Longtime readers, such as they are for a two-year-old blog, can probably figure out that there is only one topic I can address this morning. That's right-- the crazy train. (Please don't click on that. I simply felt obligated to insert the link. I hate metal.)
Congressional Republicans' crazy train literally went off the rails, hit a garbage truck, and killed an innocent person. As the author of "Going Off The Rails On A Crazy Train: The Causes And Consequences of Congressional Infamy," I had no other choices on topics for this morning's post.
As one of my students commented yesterday in class, if you wrote a fictional story of this happening, the editorial comment would be to reject it as being too "on the nose." And therein lies the broader problem with modern politics. How do we satirize anymore?
OK, yes, person killed, and all that. Mourning, and blah, blah, blah, but if you are reading my blog, you didn't come here for warmth. Don Rickles is dead. I hereby nominate myself to inherit his title of "Mr. Warmth." As long as I don't have to tell all those racist jokes ('cuz, um... no), I think I'm a shoo-in.
The congressional crazy train went off the rails, and killed someone. True story. No joke. No punchline. The president is a reality show tv star, who doesn't know shit from shinola, is under investigation for exactly how deeply his campaign colluded with Russia, which we know interfered with the election to put him in office, he admitted on national tv that he fired the FBI director to shut down the investigation, he paid hush money to a porn star to keep quiet about their affair and the religious right is giving him a "mulligan," which is a golf term, appropriate for the fact that he spends all of his time on his golf courses after claiming that he'd never golf as president while bashing Obama for ever golfing, and maybe I should find a way to stop this run-on sentence. Hey, look! A period! But, I barely scratched the surface. I didn't even get to the fact that his political career was built on lying about where Obama was born and exploiting racism and xenophobic stupidity about that. Fuckin' Trump University and... damn it! Too... much... stupid... shit!
Satire requires taking real events and pushing them past the point of absurdity, but reality is already so absurd that there's just nowhere to go anymore.
Rock bottom. Where the hell is rock bottom?
There's a great book I've referenced a few times. A novel, actually. NK Jemisin's The Fifth Season. There's a scene in which a character named Alabaster is attempting to fight off the villainous "Guardians" on behalf of his adopted island home of Meov, and as he finds himself on a rock, past the point of exhaustion, a "stone eater" whom he calls "Antimony" doesn't want to let him stay there, so she drags him down, through the rock in a horrifying scene. Even when you think you've hit rock bottom, you can get lower. You can get dragged down through the fucking rock.
We are all Alabaster right now. Satire? How do we satirize reality when the congressional crazy train literally went off the rails and killed an innocent person?