosa DeLauro holding up her hand and saying yes.

People will die! They’ll lose their healthcare! They’ll go hungry! We are the fountain; we must serve as the force that animates humanity itself. If Rosa DeLauro naps, the world holds still. A family in Peru is waiting to see if Congress will enable them to move their limbs by voting for some money.

Put these messages side by side: We can’t wash our dishes, but everyone on the planet survives or dies on our say-so and our wallet. This isn’t politics. This is psychological collapse, a toddler who thinks he’s a god.

1. Mommy comes running when I cry

2. I control mommy

And so the only choice is Hunter Biden 2028, the one option that fully expresses progressive politics in its purest current form.