Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I feel like Edward Norton in that monologue scene of 25th Hour, except instead of going on a racist tirade to a bathroom mirror, I’m going to go on a tirade about idiots in this newsletter. Ready? Fuck Donald Trump. Fuck Melania Trump. Fuck Ivanka Trump. Fuck Ivanka Trump’s shitty clothing line. Fuck white supremacy. Fuck Peter Thiel. Fuck The New York Times and the little blue bar on their homepage that said Hillary Clinton had a 90 percent chance of winning for a solid four weeks leading up to the election. Fuck every person who said, “Hillary is not a perfect candidate, but I’ll vote for her anyway.” Fuck Deadspin and those fools who indulged the political apathy of male sports fans nationwide. Fuck third-party voters. Fuck James Comey.
Fuck explainers and the people who make them.
Hm. I feel a bit better I do. 25th Hour is a pretty good movie. It’s good to take solace in art right now. I’ve been watching a lot of Law & Order SVU. I love art. They should have an SVU exhibit at the Met.
“What happened in this election?” People are asking. Well, let me tell you a little story. In 1943, a Polish resistance fighter named Jan Karski traveled to America to meet with President Roosevelt and the revered Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Karski had infiltrated the Warsaw Ghetto and the Belzec camp and collected his findings — that Jews were being tortured and killed en masse — in a report to present to the Americans and the U.N., who had minimal information about the rumored genocide happening in Europe. Mind you, this meeting occurred in 1943, and 80 percent of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were already dead. After Karski presented his findings to Frankfurter, the justice replied: “Mr. Karski, a man like me talking to a man like you, I want to be totally frank — I am unable to believe you.” Roosevelt, for his part, asked Karski how Poland’s horses were doing.
This true parable is not exactly analogous to the media’s failure in this election, but you see my point: The inconceivable can, and does, happen, most would rather just not believe it to be possible. During the Holocaust, there was a bewildering lack of information — anything coming out of Germany was propaganda tightly controlled by the Third Reich; the world had no idea what was happening, save for seemingly left-field reports like Karski’s that went ignored. What’s terrifying is that today, we have more information than ever, being shot up into our systems like government-prescribed heroin, and we apparently still have no idea what is going on.
The modern media’s enemy in the search for information to prevent global tragedy is not fascism (yet), it is not propaganda. It is itself. It is smugness, isolation, lack of curiosity, narcissism, and laziness. It is no secret that nearly every news outlet had their “Madam President” hymnal locked and loaded for publication as soon as Hillary’s victory was called; Chris Cillizza at The Washington Post even decided to publish his pre-written text in a deluded act of “transparency.” This is not helping the healing.
Many liberals seemed to find comfort in a piece by the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, titled “An American Tragedy.” I found no such solace. The outcome of this election has proven to be, at least from a media perspective, about elites like Remnick misreading the national mood; about elites convincing themselves that America was post-racial, post-sex, post-anti-Semitic, when it has never been remotely close to any such thing. I shudder when I remember that the Guardian sent Dave Eggers to a Trump rally — and that he went “undercover” and wore a NASCAR hat. The New Yorker sent a more sympathetic George Saunders; the resulting piece still read as if he had set foot on Mars and discovered a bunch of pungent aliens. For people and publications who preach tolerance and progressivism, these pieces were instead emblematic of moldering self-satisfaction and disdain.
The stakes of this election were extremely fucked up. When writers and pundits were not mocking Trump voters, they were cutting down Hillary. The emails, the emails. Her husband, her husband. Is there nothing more misogynistic than criticizing a woman for her husband’s misdeeds? There was not a piece of writing I saw about Hillary Clinton in which she was written about without a caveat, without some form of denigration. This was corrosive. Even in his elegy for America, Remnick takes care to call Clinton a “flawed candidate.” Dude. You can stop now. She lost. Also, give me a break. Has there been a candidate in history who is not flawed? Is there a human without flaws on earth? I would rather have any "flawed candidate" than Trump right now. I would rather have Anthony Weiner. Sarah Palin...
There’s a sense of urgency right now, that something “must be done.” This urge comes primarily from social media, which is terrible and a topic that I’ll address soon. Relax. Save your energy for when/if it gets bad. Also, the thing about news is that you don’t have to read it, and two great, small forms of protest are boycotting Vox and deleting your Facebook. But really, cope however you see fit. I mean, maybe you are reading this and you love Trump in which case, hi Grandpa. But the next four years will not be nice or photogenic or entertaining when it comes to news, and news has failed us, so fuck it. Can you even imagine if D0nald Trump gets a dog. It will be the worst dog.
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