Millennials are one of the most heavily surveilled and regimented generations in American history. There are precedents, but they’re aberrations: slaves, gymnasts, the inmates of orphanages and reform schools; Michael Jackson, JonBenet Ramsey. Few Americans were under the illusion that the Dixie-inflected SoCal cortisol cases herding their kindergartners onto child beauty pageant stages were normal. Nobody looked at the public screaming fits of Bela and Marta Karolyi or Joe Jackson’s sheer abusive force of will as a stage father and saw a mainstream childrearing norm. Is she really going out with him? No. Larry is staying in with her. He already has dinner in hand.
#TooSoon
What, then, explains why Millennials are so soft and spoiled? It’s always good to hear these complaints from the same Boomers who spent their own youth throwing fits that would make their children and grandchildren blanch. A rising cohort of adolescents failing to graciously adjust to adulthood in a prosperous but fractious modern nation? Oh word?
Spoiled isn’t quite it. The Millennial Lifestyle is a trip through the wringer. On the bad end of the spectrum, it’s app gigs, cursed roommate arrangements, and crushing student debt for worthless degrees from fraudulent “colleges.” On the good end, or at least the less awful end, it’s years of academic and professional hazing for an always contingent invitation to wear golden handcuffs. Parents are scared to death that their flowers will die if they’re let out of the hothouse.
Let’s look at this from a restorative justice angle. What can the system do to make life viable for those it has brutalized through this hideous socioeconomic regime? Okay. Let’s start by making student debt as uncollectable as it currently is nondischargeable and forcing the gig apps to pay their employees–that’s what their “contractors” are, for God’s sake–either minimum wage on a shift basis or double the minimum on an on-call basis, plus federal mileage.
No, I am not trying to make liberals uncomfortable. Not principally, at least. As they’re generally construed today, liberals are a constituency vocally opposed to conservative attacks on individual liberty but, for one so keen on making individuals earn their liberty from abusive employers (e.g., by staying in school) and even abusive local and state governments (by voting for Democrats), they’re awfully reluctant to demand that other, much more powerful individuals with heavy institutional backing earn their own success by acting in ways that probably won’t provoke revolts.
Think yet again, if you will–although I’ll be the last to blame you if you won’t–of the myriad ways Hillary Clinton could have flipped the 2016 presidential election in her favor. Trump’s victory was overdetermined because She overdetermined it. Indeed, we might say She was not With Herself. Sad! Hillary surrounded herself with Beltway swamp critters, bragged about working to put coal miners out of work (Much Maggie, Such Resolute; Wow), catered to rich feminist extremists in a society with a swelling population of underemployed, undersexed young men, and strung Bernie Sanders along as a spurned proxy barnstormer instead of easily winning the general election with him as her running mate.
Assertions that the dispossessed masses owe imperious, out-of-touch politicians their loyalty in exchange for promises never delivered to hold bad corporate actors accountable to the law are highly fascist. What did voters actually have to lose by giving Trump a shot? The esteem of cosmopolitan elites who had always openly mocked them and wished them ill? Assistance from a government run by a neoliberal wrecking crew constantly insisting that its viciousness was merely the realpolitik necessary to play chicken with theoretically persuadable Republican voters, that it was trying its best to serve the vulnerable but had to placate malicious compatriots who wanted them dead and disingenuous ones who needed to maintain the value of their portfolios?
They didn’t all have nothing to lose–indeed, many vulnerable poor voters thought they had more to lose under Trump than under another Clinton–but by the same token, a great many had already lost too much under “sensible” centrist governments of both partisan stripes to assume that Trump would be worse. At worst, they figured, he’d promise and not deliver.
They took notice of the horde frantically denouncing him from positions of power and privilege: spooks, feds, out-of-touch Pentagon flag officers, civilian chickenhawks who sacrificed kids from the provinces on indefensible foreign battlefields like so many pawns on a chessboard, cutthroat holier-than-thou meritocrats who expected the whole damn nation to get with the program and play their sleazy game of professional striving at all costs, racially woke moralists living in segregated neighborhoods with the thinnest of veneers flapping around over their racial and class prejudices. The sputtering hysterics of these vicious, disingenuous cosmopolitan parasites gave a critical mass of voters confidence in Trump. Sermons about how Trump is just a bigot pandering to bigots inevitably backfire. Voters who confidently know in their own hearts, from their own relationships, that they are not bigots, and who know without a doubt that the Democratic base is crawling with bigots who constantly proclaim their own enlightenment, figure they might as well vote for a candidate who shows some promise to concretely improve their lives.
Large segments of Trump’s base are bigoted. They were bigoted back when they were voting for movement conservatives out of malice. George W. Bush appealed to their basest impulses. So did Bill Clinton. Forget rehabilitation; neither of these thugs should have been habilitated in the first place.
This is unfortunate, but it isn’t germane. Bigots were not Trump’s key to victory. NPR rarely grapples with this, let alone in good faith, but it’s the easiest shit to argue. Let’s hold all else equal–control for other variables, as Nate Silver mythically does–and run a counterfactual 2016 general election in which nobody turned out for Trump in the sincere hope that their communities’ boys and girls would be brought home from our ruinous foreign wars or rescued from the throes of crippling, life-threatening drug addictions or put back to work in revitalized factories in a country with a revitalized industrial policy.
Under this scenario, Trump loses every swing state. He keeps every politically activated Facebook paranoiac and still loses the election in a Clinton blowout. This scenario doesn’t even require Clinton to gain any voters. It only needs Trump to lose a nationwide total of well under a million disaffected voters in a few key states. In every 2016 swing state, this bloc was Yuge.
The point of this exercise is that there weren’t enough deplorables in the basket to Lock Her Out of the White House. It isn’t to assuage fears that right-wing nut jobs are a potent political force. They very much are, especially in rotten boroughs. Many such cases indeed. It helps that the Confederates, a rare army of “losers” widely encouraged to fly their battle flag over their places of “defeat,” have renegotiated the Three-Fifths Compromise for a full prisoner headcount.
Trump has a rare gift for communicating to the schizoid. No other president in my lifetime, and probably in living memory, has rivaled it. Like any good CIA asset, he panders mainly to hardline reactionary conspiracy theories, although not enough for (barf warning) the “Intelligence Community,” and certainly not in ways they seem to support.
Trump has millions of Americans convinced he’s Q. If that leering, jailbait-chasing pervert is St. Michael the Archangel of Missing and Exploited Children, God help the kids before their enemies. The explanation that makes sense here is misdirection. Q-Anon keeps some goobers from looking too directly at Jeffrey Epstein and his legion of associates, including one Donald John Trump.
It is, however, only the slightest misdirection. It takes hubris for Trump, Gaetz, Boebert, and the gang to draw attention to ubiquity of perverts in and around the government. Sure, you’re right about the Podesta brothers, but speak for yourselves. They have awfully high confidence that the electorate won’t put the pieces together and realize that the whole government is rotten, confronting not just Democrats but also Republicans for their perversions.
Both sides are overdue for their punishment. If the Turkish intelligence services were blackmailing Dennis Hastert into sandbagging resolutions denouncing the Armenian Genocide, why can’t the Podesta brothers be Madeleine McCann’s kidnappers? If that sounds crazy, ask yourself: What’s up with Tony’s art collection? What’s up with the police sketches of the two suspects? Assuming the Spanish police weren’t using John and Tony Podesta as Dahmer-grade Gladio assets, they had every reason to focus on European suspects, not on a barely famous former American official and his brother. Those two were ideally poised to hide in plain sight.
Criticizing both sides upsets both sides, and I do mean both sides. The Blue No Matter Who should explain what anybody’s supposed to make of Comet Ping Pong’s owner, or “owner,” one James Alefantis. How the hell does the pizzeria that, according to opposing viewpoints (TM), either absolutely is or absolutely is not a child rape dungeon end up with an owner whose name is one letter off from an anagram of “J’aime les enfants?”
At the time, I spent hours before I went to sleep at the Harris Beach rest area typing out an essay about this extremely normal shit on a hand-me-down phone whose battery has since died, matching the letters over and over again. It still feels surreal. It feels like “James Alefantis” is a code for the initiated and a fnord for the general public.
Why would they use a Greek guy to signal pedophilia in scrambled French? Well? Why wouldn’t they? These are weird, twisted people. The Clinton e-mails demonstrated their habit of using crudely coded language. Maybe the “walnut sauce” was just drugs. What it was not was anything to do with walnuts. Please.
They’re playing with us. It’s a gaslighting op. It’s possible that these are all coincidences, but plausible it is not. The two guys who just happen to be dead ringers for the prime suspects in Europe’s most sensational child kidnapping case are also associated with a guy widely reputed to be the orchestrator of a child sex slavery dungeon who himself just happens to go by a name that’s damn near French for “I like kids?” Am I crazy to wonder about this shit? Are we all crazy? It always bears repeating that I wouldn’t be pointing about of this out if it didn’t look sinister.
It’s always fun to be badgered to ignore and forgive these creeps for their weirdness and viciousness. What are we (“we”) even defending by voting for them year after year? Bill Clinton is still the psychopath who flew home to sign Ricky Ray Rector’s death warrant, and he’s #StillWithHer. If opposition to the death penalty is negotiable enough to order the execution of the most brain-damaged retard on death row as a matter of pure realpolitik, maybe there aren’t any actual principles at stake here. The West Wing teaches us this. President Bartlet had to deny clemency to that suicidal small-time drug trafficker to build political capital with the Republicans to, uh, yeah, do this and that on policy, just like when Slick Willie secretly met with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security, then blew it all on that plump Jewess’s dress.
That one we call the “Ooh, Mo Batter! Blue!”
Again, #TooSoon, as she said.
The Big Dog became more popular with his electorate, not less, for having Westside Thicky slicken his willie. J. Denny Dundiddly had yet to expose himself (ew), and Gateside Downlow’s briefs exposure as a Page Fancier had been memory-holed years prior, but it’s impressive, given how many of these creeps keep getting exposed for their sexual power plays on minors, and at that often ones kept captive under affirmative duress, that Bill Clinton’s big scandal featured his having sex, after a fashion, with an enthusiastic grown woman. As abuses of power by American officials go, it was trivial.
It’s worth noting, too, that Monica Lewinsky quickly came (giggity) to wield exceptional power in the White House for an intern, precisely because she sucked so much. She was allowed ample, if not quite unlimited, access to the facility, one of the most restrictive on earth. This chapped the hell out of Gary Aldrich’s ass. He wrote a damn book about Bill’s horniness before the Lewinsky story broke, and also about how sore it made him to be stonewalled by people he wanted to interview about everybody’s private lives. Just as with Trump years later showing up at stream-of-consciousness rallies with no experience in government and beating a former United States Senator and Secretary of State in their race for the presidency, Lewinsky scandalized the hell out of official Washington by effectively pulling rank on staff greatly her senior as a juniormost staffer.
Swallowing: Is that like inhaling? Did she? Is she the kind of girl who gives a guy head even when he’s hung like a moose? Is this the truth? Up against the wall, signora, and tell me: If this thing could fucking talk, would its story be titillating enough for the Special Counsel?
Bill Clinton famously had procreative sex with his wife as well, and we can all see how that worked out. Many families are worth valuing; that one’s worth making wait until it at long last shows some values, and lives by them. Frankly, few Americans imagined Bill Clinton was stepping out on a good woman, or for that matter a particularly promising child. A guy everybody knew was horny as hell by the time he was first elected to the presidency cheating on the worst yuppie harridan in the land with a laidback, gracious, tasteful mistress was pretty damn sympathetic for ordinary, normal Americans.
Ken fucking Starr, of all people, went on to cover for serial rapists on a college football team. What the hell are movement conservatives or the religious right supposed to be worth to voters now? It makes sense for shitheads in business to vote for them because they’ll do their part to discipline labor, but they can barely hang on to the Job Creator vote, because the Job Creators have defected to Trump. What is the mewling and scolding of the dwindling Never Trump conservative movement supposed to accomplish in the face of his proud caterwauling? A sniveling rear guard of scolds and creeps who constantly whine for the mods to put Trump in the penalty box want us to vote for them because they pretend not to be dissolute perverts.
That dog don’t hunt no more.
Trump is a sign of many things, and some of them are hideous, but among the better ones, he’s a sign that voters want honesty in their politicians.
They’d rather have him bragging about how he’d bang Ukrainian refugee cuties in a New York minute than listen to another round of Slava Ukrainy horseshit from the same warmongers who forced the country’s armed forces into the bloodbaths of Iraq and Afghanistan. Vladimir Zelensky is a piece of shit crook who celebrates active Nazi warlords. If the Russian spelling of his name was good enough for the movies, it’s good enough for me, and it might as well be good enough for us all. It was stunning to watch him lead a standing ovation before the Canadian Parliament for a Waffen SS veteran named, swear to God, Jaroslav Hunka. More like Nazislav Hunky, eh? Canada has a famously large and politically active Ukrainian community, but did they really have to clap and cheer for that John Demjanjuk ass motherfucker?
I guess they did. I also guess Putin isn’t all that bad for pursuing a total war against the Ronald Reagan of the Pale of Settlement. We need to spend another few billion on weapons for the Judenrat-in-Fatigues guy? Says who? In the name of my late grandfather, the one whose father faked Lutheranism to get the family the hell out of White Russia, I declare that we do not. I assume they both would have been just as stunned as I am to watch this shit unfold and unfold and unfold. Putin’s primary objection to Ukraine’s militarized nationalism is probably not its infestation with skinhead Bandera apologists, but you do, in fact, gotta hand it to him for presiding over a war against the most active and deadly Nazi armed forces in the world today. This is, objectively, exactly one of the things he is doing.
The Ukraine clusterfuck on its own won’t sink Funny Uncle Joe’s campaign for reelection. As a component of inflation or austerity measures, however, it may. If America First (in which my Jewish grandfather dabbled but by gentile grandfather did not) means limiting or ending aid to a fighting force of brutal but inept Nazis, should we not put America first?
This is racism? No. The obsession with the war in Ukraine and simultaneous utter disinterest in the wars in Ethiopia and the Congo, now, THAT is some fucking racism. That’s all about White people being sad about Whitey’s Trauma, and yes, a surprising number of these White people are black.
Everything about this fixation on Ukraine is class- and caste-coded. It’s a compulsory bougie hobbyhorse. If anything in American politics is fair, Trump hammering Biden for using his coked-up footjob wastrel of a son as a conduit to Ukrainian oligarchs is fair. This is not to say that it will necessarily work, given how many Americans quietly look up to Hunter Biden as an aspirational figure vicariously living a lifestyle they seek for themselves, just that it might, and that Trump will probably try it.
The intersection of war and sex is a horror. Hunter’s girls, mercifully, seem more like Instagram call girls or spies than sex slaves. He’s yet another freak whose sexual compulsions actually aren’t all that awful. He probably doesn’t do anything Donald Trump doesn’t. He gets high as a kite on freebase and has all-night orgies with strippers. He stalls on child support for his bastard. Maybe the kid will grow up all right in spite of it all and realize a full, satisfying career as a schoolteacher, like Strom Thurmond’s daughter. Strom was a better absentee father than Hunter, but at least Hunter isn’t a schoolteacher. If Yorkville’s varsity wrestlers need not give thanks, perhaps its cheerleaders should.
WE ARE!
Hunter’s lifestyle is bad, but it’s no Boys Town.
*****
In the month that I’ve wandered away from work on this screed to do shit like work on a freight dock (your boy gets paid), Israel has managed to provoke something resembling the Third World War. The war between Israel and however many enemies decide to engage it on however many fronts (currently looking like, among others, Iran attacking Israel on all possible fronts) horrifies me in a way that the Slavic showdown in Ukraine does not. It’s probably because Israel is a country my friends, classmates, and our peers might visit, and in some cases in fact have. It makes Ukraine and Russia look like shitholes, even in peacetime.
Israel is now showing its true colors in rare form. Killing hundreds in a coordinated airstrike on a hospital during a blockade on everything down to electricity and water after days threatening exactly such a strike, then blaming it on an accidental enemy artillery discharge, requires unparalleled psychopathic arrogance. I write this, of course, as an American, whose government is Israel’s parallel. It figures our ruling class would side with Israel, a country that, unlike our own, has had as its head of government a Philadelphian. Would that Bibi were merely the Republican Milton Street.
Mainstream outlets are failing to suppress news of Israel’s utter heinousness in its war on Gaza. They’re trying, but they’re overwhelmed by what their own reporters have confirmed or personally witnessed. The whole scene calls to mind the campaign to sanitize what American police were doing to Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020. By now, all but the worst shitlib diehards can tell that Israel is committing the Siege of Leningrad on the Warsaw Ghetto in response to a guerrilla incursion.
The shitlibs, that is, and also the anti-Islamic religious right. Uh-oh. To paraphrase a certain Indonesian-speaking “Chicagoan,” we forgot some folks.
Meanwhile, the House GOP Caucus, having allowed its nuttiest members to help the entire Democratic Caucus oust Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, is consumed with too much infighting to nominate a replacement. The Democrats’ kingmakers would have sat down any caucus member so defiantly threatening their own party leadership for The Talk. They’re evil, and they’re bad at elections, but they’re ideologically committed and disciplined. They highlight the absolute mess that is their current opposition.
Who, then, is the closest to a favorite for McCarthy’s replacement? Think (if you can stomach it): wrestling. Yes, you’re getting a clue, too! The Republicans are just a bit too divided to elect Jim Jordan.
Steve Scalise was briefly another favorite, and he may be again. Aside from Trump being one of the least consistently and committedly evil Republicans active today, and it’s a big aside, Scalise does not have the taint of personal scandal about him. He’s evil as hell, but that’s just policy. He does not make the news for molesting wrestlers.
If we can ignore questions of wrestling’s heterosexuality as a sport, we might assume that the GOP’s kingmakers, having not so much shame as a desire to look vaguely credible, would have made Jim Jordan go away by now. There are people it is not safe to piss off, and some of them are Republicans, not Democrats. We might expect some of the Republicans behind the scenes to pull out all the stops and destroy Jordan’s political career: no more seniority, no more campaign funding, fuck his district into a shape no one recognizes, a powerfully targeted primary challenge.
They have done none of this. Nobody stepped in behind the scenes to end the party’s affiliation with a scumbag accessory to the serial molestation of college wrestlers not two decades after its Speaker Emeritus went to federal prison for bullshit white-collar lying to the FBI but really for serially molesting high school wrestlers as their coach. Nobody was like, hey, this looks like shit, we gotta stop it.
Instead, as Yaakov Smirnoff would have it, the Jordan gets to cross all over the rest of us. His being the second high-ranking Republican in very recent years to pervert a wrestling program for young men into a casting couch for horny authority figures isn’t even a talking point among dissident Republicans. Nobody in office has stood up to call Jordan the new Denny Hastert and refuse to enable his further rise in public life. Nobody has even done this for political gain.
Even Democratic officials are curiously silent about this. Surely they, many of them affiliated with Jeffrey Epstein, are not also perverts.
What even is Israel at this point? Whatever moral high ground it held is gone under its current government and won’t be back until Netanyahu is out of office (and, say, in prison on the corruption charges he still faces).
I’d say that the Christian hard right is profaning its own religion, but its versions of Christianity barely have a virtue left in them to profane.
Murica Derp 