#(like people on instagram making fun of americans for being patriotic while they themselves put their flag in their profile)

[circumswoop]

Football Night in America 2: Always Concealing a Secret Doubt

Football Night in America

Jamie Lauren Keiles tweeted “as writers, as we look for opportunities to act, what we can do in the meantime is keep clear personal records of what reality is like now”. I’ve had multiple discussions with friends about the disability of push notifications during the neverending news drip, how it makes us crave distance and how that alone, itself, is alienating, that distance cld ever be a destination. Like flying just for the miles. What we cannot afford to be, as writers or as friends, is distal, even when the body is in decay. Decay doesn’t always hurt, as any dentist looks forward to telling you. Is it hard to stay together? Is staying together a viable form of organization? I texted Ben, how will our data plans ever survive any of this. He texted back, I’m afraid if I unplug from the tl I’ll wake up like Neo naked in a tub of fluid. This was right after I discovered the Russians are flexing on Ukraine again. Delimitation is more than a meme, or maybe not.

What is reality like now. It was Super Bowl weekend in America. The movie star quarterback of the Vegas favorites, praised as a superager and hated for his great qualities, was said to “choke up” when a little kid asked him who his hero is. The vegas favorites were the Patriots, whose name is fake, as proven by the WE ARE ALL PATRIOTS tagline on their merch. The debate over what constitutes fake news, to the extent such a debate is even being had in a society that is essentially debateless, keeps glossing over the cusps of it: that fake news has the same exquisite definition as mansplaining. Mansplaining is not telling a woman something she may not already know, it’s telling her something she already, for sure, knows. Fake news is not news you may not believe or may disagree with, it’s news you generate with the intent to mislead. Both mansplaining and fake news have the same rottenness at core: not just raw self-interest, but the overcompensation of people who believe themselves to be ahead when they are utterly behind. Why do you need to harangue a woman into submission? Because if you don’t, who else will. Like, that’s what the supremacist Right, and the misogynists who operate it, have always cudgeled as truth: that whites, and men especially, are permanently Ahead and enforcement is solely up to You. You are ahead, and you must stay that way. Always look over your shoulder, bc someone is definitely gaining on you.

Trump’s identification with the Patriots is irritating, if only bc Brady and Belichick are the great erotic male literary collaboration of our time.They proved this in the Super Bowl by first not playing to their audience (falling embarrassingly behind) and then playing overtly to their haters (by exerting an ethic that never confuses extraordinary force with medium-term precision). Twitter instantly fell apart with exasperated threads comparing the alleged trauma of this Super Bowl outcome with that of the Election, which is the Super Bowl for fat people.

Carly was the only other one for the Patriots in my closed circle. We agreed Tom Brady is handsome in the Adonisian sense, and not in the red-skinned bro-with-squinty-eyes sense like most jocks. He cld model! she gushed. Wokeness will only get you so far when it comes to American sports, and you can’t just show up for the day and rep the minority city. Atlanta is a new American beauty capital but if its athletes are demonstrably less terrible than Boston’s or anywhere else’s, I’d need to have a look at those findings.

As an extremely shallow person, one of the things that bothers me most about the new regime is how wholly, defiantly unhealthy everyone in it is. From the purple of Sean Spicer’s undereyes to the puce of his pursed lips, from Steve Bannon’s terminal unshavenness to the wattle every last one of them has, Rex W. Tillerson (W. for Wattle) as particular offender, cld their bathrooms all have lighting this bad? Do they not have access to leafy vegetables? Or purified drinking water? Yes, in America commenting on someone’s overt lack of health is definitely shallow, just as the right to look and be unhealthy is a certified letter of aggression. These people will play politics with their own bodies, and repulse us by any means necessary. While there may be something nice about current highly-paid NFL players having fat guts, there is also no word to describe how spectacularly out-of-shape former athletes get. And there should be.

What else was going on? Conrad and Angelo and I went to DJ Spinn’s birthday party at Tokyo Beat and watched the footwork dancers corkscrew themselves into bright bonfires of joy. Watching street dancers is strangely purifying, like thrown birdseed on your day. The bone-breakers on the Red Line haven’t been as active lately, and I wonder why. Maybe they formed a union and are now protected from their dazzling impromptu hat-in-hand protests, their sudden cleansing of the filthiness of the trains. The union will ensure that the bone-breakers and all the other street dancers are guaranteed compensation and health insurance for scapulas they might tear too far. Meanwhile, footwork dancing looks like a first-rate Chris Brown dream, can you tell I have zero clue how to technically break down forms of dance? I put them on an Instagram story but didn’t want the flash to distract so you couldn’t really see much. Conrad ordered a drink. Angelo disappeared into the crowd. I kept watching, mesmerized from the waist down.

Ben and I and two girls from Orange County I met in the Lyft Line went to see some guy play funk and disco records in a warehouse at 4 am. Going out when you’re this wobbly and constantly waiting for some kind of drop feels like when the Wi-fi goes out, like how can we occupy ourselves rn?? A sort-of drawn curtains mentality takes over, and you hope nobody sees you having even the most circumstantial kind of fun, but it’s necessary? Drugs and alcohol suck but at least they don’t lie abt it. Then I got home, or at this point the timeline collapses, but I got home and my Wi-fi really had gone out. It was just me and the Criterion Collection, like Lena Dunham in bed sick with mono in some kind of Google witch hunt.

Ignorant is the Western way of life. Richard Burton says that in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, from the outré black and white universe of 1965. Burton acts from a denomination of power that’s no good anymore, but his restless methodism always finds the enemy like some kind of software. Geopolitics and instincts actually going together is one of the great reliefs of the period spy movie, and now they couldn’t be farther apart. Money has always been the only thing anyone cared abt, and yet the only thing anyone cares abt anymore being money still feels like a plot twist.

In one of those talks with friends, where we practically examine each other’s nail beds for signs of Nazi flesh, she named kleptocracy, autocracy, and fascism and told me no ontological database would support all three being true at once. I said Trump, simply as electoral phenomenon, produced the first two as fluid states, knowing the third would take care of itself. Some people just want to rise so high they don’t have to hate anymore—they can get people to do it for them. Ignorance has never been so much the Western way of life as with these old white people who elevate the unread brief to a form of pulp art, who are nevertheless hilariously, decrepitly, skull-clutchingly in charge of reality again—reality as unclear personal record. Trump, unlike Tom Brady, only thinks he’s a superager. Only white supremacy cld ever explain it, and only a parody of rectitude could ever intervene, interfere, and interlope as much as he and his nightmare of whiteness are.

Remember when the Feed was just libs talking abt television? Yeah, I almost miss it. Most of the television I have watched in 2017 is Hannibal, that hot flash of homoerotic giallo that somehow lasted three seasons on an American network. In the same manner of the Trumps looking rich only to the most depraved poor people, the character of Hannibal Lecter, with his spread collars and foodism, looks tasteful only to the most depraved rich people.

At one point on it, Hannibal tells Will that fanatics are always concealing a secret doubt, which I found amusingly “topical” but not enough to actually tweet it. Skip the blind, or bland, poetics of replacing “fanatics” with “all people” and a very clever recipe for coping emerges: whatever the fanatic says, know that in his heart he is always calling it wrong. That’s living under autocracy.

#fascism #not my president #writing #donald trump #tom brady