July 5: Stop reporting on the Thing as if he were a real anything. Report on the look of the sky from your news headquarters. What you said to the person who served the coffee you carried to your desk. The number of fronds still thriving on your palm tree. On WQXR, each hour you stop the music to tell me about the Thing’s thing yesterday and today. No, no, no, no.
July 16: What do they want, if the great blob of dread and loathing they comprise can be said to want anything? They want to punish women, people of color, and the poor for expressing desire and aliveness, for believing they are worth something and in that desire destabilizing the conditions on which the past rests. All the billions have been spent on this.
July 17: The supporters of the Thing see in him what they really look like.
July 25: On November 8, 2016, the US experienced a fascist coup. Hillary didn’t lose the election. There was no election. All the sentences spilled in the interim explain nothing, reveal nothing, express nothing true about what has happened and why it happened. The analysis is sawdust and unreadable. Using the word “president” is obscene. On and on goes the charade. I know nothing more than anyone else, except that anything even remotely governmental in this setting, with these officials, is a charade. Experiences that used to feel good on a personal level are saturated with the knowledge of how we are living. Nothing is separate. It never has been. I’m not depressed. These thoughts don’t issue from a psychological state. I see massive amounts of cruelty called other things, massive amounts of money spent to hurt and deprive the majority of people and the planet’s ecology. I couldn’t care less about why this feels good to so many people. The analysis of origins seems irrelevant. Haven’t you noticed how pathetically washed out all discussions of Mueller have been for many months? The Right Wing coup is a closed system on a feedback loop with its own power. It doesn’t care about demoralizing us. It doesn’t have to care. It doesn’t feel threatened.
July 25 (redux): Enough with the retroactive gaming of the past. You don’t know when this started and how it was caused. You don’t know what “it” is. You don’t know when proposition A is a distraction from proposition B. There are no distractions. What is big to me in a frame may be trivial to you. I would bet money it is. All the pundits on all the shows and in all the columns in all the publications in all the world do not know. It is not secret knowledge. Looking for origins is reverse teleology. The chain of events you are talking about as a knowable entity is mutating all the time. Even if you knew what caused it, and even if you knew what it was, knowledge of the cause wouldn’t fix it.
July 28: In case you were wondering how they can go on being the way they are, everyone lies all the time to people with power over them, so they don’t know how despised they really are. Every day is “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
July 31: Let’s say, for argument’s sake, his head explodes, and no dogs are injured by bits of skull fragments, I think the majority of the followers that squirm in his wake would deflate. The great bubble of their bodies would lose air, and they would sink back into bland, nameless primordial dread and resentment. They are not a movement. They do not believe in anything. They are moved from point A to point B by money, and algorithms, and bad moons or sick planets, but I think they would go away ish. This is my hope and my belief, a kind of sandwich of speculation entirely lacking in data. Data isn’t data, anyway. They like the Thing. They really like him.