Nebulous concepts.
First off, hello and welcome, or welcome back. I thank you for reading my words; this started as an exercise to become a better writer first and foremost, and I feel that, slowly and surely, I’m getting better. My voice is pretty uniquely mine, and I continue to write like I talk, minus the pauses and with the benefit of editing. I strive to be clear and thoughtful, and, once again, I thank you for riding with me.
Let’s address the elephant in the room first. November was the longest month ever; let’s get into how.
Post-election America
So, that’s over. On the national level, well, it’s like an explosion in a pudding factory; it’s goopy and it’s EVERYWHERE.
We learned quite a bit about our neighbors, and about the nation as a whole, and of power, and of a very important role in democracy being reduced to vibes and feelings. We were reminded, quite frankly, that evil pays. That bad wins. That good, no matter how naked or how swaddled, can be a bad thing.
I’m not saying Kamala was great; I voted for her because the alternative was That Fucking Guy and if Jill Stein is ever an answer, then it’s a stupid question. What I’m saying is we as a country have wrestled with four years of being told about the rule of law, of court hearings, of evidence, of excuses and denials and ALL CAPS SOCIAL MEDIA…and at the end, it meant nothing. There are no earthly consequences coming. I escaped from the Baptist church and was told that the evil will get theirs in the afterlife, but no one could tell me why we had to wait when those people who were making it hard for us down here seemed to be doing so well.
I won’t do an autopsy of Why here, just a What Now. What’s done is done, and we’re in for another shitshow. But I am interested in a few things that became apparent, and how a lot of well-meaning people are thinking about dealing with it. Those Interesting Times that your grandparents talked about? Well, here we have our own brand of them coming.
The hypocrisy of it all
I know a lot of journalists - love a few, actually - and I understand the parts are not the whole. But the absolute cowardice displayed over the last eight to twelve years, continuing in this shitshow, makes me angry.
To put it simply, we look to the media to tell us truth from places and about things we don’t and can’t see. The truth doesn’t have a bias, but when someone is constantly lying, truth is a natural opponent.
Billionaires have bought major news outlets to amplify their right-leaning voices, and we’re finding out that the lies are being amplified. Their concerns are broadcast to us, and we’re facing a deficit of trust. What is the real news? What is the real truth? Of course, there will be those who go off to the fringes - “big government” isn’t keeping you from drinking raw milk because they know about its magical properties of opening your thirdly or whatever, but to keep you from shitting yourself to a painful death - but there is a need for news. There is a need for truth, even when inconvenient or not profitable.
Of course, this is me preaching to the choir. You, dear reader, know that. But we’ve watched the ascension of TFG mainly because no one wanted to say “lie”. Papers jumping all over themselves to self-censor. Applauding the eyeballs and outraged message boards, rewarding shareholders with the advertising profits borne from clicks. And, right before the election, the overt pandering, the bending of the knee to a bully. “If you win, remember that we didn’t call you a liar.” And even then, to no one’s surprise, we’re hearing about pulling licenses and cutting funding. Can’t please a bully, ever.
Of course, even while the media is not a monolith, mainstream media kept hitting certain themes. This is one that caught my interest.
So, this article from the Boston Globe postulates that, with all the effort in reaching women this election season, especially after the repeal of Roe v Wade, men are being reduced to rapists, misogynists, and generally bad people, and thusly TFG happened. That somehow, in trying to empower women, Kamala cast this note that a vote against her is a vote against women everywhere which, well, no one wants to imagine the magnitude of what that statement would be.
Anyway, by not “catering to men’s issues,”, the Democratic Party turned men off and they ran in the millions to vote for a rapist, racist, mentally decrepit asshole.
“The Democrats and progressive institutions have a massive blind spot when it comes to male issues, and this was exposed in the election. At worst, men are seen not as having problems, but as being the problem.
The language of “toxic masculinity,” “patriarchy,” and “mansplaining” from the political left has not been hugely appealing to men who are struggling to find their feet in the economy. Perhaps this should not be a huge surprise. As Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, writes, “No one wants to be a part of a movement that ignores or even denigrates them.”
“But if progressives dismiss whole swaths of the electorate as misogynists, they will send even more men running toward the political right. Instead, they need to show they can take men’s concerns seriously without backing down from fights on behalf of women.”
But that leads right into this opinion from John Stoehr: perception of men’s mispgyny can be just that; perception. Because the right wing media completely shouted out any facts the left could come up with. the populace largely believed that the Left hates men, the economy is shit, and any number of other things, because the left did not have media reach half of what Republicans did. Facebook ads, Twitter being run by an apartheid sympathizer, rightwing owners of media conglomerates with huge reach in newspapers and media outlets - all those did what tell you that stuff sucks and TFG was awesome. And as Stoehz put it, “Voters who knew the facts voted for Harris. Voters who believed lies voted for Trump. That is the new fault line in American politics.”
We’re at the point where truth isn’t given to us; we have to find it. We have to decide who or what we trust to give it to us with context and without an agenda. We as a populace have to decide how we react to that information; hell, there are people openly saying not to trust medical professionals, lifetime armed forces personnel, people who have literally studied and written and pondered for YEARS because their conclusions contradict a YouTube video made by a 30 year old with charisma and more than a little hatred of some Other. How do we get back from that? Is that too late?
Of echo chambers
After the election and the realization of a lot of people that Twitter was A Bad Place To Be, a ton of people moved to Bluesky, a new social media platform aping Twitter. A wave of op-eds decrying the move followed. All of them had the same theme; with left-leaning users moving from Twitter and Elon’s overt yearning for apartheid, race mongering, phrenology, and transphobia, what this really says about those people who left are that they want an echo chamber where they can tell each others that they’re right, and good, and frolic amongst themselves. They are running from new ideas! They are mentally and intellectually weak!
This is an old playbook.
Remember when TFG started Truth Socal? No one yelled about an echo chamber. This “liberal bias” lie gets put into circulation, and media outlets, eager to be the next Pravda, GLADLY censor anything that would offend the Right. Can’t call em Nazis. Can’t call mass murder a genocide. Can’t say that anti-gay and -trans sentiment is anything but “a worrisome development”. One imagines that, when planes start taking people out of the country and leaving them there, that when actual concentration camps pop up, those same outlets - and I’d include those social media places that will censor your speech - will not want to call things what they are. There’s power in calling a spade a spade, but there’s also danger in doing so.
Someone else made a point; when hanging out with your friends, you don’t invite the asshole to join. You don’t bring someone in who actively hates you or who you are for reasons of inclusivity. Your friend group, by definition, IS AN ECHO CHAMBER. Otherwise, what are those “friends” doing there? Same goes for social networks; why would I listen to someone whose presence I can’t stand or who openly hates me, especially when I have the tools to mute or block them? That’s not a symptom of weak ideas of “refusing to listen to all sides”, that’s self-preservation and not ruining my good damned time.
This holiday season, families are getting together, and politics will come up, because politics is the personal, and there will be screaming and yelling and slammed doors, and you will see the image of “WE CAN DISAGREE AND STILL LOVE EACH OTHER.”
To that, I refer back to James Baldwin.
People, we will spend the rest of our lifetimes being told that we’re wrong. When tariffs jack up prices, or the US Army is sent in to quell protests, we will say we told you so and feel smug; that would be human. But that’s not going to do anything for anyone.
My main concern is this; without a community, without a friend group, without like-minded people, a lot of things will be happening that will test you, and there will be people who are telling you that the wetness you feel on your head is just rain. Gaslighting will be rampant, and people will tell you things that you ca see aren’t true. You need people to turn to and say “did you see this shit?” and you need those people to say they share your concern and that they indeed saw that shit. And, those are people who you can do for and who they can do for you.
This is going to be amazing to watch, as a nation is told all sorts of out and out lies and the mainstream Fourth Estate, playing into the hands of a Christian fundamentalist authoritarian, doesn’t say it’s a lie. “There are concerns.” “Suspected.” Very passive word choices to tell you that it can’t be that bad or it doesn’t mean what you take it to mean. Here’s where my concern about journalism comes in; of what interest is the truth? In an industry where truth has become an afterthought, where clicks and “engagement” are markers of what a successful publication is, where is the incentive to tell the truth or to say what is morally right? And, if we look towards independent journalism or media, what of forced silence when they are attacked online or in person by an emboldened fan base excited and emboldened to hurt people they don’t like or uncovers a truth they don’t like? Everyone loves the whistleblower, but that person won’t get off unscathed.
Online death
People are singing the death of Twitter, not realizing that it’s a rather old song. “Any day now,” they say, “it’ll be a ghost town." Any day now, enough people will see that it’s a cesspool of Elon’s wet dreams and leave.
Conservatives openly seek to go to where the “crybaby liberals” are, because that drives their engagement. Can you imagine, getting paid by how many people you piss off? To get paid every time you pop up and post some bullshit like “your body, my choice” or “Chicago/LA/Detroit is such a shithole”? Is this the late stage capitalism we’ve been warned about?
I watch all this with some bemusement. Online, people go where the people are. People go where their friends are, where people they’d like to hear from are, not usually where the people they don’t want to hear from are. And, despite the antics of Apartheid Clyde, there still remains a large contingent of those people still on Twitter. I think that speaks towards the fact that, for a lot of marginalized communities, etching out a niche amongst a hostile base is a given. Algorithms and doxxing and shadow banning be damned; we want to talk to each other, share our lives, get our feelings and thoughts out there, get these jokes off. Once again, finding community amongst a larger populace is a function of every person’s social interaction; remember, we tell teens to “find their tribe” and other, non-coded terms to mean to find the people like them. And those people won’t leave that community until they’ve been driven out, and that hasn’t happened.
Yet.
-exhale-
I worry for my people, I worry for my friends and their loved ones. All I can do is get ready, because, as the song say, if you stay ready, you ain’t got to get ready.
I was thrown off my creative for weeks after the election; it felt…insensitive…out of place…to write a short story about fishing or to draw a comic strip that could elicit a chuckle. Rome is burning, or about to, and this is no time to tune the fiddle.
But there are a lot of people who need to get it out. Who have a song to sing or a letter to write or whatever. We got it in us, and there’s more room out than in. My lineage is dark humor, of jokes made to lighten the mood or stories told to calm nervous bellies, and dammit, I’m going to do what I can do. You may be called as well; do what you can.
Only way out is through.
Next time, I promise I’ll have other content to your inbox besides this politic. Winter is here, and with it the seasonal depression and my urge to hole up in my house and nap until the sun is warm again. But there is love and good and funny and beautiful still out here; think on those things with me.
Happy Thanksgiving, people. Team Kendrick.
Words from an Elder
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson