The State of This ****ing Union

Welcome to the dumpster fire, again

Joe Biden killed it during his State of the Union yesterday.

Yes, he did. In a fiery hour of well-argued rhetoric and aspirational policy, delivered with palpable commitment, he also vigorously tore up the key talking point of the Republican Party and their media enablers (and I’m not only talking about Fox News: if The New York Times don’t stop with the endless crap about his age and “let’s hear from the poor mistreated MAGA voters, again”, they’re going to lose me for a sunbeam: which is that Biden is old and sleepy and demented.

Well, as a couple of commentators have said today: If I ever succumb to dementia, I hope it’s that kind.

Before the speech was even over, the fetid and febrile rats’ nest of baying right-wing grifters and obstructionists were hurriedly pivoting. “Sleepy Joe” clearly wasn’t going to work after a display like that, in which he blithely dealt with dumb-ass heckling from moronic performance artists like Marjorie Taylor Greene , playing not just to his own crowd but also addressed the other side directly and with humor. (Speaking of the other side, how do you sit there and refuse to stand or applaud when a guy announces a commitment to clean drinking water for children? How much of a partisan hack do you have to be? How can your constituents take you seriously after that?)

So instead they started clutching their pearls and bleating “Ooh, he’s a bit aggressive, isn’t he?”... and by this morning the story was that Joe was so done up on drugs it’s a wonder he didn’t go tearing out of the chamber and start clubbing old ladies to the ground for kicks. From one lie, straight to another. Without pausing for breath.

And this is what has me losing my mind today. Bear with me as I may have ranted some of this before, but you know what? I’m ranting about it again. Not least because I have to get it out of my head to stand any chance of working this afternoon.

I’ve been politically engaged my whole life. My father was, fighting the good fight all over the world, and he passed it on — though I don’t have a tenth of his practical dedication or dogged praxis. Since moving to the US a dozen years ago that engagement has increased exponentially in the face of a system that feels like it’s on the brink of exploding into bloody tatters. I’ve always believed both in the possibility of positive change and that this is the entire point of political engagement: taking a cue (as my father did) from the eleventh of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach:

“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

But I look around at the state of American political life and discourse right now and think... this is just a fucking zoo. This isn’t politics, committed public servants trying to figure out how to run a country. It’s a freaking madhouse. And I’m sorry: that’s one side’s fault. Nobody’s claiming the Dems are perfect. But the absolute clown-show of partisan bullshit we see around us is the work of one party, and one alone.

I’m not going to exhaustively list ten thousand examples of Republican fuckery: you’re either immersed in US politics — and thus aware of things like how they’re doggedly tanking every bipartisan effort to address issues on the border, despite the fact that’s their number one campaigning platform (in fact precisely because, of course, that’s their only platform, so they don’t want a solution, just the problem) — or you’re not.

What’s driving me to distraction... is the lies.

In fact, “lying” is too narrow. A lie is where you deliberately make a counterfactual statement. And sure, all politicians do it from time to time — though not with the steadfast dedication of the modern Republican party, merrily aping the example of the Liar in Chief, Donald Trump, whose well-documented tens of thousands of lies during his ‘presidency’ haven’t stopped him being the GOP nominee again.

They do lie, constantly. From gaslighting the world over what happened at the Capitol on January 6th, to going back to their districts and claiming credit for the positive local impacts of Bills that they voted against in Congress. But it’s bigger than that.

It is — as I’ve said before — a wholesale rejection of the notion of truth itself. The declaration that it simply doesn’t matter. January 6th itself provides a headspinning example. Republicans claim it was mere a high-spirited expression of views by what were effectively tourists, and any of them subsequently imprisoned for trivia like clubbing cops to the ground are in fact “political prisoners”. They will however also claim that anybody who did anything wrong that day was in fact in the pay of the FBI, and/or a member of their favorite shadowy made-up bogeyman, “Antifa”.

Which is it, my dudes? Were those rampaging assholes that the entire world saw live on TV simply well-meaning grassroots conservatives, or were they in fact wily operatives of the Deep State? Because it can’t fucking both, can it?

Actually, to Republicans, it can. Anything can be said about anything, even if it’s self-evidently false, or contradicts what they said yesterday, because their utterances have nothing to do with truth, or with attempting to drill down to what actually happened. They say things purely as a factor of what they believe will get them what they want at the time.

When reading Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest recently I came upon this quote (put into the mouth of the man running the death camp):

...the Christian system of right and wrong, of good and bad, is 1 we categorically reject. Such values—relics of medieval barbarism—no longer apply. There are only positive outcomes and negative outcomes.

THIS is how the Republican party operates. Right and wrong, good and bad, true and false, all are irrelevant. The only criterion that determines whether something is the correct thing for them to say in any given circumstance is whether it will have a positive outcome for the person saying it.

That’s it. Nothing else.

And what is a positive outcome for such a Republican speaker? Anything that will overcome the fact that their mindset is hideously, ridiculously out of step with modern America, which is why they haven’t won a popular election in decades and would be absolutely unelectable forever, were it not for the out-dated “don’t be mean to our state just because we’re only seventeen people and some cows” anti-Federalist bullshit that is the Electoral College.

Any member of the GOP who isn’t clinically stupid knows this. The only way to try to convince the electorate otherwise is therefore to lie. About everything. To pummel reality so hard, for so long, that the seams give way, and anybody can say whatever they like about anything — and volume (along with the threat of violence) is the only arbiter of success.

One of the founding forces of the “United” States was people of odd and unpopular religious views flocking to the new country in hope of being able to be weird in peace — and in particular in search of the freedom to experience a personal relationship with God. Over the last couple of centuries this has morphed steadily into those same people demanding a personal relationship with reality itself. Yes, Trump is the focus of much of this, but it’s also real and deep and not going away any day soon. This isn’t politics It’s barely a society, and it’s certainly not “united”. It’s open tribalism.

So how the hell do we fight it? This morning I happened across a quote from Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections:

“119. A false doctrine cannot be refuted, because it is, of course, based on the conviction that false is true. But one can, may, and indeed must, again and again, stress the opposite truth.

And I guess that’s all we can do. Keep yelling the truth, in the hope it drowns all the rest out. The other side is loud, though, so very very loud.

We going to have to shout at the top of our lungs.