Find your way home

Get back to where you once belonged

In my earliest days of writing about politics, the era of Bush and rightbloggers, I focused mostly on conservative arguments vulnerable to attack from a street-level, common-sense perspective. That was because I was (and remain!) poorly educated, and the rankest idiocies were all I was fit to criticize. Fortunately conservatives gave me plenty of those.

I didn’t have to do much reading or deep analysis to keep up because the War on Terror was a veritable festival of bullshit that any fella who hadn’t been flim-flammed by patriotic gibberish (and there weren’t many) could see right though it — dumb propositions performed by jacked-up jingos like Del Sarte poses at a 19th Century county fair under the banner “Greeted as Liberators.” All I had to do was kick the plinths out from under them. I couldn’t miss.

It could get frustrating, because it took other people such a long time to see as I did how ridiculous it all was, despite my best efforts. But it was also easy and fun.

And I was given plenty more opportunities in the Obama era because, whatever else you want to say about the old trimmer, he was certainly no radical, yet conservatives acted as if he were black Robespierre come to murder them, burn their megachurches, and build a Cult of Reason on the ashes. Following them was like watching lunatics in a 19th Century madhouse gnaw on tree stumps like Curly from The Three Stooges. It was practically a guilty pleasure.

The first Trump era coincided with my establishment of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, where I began to spread my ambitions out a little further than I had done, picking up arts coverage, personal essays, straight reporting, and (I like to think) a different and more serious kind of political writing. I kept an oar in, though. At first it was fun enough ragging on conservatives in the old way, particularly the never-Trumper and just-the-tip-Trumper types who were stupefied by the new MAGA order and had a hell of a time adjusting. Who wouldn’t enjoy the spectacle of farticious Jonah Goldberg, who had made a living as well as a mockery of himself splitting hairs to defend conservative absurdities, fumbling frantically for footing in the new, more explicitly racist and stupid rightwing world?

But over time I found my usual style of sniping almost beside the point. Because the MAGA arguments were not only even stupider than the old neocon-theocon ones had been, they were almost too dumb and brutish to make fun of. There was some residual hypocrisy, which is always a good hook. But it was mostly just overt bigotry, chest-pounding, viciousness, and above all the ignorant ramblings of Tubby himself. There was barely anything to engage. It was like making fun of a natural disaster. The stump-gnawing rightwingers had gotten hold of the nuclear codes.

That’s when I developed my little rep company to enact scenes from Trumpworld – the Mar-a-Lago Throne Room, the Winter White House in Gulchville, Kentucky, Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, and all that. Now I set my bêtes noires loose on a premise and allow them to embarrass themselves. In this I have taken my cue from my satirical forebears: Show, don’t tell. It hope it gives you pleasure; it certainly does me.

I mention all this by way of addressing the confusion and despair a lot of us have been feeling in the second Trump era, which I know has a lot to do with the overt fascism and the DOGEbag invasion of the national fisc, but which I think is at least made worse by the absolute, one might say nihilistic stupidity of it all.

It’s one thing to be Orwellian, but when, for example, Tubby bars the White House to the Associated Press, a journalistic institution from the days of Horace Greeley and Henry Raymond, just because AP won’t put his stupid “Gulf of America” bullshit in their respected Style Guide, we’re past Orwell and into Caligula’s Horse territory; and, when Trump’s bootlickers insist AP is the real censor because they use “weaponized language” like a person’s preferred pronouns and the capitalization of “Black,” it’s as if there were a popular movement afoot to restore Caligula’s reputation as the greatest Roman Emperor.

I understand and even share the sense of inundation. I have seen people scrambling to find footing in the onslaught and looking for any precepts that might help. In fact I’ve written a few of those myself. But the main thing I have to offer you now, based on my own example, is this:

Our struggle is in a new phase but it is not new. It comes out of a time when we were making progress and it was easier to hope. The circumstances have changed but what we hope for has not. (If merely getting through were all we wanted, we’d have joined the Nazis — much easier!)

If your current methods aren’t working for you, go back in your mind to when you were less beleaguered, and could more clearly see a path forward to a better society; and, starting from that, find a new way forward that sustains that hope.

Maybe it’s activism; maybe it’s quietism. Maybe it’s head-on into the storm; maybe it’s an end run.

For me it’s sketch comedy. Maybe that means I’m shallow. But, like the rube giving unhelpful directions in the old joke says, I ain’t lost.