Which the rest of the world has now gotten a taste of in light and in view of the continuing Trump theatrics around…well, just about everything but specifically now his negotiations this past week around The Big Lie that the election was stolen from him, as well as the entirety of everything else he’s ever done. Bleeding over into everything now, including crucial elements of our public discourse on the entire media-focused world from Depp v Heard to the Washington Post dust up, we are now mired in the mix of a zeitgeist permanently enshrined under the words, PROVE IT.
However, the only way to win this game is to not play, especially since every other way has you losing. Sucked into a tar baby-esque entanglement of “what ifs” and “says who’s?” that will undercut your undercutting even as it undercuts the very mainstays of whatever consensus reality you happen to be participating in. And Trump, in particular, will do this until he dies.
Our job is not necessarily about figuring out who is breaking the windows at this point. Our job is to figure out how to stop the breaking of windows. However, breaking windows is as American as apple pie. Try telling someone that the country itself was stolen from the people who lived here before Europeans showed up and see what happens.
In fact try to advance any grievance at all if you’re not part of the dominant paradigm, and you’ll be met with a counter grievance, a flood of what-about-me’ism that’s as ironclad as the promise that, inevitably, the good will get vanquished, the bad will prosper and the evil will remain unpunished. So the Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez grills a coworker for retweeting a shitty tweet and gets canned for not keeping the party polite? Surprising? Not in the slightest.
And then Depp v. Heard. The “wounded” cancel warriors. The woke anti-woke folks. All with axes to grind that are grinding against the prospect of having to stand in the grievance line because in the end, even if Depp “wins”, Louis CK walks off with a Grammy, and Joe Rogan is making more money than G-d, them voicing the take of the aggrieved amongst the aggrieved is OK, just as long as they can go first.
Or, how, and why, you must be absolutely certain of the devil.
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