America feels so crazy right now.
Did you watch the SOTU? I don’t know why I did but I did. I tried not to. But these days I feel so alienated from so many things watching things on Twitter alongside other people who seem similarly unhinged and flailing like me always feels like a comfort.
We shook our heads, groaned at our laptop screens, laughed. Ninety minutes of our dumptruck dictator, our garbage pail POTUS, going on about his successes, much of wish you can say “Thanks, Obama” for. And then Nancy Pelosi, in true Baltimore Aries form (I just made that a thing), ripped his speech at the end and we were all like “did she just. . .?!” and she really did and then both the MAGA set and then lefter-than-thous scolded us for praising her for her performative empty gesture.
How do we win, we are always wrong, this much we know. We have no one but ourselves and we hate each other. Every road is an uphill, all doors a trap, all ends quite dead.
I don’t want to talk about the Iowa Caucus. Do you?! I don’t think you do. What on earth is happening, America, how can we just put the whole country in rice? We no longer function. We are Britney in 2007 with the shaved head, hurling an umbrella at a car in the middle of the night. Survival seems unclear but we definitely need supervision but only shady people want to take care of us.
America, being young and hot is not going to save us anymore.
Back to Iowa: Bernie clearly won the popular vote but some weird thing happened with Mayo Pete and he cheated, I guess—I don’t really want to think about it. I have one friend, just one, who loves him. I don’t get it. Anyway, if I was Biden I would drop out and if I was Warren I’d wonder why I did not poll neck-in-neck with Sanders. What is happening when people go to vote? Can we trust anyone?
My dream is this weekend to go to New Hampshire to canvas for Bernie. We have one week til the New Hampshire caucus. I already am planning on South Carolina at the end of the month. I am swooning over Bernie more than ever and it worries me so much—I constantly think somewhere somehow the other team (and this time I mean fellow liberals) will find a way to cut him down and there we go: another Trump term.
I am not sticking around for another Trump term. Next month I take a short trip to Europe, the first time in ages, and part of the trip’s intent is to see if I can imagine relocating if Trump wins. Because I think he might.
Because we Americans of the Correct Hearts & Minds cannot rally to fight anything we are so busy fighting ourselves.
Our morality has to be more moral than our neighbors, our purity more pure, our righteous indignation the most righteously indignated.
We are screwed, I think.
I have nothing more to offer in this post. Okay one more thing maybe: here, here is a photo of My President, ages ago when he was at a civil rights sit-in. He holds Rimbaud in his hand. He looks like the Brooklyn cat-loving chess-playing tennis-watching pot-smoking literary nerd of my dreams. He wants to help us even when we don’t. I think he has a chance. I don’t know. I don’t know you or what you want. I wish we had the same feelings but we probably don’t. 2020 is here and we have learned nothing and probably we wouldn’t have it any other way.