What Do You Do With the Mad That's Inside You?
God fucking dammit, America. Why are you like this?
Note: Normally, the way this Substack works is each public post has a follow-up under a paywall in which I discuss the spicier things I wanted to say but didn’t want to deal with drive-by sealioning in the comments. Since merely relating that Trumpers were wilding on my local NextDoor has gifted me with days of abuse from same over on the Hellsite Formerly Known As Twitter, I frankly have no more bandwidth for being yelled at by hordes of lesser Hutt cousins, with attendant Salacious B. Crumbs, about how stupid and bad and wrong I am. Consider this one a follow-up to the last four free posts about the Gravitron of Nightmares we could’ve not been stuck in forever. Paid subscriptions support and further this newsletter; if you want to see more essays here, subscribing is the best way to make it happen, as I have many folk to feed.
Well, that happened.
Followed by a simply wonderful fortnight of sifting through the ashes of the social contract looking for charred chunks of hope and decency and finding pretty much FUCK ALL. Also sifting through the WhAt WeNt WRonG hot takes of everyone from Bernie Sanders to Elon Musk’s ketamine dealer to the feral diaper-hunting meth-opossum prowling around behind my house who’s got all the answers.
It’s been a real treat.
There is a palpable, completely revolting sense excitement among the media. They got what they wanted—Hate Island is back on! All new episodes! Ooooh what hot little monster is Trump gonna couple up with this week? Time to get called heroes of the resistance for shitposting on the internet just like we were going to do anyway! But among regular goddamned people who didn’t want to actually set the world on fire to cook their horrible burgers and yuk it up with the other sadists in the Bad Uncle club, there’s a real well, fuck it vibe going around.
What else is anyone even supposed to say at this point? It’s gonna be real bad? Yeah, we’ve all been saying that. No one cared. Trump is going to fill the cabinet with whatever Spirit Halloween remote-controlled jump-scare ghouls he thinks will make out with him most enthusiastically or hurt the most people or piss off liberals or, hey, fingers crossed, all three? Yeah, apparently that was a plus. Nothing’s going to get fixed, rights will be lost, and every piece of the country that still works in any way is gonna get its teeth kicked in while a nation of aspiring Mad Max extras laughs and pretends it’s awesome? And all that’s assuming we don’t get into a war because Putin told his monkey to get dancing? I don’t know, man. Guess so.
I’m not a politician, I’m not an analyst, I’m not an economist—hell, I don’t even have a podcast, which means I’m barely a real person. I feel just as fucking defeated and cynical and scared and hopeless and holistically disgusted as everyone else who can define the word tariff without Google and doesn’t own a major newspaper.
But as the shock has begun to wear off, and the sadness numb, what’s left over?
Oh, Christ on a fully-fueled megayacht I am so fucking angry.
And finally, I get to say: IT’S BOTH SIDES, BABY.
And that’s why this particular primal scream of useless rage at the oncoming Snowpiercer baby-eating bug-train of the future is under a paywall, because EVERYBODY’S GONNA GET SOME today, and if you want me to fight with you about it, you gotta pay the troll toll.