Neoliberal decline shouldn't be this goofy.
So it's time for a chuckle.
It is a longstanding editorial value at This is a Newsletter! not to take current events too seriously. The subject matter, however high-stakes it might be from one moment to the next, is worth taking seriously and worth trying to write about to the best of my abilities. The news biz and its practitioners and accumulated lore and pomposity, on the other hand, must never receive even an ounce of respect. This approach is a little demented, admittedly, and it creates some strange internal conundrums—I am deeply unsettled with a sitting president deporting Americans to a mega-prison in El Salvador—but, on balance, looking for the perverse humor in this deranging timeline is probably healthier than acting in the way that, say, the editors on the New York Times politics desk act.
If Coachella is any indication, enshittification has broken tech containment and is now a societal contagion. Cost-of-living is skyrocketing and wages aren’t keeping up and all the high-paying jobs that would blunt the worst affects of inflation require high levels of education—which is unaffordable and will put you in crippling debt—and while you’re trying to pay off that debt, you’ll have to keep up with the increasing costs of necessities like healthcare and groceries—and godforbid you try to buy a home—and this is turning the working class into glorified wage slaves to shareholder value before we’re inevitably replaced by AI, which causes us to live in a state of scarcity and daily struggle, and the very people we elect to supposedly represent our interests will leverage all this to pit us against each other over bullshit culture war issues so we’re too distracted to realize our political system exists to funnel massive amounts of wealth and resources to the oligarchic elite in ways that are unethical and probably illegal, but they’re so rich that they’re above any repercussions. There are no shortage of ideas to solve this crisis, but the horizons of our political discourse and imagination will not account for any redistributive solution, so instead, we were treated to Katy Perry in space. Imagine blasting “California Girls” in a rocket. Fuck yeah!
As I contemplate the worst and dumbest shit that is happening, it’s also worth considering one of the few amusing aspects of the clanking, dangerous, pollutant-belching mechanisms of America’s government. The Vice President has some symbolic sense of importance and gravity, but no one really can articulate what the person assuming the job is supposed to do. The role functions less like the Executive Office backup quarterback and more like a president’s appendix. And for this specific cludgy and brutal administration, the prerequisites mostly entail a warm body to serve as a space-filler adrift within a hideous cavity, a vestigial wad prone to irritation and inflammation and bloat—which makes an amoral striver and transparently cynical creep like J.D. Vance a perfect fit. The job is mostly to exist, but Vance is a tragicomic zenith of the form; a stammering, peevish mediocrity happy to be remote-controlled by a cadre of floridly insane Silicon Valley reactionaries who want to turn the country into a series of crypto-powered plantations.
Occasionally, Vance gets to perform “dignified” statesman duties, like sit in Oval Office meetings fuming at foreign leaders looking moon-faced and demanding apologies on the president’s behalf. So given the relatively low stakes of the Ohio State University football team visiting the White House, even someone who is terminally clumsy and ham-fisted should be able to keep it together for a photo-op. But Vance still managed to goof it up.
The setting was perfectly anhedonic, suitable for a prissy dunce like Vance to rise to the occasion—in theory. The U.S. Marine Band is dinking through a celebratory song, the stage is full of beefy men dressed exactly alike, the mood is reverent and strained as lavishly un-fun, and the big trophy is right there. All the veep has to do is pick up said trophy and grimace through a bunch of awful photos. And Vance was feeling himself, bopping over and grooving a bit. But when he tries to pick up the trophy, it just falls apart in his hands. A man in the same suit lurches over to try to put it back together and it doesn’t work, so he just shuffles over and holds up the trophy like a weird child presenting a drawing of their middle school on fire to their disgruntled parents. His mouth is moving, though you can’t hear it over the sound of the band tootling through the climax of “We are the Champions,” but it’s likely the sweatiest possible gloss of I meant to do that… I hope this is the best moment of the rest of his life.
These days, metaphors are barely metaphors. A drowsy TV casualty shithead is running the government not like a businessman, but like a slumlord. A bunch of adult libertarian sociopaths are pouring orange juice into a USB-C port to see what happens. It’s unclear if anyone understands what a tariff is. There is a deranging faith in the attempt to find some hope for the future in this humiliatingly stupid and craven present, but I am contractually obligated by your subscription to wishcast what this all means for the broader culture.
I’m not particularly sure, but I do know that we have to stop saying the word unalive. It gives an overall embarrassing vibe that pervades the experience of being online, and this is taking into account the widespread desire to avoid getting hit with the shadowban. There are elite tics and shibboleths and idiocies in our government cosplaying as the Bobs from Office Space and people are cowering to an algorithm from halfway around the world. So now the average adult TikToker is speaking like the Kids Bop version of themselves. The word eggs does not belong in the word sex. Would James Baldwin write the word unalive? Would Maya Angelou use the word grape to describe sexual assault? The world is falling apart and people are using the corn emoji as a substitute for the word porn. If you’re that afraid of being censored, then get creative, because if I have to read the phrase unalive one more time, I might fix myself a bleach martini.
You'd be surprised how many people have defined what the VP is there for:
“It's easy being vice president—you don't have to do anything.” Joe Biden
“The man with the best job in the country is the vice-president. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, 'How is the president?’’“ — Will Rogers
“I spent several years in a north Vietnamese prison camp in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States?“ — John McCain
“Vice president: A spare tire on the automobile of government.” — John Nance Garner
“Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea; the other was elected vice president of the United States. And nothing was heard of either of them again.” — Thomas R. Marshall
“One seldom ever remembers meeting a Vice-president.” — Will Rogers
During Ohio State’s national championship run, they lost to an aggressively mediocre Michigan team—at home—and received a broken trophy from an incel posing as a politician. On balance, the universe is doing fine, actually.