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This past week.
Jan. 11th, 2020 10:25 pmThere’s been a feeling in the air this week that I’ve noticed has a lot of my fellow Gen Xers and older Millenial friends on edge, which reminds me of the time immediately post 9/11 or the Dotcom bust. Maybe younger Millenials associate this feeling with the 2008 crash. A feeling that everything changed literally overnight, and things are about to get a lot harder now and maybe never go back to the way they were before. A feeling of everything speeding up, and being unable to keep up or catch up. I have had so many anxiety attacks this week. So many.
I remember the moment that the war in Iraq felt inevitable. Not when George W. Bush actually declared war in 2003, but the moment they announced the results of the 2002 midterm elections. That meant that Bush now had a congressional majority to do whatever he wanted, and he had already been trying to get support to go to war with Iraq at that point. It was commonly suspected from the moment he announced his candidacy that this would be one of his major goals. It was the reason some of my friends in the military sought discharges the moment he took office. (I won’t say “the moment he was elected,” but since the 2000 Florida recount was stopped, I guess we’ll never really know for sure.) But 9/11 was just an excuse. WMDs were just an excuse. “Surely,” I thought at the time, “he’ll be voted out in 2004. He’s most likely not even there legitimately in the first damn place.”
But then he wasn’t voted out – though he secured the Presidency very narrowly, and at the time there was a lot of evidence to suspect massive voter suppression was partially to blame, which of course has never been investigated as thoroughly as it should have been. Yesterday, it struck me that it’s very easy to understand in hindsight how I ended up getting sucked into a cult. Nothing made sense during that time. All of the information was pointing in one direction, and yet as a nation we were going in another direction. We had a President whose entire administration operated under a fog of possible illegitimacy, who’d seized massive powers for himself and his administration via the Patriot Act, and who took us to war under pretenses that were not just probably false, but patently, verifiably false. And he was allowed to just do it, get away with it, and then he was re-(s)elected and enabled to keep on doing it as if the false narrative were absolutely true. George W. Bush was just allowed to ram through whatever he wanted.
And we learned that everything we had been told as dissenters – that we would be persecuted, targeted for our dissent, that the state would try and shut us down – was false. Instead, we were just ignored. Like no dissent even existed or registered. And somehow, that was worse. Because when the state is reacting to dissenters, that means it perceives dissent as a threat. Bush’s state just pretended we weren’t even there. Joining a cult was my brain’s attempt to check out from all of this, because at the time it just couldn’t handle it. It was “I reject your reality and substitute my own.” It was “if reality is really that malleable, then maybe we can make our version the true version if we just believe hard enough.” As Philip K. Dick once said – “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” But powerful people can appear to make it go away for a long time, proportionate to how much power they possess. (Or as a wise Frenchman once said, “Choice is an illusion, created between those with power and those without.”)
And “real reality” didn’t even return after Obama was elected, because there was no accountability for any of the misrule which happened on Bush’s watch. We were just told we had to “move forward as a nation,” and the right wing propaganda machine still controlled the narrative after all that time. The Occupy movement was a cry, a scream, for accountability. The media painted the entire event as a Millennial tantrum with no actual goal or purpose, instead of a legitimate movement joined by protesters of all ages, races, and demographics in an attempt to demand accountability from the state.
Judging from that, it’s not hard to understand why many Occupiers ended up becoming accelerationists. Recent events have made the Trump administration seem more like a rehash of the Bush years, but worse than ever. (Hey wait – a Matrix sequel is being made, MCR is reuniting, and people are trying to resurrect Tripp pants. Maybe it is 2003 again!) People criticized Obama for being “Bush lite,” and for valid reasons in some cases. The Patriot act remained in place, and American imperialism in the Middle East continued apace. But he didn’t start a needless war with Iran. Instead, he helped to negotiate the Iran Nuclear Deal, which of course Trump pulled us out of the moment he could, since his whole reason for wanting to be President in the first place is his bitter resentment of Obama’s achievements. Full stop.
Basically, what I am getting at with all of this, is that there have been so many moments over the past two decades where things seemed to get a lot worse very quickly, and there was never a return to the way things had been before things suddenly got so much harder. And it feels like it just happened again. I’m not in danger of checking out this time. I know that those of us here at the ground level, so to speak, don’t have the ability to suspend reality and its effects as much. But my brain is still attempting to check out.
This time, it’s manifesting as if my executive dysfunction has suddenly gotten a whole lot worse. Because my executive dysfunction has gotten a whole lot worse. I’m forgetting things. I’m losing my train of thought constantly. I’m zoning out a lot during the day. My anxiety is through the roof. Trump’s supporters didn’t even know who Qasem Soleimani even was before last weekend. None of us did. Now they’re trying to make him into enemy #1. Trump and his people have been looking for a reason to commit acts of aggression against Iran for a while.
Yesterday, it was suggested that Trump had Soleimani killed to appease several senators who would be taking part in his impeachment trial. If so, doesn’t this seem to be yet another example of corruption to add to Trump’s ever-expanding list of acts of corruption? I’m not saying that Soleimani was a nice guy. I’m saying that Trump’s purported reasons for assassinating him were sketchy and in bad faith. A good friend said something this week, like “Trump and his cronies are rushing so quickly to ram through everything they want because they know that they won the lottery using a fake ticket, and they know those winnings could disappear at any moment.” I’ve been praying for reality to reassert itself. To snap back. I’m not sure what will happen or who will be affected when, or if it does. I just know that we can’t keep on like this. Not for another four years.
I remember the moment that the war in Iraq felt inevitable. Not when George W. Bush actually declared war in 2003, but the moment they announced the results of the 2002 midterm elections. That meant that Bush now had a congressional majority to do whatever he wanted, and he had already been trying to get support to go to war with Iraq at that point. It was commonly suspected from the moment he announced his candidacy that this would be one of his major goals. It was the reason some of my friends in the military sought discharges the moment he took office. (I won’t say “the moment he was elected,” but since the 2000 Florida recount was stopped, I guess we’ll never really know for sure.) But 9/11 was just an excuse. WMDs were just an excuse. “Surely,” I thought at the time, “he’ll be voted out in 2004. He’s most likely not even there legitimately in the first damn place.”
But then he wasn’t voted out – though he secured the Presidency very narrowly, and at the time there was a lot of evidence to suspect massive voter suppression was partially to blame, which of course has never been investigated as thoroughly as it should have been. Yesterday, it struck me that it’s very easy to understand in hindsight how I ended up getting sucked into a cult. Nothing made sense during that time. All of the information was pointing in one direction, and yet as a nation we were going in another direction. We had a President whose entire administration operated under a fog of possible illegitimacy, who’d seized massive powers for himself and his administration via the Patriot Act, and who took us to war under pretenses that were not just probably false, but patently, verifiably false. And he was allowed to just do it, get away with it, and then he was re-(s)elected and enabled to keep on doing it as if the false narrative were absolutely true. George W. Bush was just allowed to ram through whatever he wanted.
And we learned that everything we had been told as dissenters – that we would be persecuted, targeted for our dissent, that the state would try and shut us down – was false. Instead, we were just ignored. Like no dissent even existed or registered. And somehow, that was worse. Because when the state is reacting to dissenters, that means it perceives dissent as a threat. Bush’s state just pretended we weren’t even there. Joining a cult was my brain’s attempt to check out from all of this, because at the time it just couldn’t handle it. It was “I reject your reality and substitute my own.” It was “if reality is really that malleable, then maybe we can make our version the true version if we just believe hard enough.” As Philip K. Dick once said – “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” But powerful people can appear to make it go away for a long time, proportionate to how much power they possess. (Or as a wise Frenchman once said, “Choice is an illusion, created between those with power and those without.”)
And “real reality” didn’t even return after Obama was elected, because there was no accountability for any of the misrule which happened on Bush’s watch. We were just told we had to “move forward as a nation,” and the right wing propaganda machine still controlled the narrative after all that time. The Occupy movement was a cry, a scream, for accountability. The media painted the entire event as a Millennial tantrum with no actual goal or purpose, instead of a legitimate movement joined by protesters of all ages, races, and demographics in an attempt to demand accountability from the state.
Judging from that, it’s not hard to understand why many Occupiers ended up becoming accelerationists. Recent events have made the Trump administration seem more like a rehash of the Bush years, but worse than ever. (Hey wait – a Matrix sequel is being made, MCR is reuniting, and people are trying to resurrect Tripp pants. Maybe it is 2003 again!) People criticized Obama for being “Bush lite,” and for valid reasons in some cases. The Patriot act remained in place, and American imperialism in the Middle East continued apace. But he didn’t start a needless war with Iran. Instead, he helped to negotiate the Iran Nuclear Deal, which of course Trump pulled us out of the moment he could, since his whole reason for wanting to be President in the first place is his bitter resentment of Obama’s achievements. Full stop.
Basically, what I am getting at with all of this, is that there have been so many moments over the past two decades where things seemed to get a lot worse very quickly, and there was never a return to the way things had been before things suddenly got so much harder. And it feels like it just happened again. I’m not in danger of checking out this time. I know that those of us here at the ground level, so to speak, don’t have the ability to suspend reality and its effects as much. But my brain is still attempting to check out.
This time, it’s manifesting as if my executive dysfunction has suddenly gotten a whole lot worse. Because my executive dysfunction has gotten a whole lot worse. I’m forgetting things. I’m losing my train of thought constantly. I’m zoning out a lot during the day. My anxiety is through the roof. Trump’s supporters didn’t even know who Qasem Soleimani even was before last weekend. None of us did. Now they’re trying to make him into enemy #1. Trump and his people have been looking for a reason to commit acts of aggression against Iran for a while.
Yesterday, it was suggested that Trump had Soleimani killed to appease several senators who would be taking part in his impeachment trial. If so, doesn’t this seem to be yet another example of corruption to add to Trump’s ever-expanding list of acts of corruption? I’m not saying that Soleimani was a nice guy. I’m saying that Trump’s purported reasons for assassinating him were sketchy and in bad faith. A good friend said something this week, like “Trump and his cronies are rushing so quickly to ram through everything they want because they know that they won the lottery using a fake ticket, and they know those winnings could disappear at any moment.” I’ve been praying for reality to reassert itself. To snap back. I’m not sure what will happen or who will be affected when, or if it does. I just know that we can’t keep on like this. Not for another four years.
