A Bunch of Pissing on Stuff that Needs to be Pissed On
I’ve spent the past week fighting off some mystery bug and I’m a bit cranky. So, today, I am going to piss all over the place. Let’s start with:
On the surface, Trump’s nominees are absurd. He’s put up several people with credible sexual assault/misconduct allegations against them. There’s a bunch of reality TV and entertainment has-beens, along with the usual resume liars. There’s plenty of people with no experience in government (which is not a good thing) and/or who have never led an organization. It’s all manure-coated flash, fecal shock & awe.
Shock & awe is exactly how we should take these things. I mean, Mehmet Fucking Oz! A quack and a carny hoisted on us by Oprah, another carny and a horrible judge of character. We should be pissed off, but that is what shock & awe is about, a huge spectacular distraction designed to open an opponent up to attack. Yeah, Oz and Gabbard and Gaetz and Hegseth and McMahon and RFK Jr. We’re going from the highly competent and even more intelligent Pete Buttigieg to the Real World’s Sean Duffy! Arrrggghhhhh!
But what is going on behind the chaos? Who are the nominees for undersecretaries of all these departments. Who are the lawyers and other top dogs, the people who do the real work? How many mooks like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Russ Voight are there working in the shadows? Who are the people on the staff lists drafted by the Heritage Foundation? Mehmet Fucking Oz doesn’t matter. The never-heard-of-him who is second in charge does.
As Robert Reich, Charles Pierce, and others have written, there’s a lot of policy and attack planning going on quietly behind the noise. The tech barons want to make themselves completely untouchable, as they have mostly done in California, and they have their plans. Miller and others are trying to find loopholes so that they can use the US military on the domestic population, something that is unconstitutional, but we know that they will try. There’s a lot more. But you really have to dig into the media to find this stuff.
Cable and network news is focused on the nominees because that’s the easy story. “Matt Gaetz pays for sex! OMG!” like Gaetz having to pay people to fuck him is real news, but it does gets clicks. The real stories are getting reported on sites like ProPublica and Lawfare, in substacks, and “below the fold” in the major newspapers. It’s depressing and absurd. The behind-the-scenes stuff is the story and every single one of the news orgs hurrying to get another look at Matt Gaetz extremely big while ignoring Miller, Bannon, and Vought head know it. They’ve been to journalism school. They know what the job is, but they refuse to do it.
I’m also pretty down on the politics-as-entertainment crowd. I tuned out the late-night host right after the election. I didn’t want to hear their post-election snark. When I turned back, nothing had changed in the way the hosts and their writers attacked politics. As with the worst of mainstream media, late-night’s focus is on Trump’s Island of Misfit Pols and not the fascism-fueled army of Bumbles waiting for the Go sign.
Worst of the lot is the Daily Show, which is way past its usefulness (if it was ever useful, I’ll get to that). Yo! Stewart! As Ed Hunter once said, “Get on the ice flow, old man. You can no longer serve the tribe.” Usually, Seph Meyers and Stephen Colbert are good at interjecting a bit of substance into the silly, but they are either burnt out or shell shocked or whatever. And, SNL, oof!
The transparency of the late-shows’ hollowness is probably a good thing. We’ve been mistaking satire as MLK-esque opposition when really it serves as court jester. At best, satire makes us laugh at the powerful, which helps give us some hope. It lightens the heavy for a bit. It is essential for our mental health. However, yucking-it-up no matter who soul-southing is essentially entertainment. Even when it is informative entertainment, it does not organize anything. It does not get people into meeting rooms or even into the voting booth. Too often it is just a panacea.
This entertainment-as-politics trap isn’t new. It’s rise came in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly where the anti-war movement, hippie counterculture, and rock& roll met. In some ways it was helpful, in others not. The late 1970s and 1980s saw entertainment-as-politics in punk and hip hop. In some ways it was helpful, in others not. In the 1990s, alt culture was the “change-maker.” In some ways it was helpful, in others not. Since then, we’ve turned to comedians as our entertainment activist and tried to tap into the popularity and bank accounts of major majors like Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny. In some ways it was helpful, in others not.
Actually, in most ways this has not been helpful. Relying on “entertainment activism” to bring about fundamental change or even to get people to pay attention after what is immediately on the screen fades is ineffective at best, a false promise and distraction at worst. Yeah, cultural activism is essential in changing public perceptions on who we are as people, but it doesn’t work in cut throat politics, even at the ballot box. So, to rely on our “troops” in the entertainment industry is foolish.
I’m not saying they should go away (actually, John Stewart: Go away!), but we must look at these things as entertainment and only entertainment. I love that John Oliver does what is essentially a policy show with smart-ass asides, but he is creating entertainment and us consuming it without acting on the info that he provides is not going to change anything except his bosses’ bottom-line. We have to get it in our heads that a joke about Donald Trump is pretty much a joke about poop or airports or “Have you ever had to take a poop in an airport? You know what I’m talkin’ about!” It is nothing more than that.
Liberal/left White folks need another wake-up: Yeah, Trump is bad, horrible, you name it but do understand that MAGA is what Black and Brown Americans have been experiencing since the nation’s founding. At no time in American history has any Black or Brown person felt true justice. For most of our history neither population could vote. Economically, they’ve always been screwed, either forced to work for free or paid far less than White people. Since forever they’ve been arrested and incarnated at rates far higher than White folks, and punished far more severely. In 2023, after the George Floyd protests and the alleged damage of “Defund the Police,” police killed more civilians than ever, and Black men had it worse (per capita).
People of color, many women, and most queer folk have been living under fractional fascism forever. Roe v Wade legalized abortion in 1973. The Supreme Court struck down Roe in 2022. That’s only 49-years of full or partial reproductive freedom – that level of freedom determined by class – in the 248 years of the United States of America – a blip or, sadly, a footnote. Queer folk have never been totally free.
I’m not writing this to create a hierarchy of oppression, but to put things in perspective. Yeah, Trump is bad, his election is infuriating, and thinking about the next four years is depressing, enraging, frustrating, etc., but, his antics aside, it’s pretty standard for this country, especially if you aren’t a whiter shade of pale. And, yet, Black and Brown people have never given up the fight or threaten to take all their stuff and move to Canada. There have always been women and queer folk deep in the fight. White men, too, but you don’t hear much from them because they walk much more than they talk.
This fight like all fights comes down to two things: What they do and what we do. What they are doing right now is preparing for blitzkrieg. Where it will happen, I don’t know. They are talking immigration, and that is what Trump, Miller, and Bannon hit first last time around. Very good chance same thing happens this time around. But they also could be fronting an immigration blitz while preparing for something else.
So, we not know exactly where they are coming at us. We also don’t know when or how. We don’t know if they will be effective this time around, as inept as last time, or a complete disaster (in any case, innocent people will be crushed, that we know). All we know is that they are preparing for something and the likelihood is that that something will come fast. And there is nothing that we can do about what they do except prepare.
Which means: What we have control over is what we do. In Trump’s first term, moments after he announced his Muslim ban, protesters filled the airports, while lawyers shut Trump down in the courts. He ultimately won out, but only after months of court battles and watering down the ban, which did hurt people but never had his intended effect.
On January 21, 2017, a day after Trump took office, the Women’s March happened. It was, at the time, the largest protest march in US history. The march didn’t focus on a single issue or legislation, and it wasn’t supposed to. The purpose of the march was a show of solidarity and power. We went to the San Francisco iteration and it was a powerful reminder that we have great numbers and in those numbers is hope.
Our initial response to Trump taking office in his first term was good. It didn’t stop Trump but it gave us a foundation to fight from. That foundation helped turn the midterm elections our way. It was essential for the Floyd/Taylor protests and in defeating Trump in 2020. That the “resistance” didn’t change the world is no knock, as “resistance” never changes the world. What it does is keep us from being crushed and creates openings for us to move things forward. It also keeps us fighting. To paraphrase the punk band Discharge, to protest is to survive.
We desperately need to respond to Trump II as we did Trump I, though with more intensity than last time. Our response will determine what happens next as much or more than what Trump does. And since we have no idea what he will do, all we can do is to fold our pointer-fingers into fists, organize and prepare.