What Curious Darkness

The country is becoming terrifyingly dark. Darkness is rising! Dark messaging is on the march! "This country at times can feel dark these days. There's a lot of darkness."

Many of us have thought for years that the country was becoming dark, but the things you think of when you imagine that darkness aren’t the things Margaret Brennan is picturing. In respectable Beltway discourse, “darkness” comprises all the responses to the darkness, and the light is all the things you see as dark. John Cornyn lost, isn’t that dark?

An open border is warm and kind; deportations are “terror” and an expression of an “apocalyptic vision.” Cracking down on public benefits fraud is cruel and corrosive. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” Woe to Margaret Brennan, who increasingly strikes me as someone who has actual mental health problems. Her face is becoming…very twitchy, isn’t it? Is it me?

In Los Angeles, the remarkably effective reality television star and mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt is quite plainly laying out an agenda focused on order and calm: better emergency services staffing, fewer homeless encampments, less tolerance for open drug abuse on the streets. What if we made the city cleaner, safer, and more pleasant to live in? What if we stopped tolerating failure and disorder?

There are broken things. Let’s fix them.

News media response: Why is he advancing such a dark and rage-driven vision? Why is he succeeding with this vicious, cruel, miserable messaging, this “angry, name-calling campaign?”

Actual headline in the unrelentingly useless Los Angeles Times, which increasingly sounds like the dayroom in an upscale nursing home for wine-drunk old ladies from Chappaqua:

“Pratt needs to realize that Angelenos don’t want the city to be torn down,” that op-ed essay warns. Arguing for better fire department staffing and fewer homeless encampments is a demand that the city be torn down. Improvement is destruction. A clean city is ruined.

In blue cities, murals depicting Iryna Zarutska are being torn down and defaced. Warm progressives won’t tolerate the darkness of the controversial and divisive vision implied by that image.

The murder of Iryna Zarutska: not dark. The depiction of Iryna Zarutska: dark, cruel, angry, miserable, vicious.

All dark things are light, and all light things are dark. This is the narrative stream we swim in. It no longer seems to be working. “I don’t really care, Margaret.”