I have concepts of what I took away from the debate...
Eating pets is so brat!
I didn’t watch the presidential debate on Tuesday, primarily because I went to see Spoon play live and figured that was a better use of my time, and also because there is nothing about this dog-brained spectacle that will impact my vote. I’ve been in a relatively better mood about the state of the world since the presidential election flipped from a grim mummy vs. mummy trudge into something resembling a referendum on whether voters want a future or not—although Israel’s ongoing war of annihilation in Gaza has cast a shadow of horror on the Democrats’ joy campaign. Judging by the clips and memes that have feverishly circulated through my social feeds, Donald Trump looked faintly glazed while swaying in a way that suggests he might be wearing rollerblades, and he was muttering and visibly wincing before saying some drowsy ad-libs about transgender operations on imprisoned illegal aliens. Kamala Harris managed to beat him to a Hannibal Lecter reference, but it’s obvious Trump has lost his fastball and is sundowning into a rambling schizo, which was only previously slightly concealed by Joe Biden’s muttering ghost.
The gilded dogshit jankiness of Trumpian aesthetics was on full display in its most deranged and degraded form. His entire campaign is built to appeal to the fringe concerns of brain-damaged Fox News junkies and terminally online incels. Of course, America’s least discerning and most servile reactionaries will still hoot to this fetid nonsense, insisting that Kamala was wearing an earpiece or whatever half-remembered 4chan gristle they’ve burped up into various comment sections. All of this, however, has been overshadowed by Trump’s comment about migrants in the lovely town of Springfield, Ohio who allegedly feast on unsuspecting cats and dogs.
The MAGA movement’s taste in enemies has never been especially creative, which reflects both what vintage of conservative they are—vain, pretentious, and relentlessly aggrieved, with strong notes of white suburbia psychosis on the finish—and the political program they stand for. The narrative of migrant crime succeeds in riling the people whose politics revolve around being scandalized and upset to remain in their desired state of outrage and agitation. It exposes various ultra-right culture-war enemies in ways built to fit their laziest media caricatures, even if they are ultimately a buffed meme-ified version of dusty bigotries.
As someone who grew up in a homogenized Wonder Bread suburb, it strikes me as patently evident that anyone who lives in a McMansion and celebrates Taco Tuesday should be disqualified from bitching about migrant crime. It is remarkable that this bears repeating, but migrants are not in America to eat our cats or dogs. Also, it is worth mentioning that the logistics behind capturing and eating a dog are a bit complex. You would have to sneak into someone’s home, and anyone who has undergone the effort to commit breaking and entry will most likely opt for the flatscreen TV or the Rolex. It is simply not worth risking jail time to kill Air Bud for a weekly meal prep.
None of this can penetrate the grandiosity and vanity of the paranoid, self-glorifying crybullies who comprise the Trumpian parasocial death-cult. These types strike me as the kind of small business tyrant who runs a pool supply company and has convinced themselves that this confers upon them the status of Job Creator and Ayn Randian master of the universe. Their names are something like Bert Applegrove, which sounds like an alias James Bond would use to check into a hotel but with a fruit randomly added in there. As self-conceived arbiters of alpha masculinity, they are middle-European genetic run-offs who have rolled down the hill of Manifest Destiny for the past 150 years accumulating unearned privilege and wealth.
The wave of migrant crime hysteria was garish and slapdash even by the degraded standards of conservative media manufactroversy, and has long since begun its initial descent into punchline territory. It is their signature recursive desire to post and post tiresome diatribes about white genocide and the great replacement theory from Twitter accounts with an avatar of either a Roman bust or some eagle-strewn 1776 dada. This all rests on the shared delusion of defending the undeniable greatness of Western Civilization, and this towering and brazen lie has not dissuaded any of Trump’s fans from backing it to the max.
The Western Civilization these people champion is completely detached from ancient verities. They are willing to boil the planet and watch millions of corpses stacked along the Mexican border in service of their endless sprawls of suburbia, which is essentially a giant, open-air TGI Friday’s. The world that they are willing to countenance any amount of bloodshed to maintain is one full of Cheesecake Factories and PF Chang’s, an ersatz, chintzy, concrete-poured recreation of things they’ve never experienced, somebody else’s dream of a culture spoonfed to them all covered in MSG and high-fructose corn syrup. These Trumpian suburbanites are not producing anything valuable in American culture. They see 5,000 people fleeing Central America, and the warfare and misery and conditions that America is responsible for, and they are furious that one of their Fuddruckers might be turned into a taqueria.
I can promise you that red suburbia is not protecting the American Eden from migrant crime, because they don’t even produce a way of life that’s worth defending. They consume a corporate monoculture through a gravy pipe, like Homer Simpson sucking beer out of a hose at the Duff Factory. They gobble up minions t-shirts and Hawk Tuah bumper stickers for their F-150s. But their delusion exists at the clammy midpoint between dispiriting jingoistic Americana and low-effort Trumpian graft. Even nearly a decade after The Orange One emerged from the bowels of the American Dream and descended a golden escalator, it is not any less astounding that millions of Americans refuse to see this gossipy golf blob as a mincing and highly distractable cable-news casualty, but as a divinely ordained figure who will purify the land by overseeing a paroxysm of retributive violence and rendering his political enemies to Gitmo post-haste for their crimes against patriotism.
I’m not convinced these people actually care about migrant crime as much as they want to maintain their unfettered freedom to consume All-American garbage: Dog food, petrochemicals, idiot television, Trump NFTs. Even the most abstracted inconveniencing of their holy comfort is tantamount to the end of the world. That’s what this migrant crime lie is built to serve: To freeze this uneasy moment in place and hold it there forever, a threat unspooling over the horizon over their partitioned hamlets, not so much into the future as instead of it.
What is most frustrating about the phrase migrant crime is it distracts us from discussing a phenomenon that recurs at disproportionately higher rates: Citizen crime. When a migrant commits a crime in an isolated incident, it is framed as an invasion. It is far more statistically probable that an American will die in a mass shooting at the hands of a disillusioned and radicalized white boy who has far too easy of a time accessing an assault rifle. In the MAGA rationale, at least they came here the right way. It all scans as a familiar threadbare excuse for political fuckery, but some of you may ask what this fearmongering about migrant crime really means. I don’t know the answer, but it’s white at the tip of my tongue…
A Shit Posting Addendum…
Absent fathers on their way to the casino…
He didn’t specify for who…
Me getting that random burst of motivation at 4 AM.
The voices told him BIG WIN tonight!
Did he just fall out of a coconut tree?
Do you think he saw that tweet about how he’s not orange anymore and decided to tan again? Also, the way his neck labia is an outie…
Me when I see the illegal aliens in prison getting their transgender operation after eating my dog.
Trump was seconds away from a slur. Actually, the way he says CHY-NA should count as a slur.
Did you know that in abortion clinics, there’s a big red button that says EXECUTE? Maybe Trump thinks they’re taking newborns out to the back of the hospitals and shooting them in the heads like old racehorses.
Spoon is great live, good decisions