Apt Horror and the Weight of Other Things

"Talk of surprises! What we suddenly discovered through the fog was so amazing that at first, we refused to believe it. But then, when we were face to face with it—galley slaves or not—we couldn't help laughing, seeing it right there in front of us..."

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

There was something horrifyingly apt about watching the late President Jimmy Carter’s casket being carried down the U.S. Capitol Rotunda steps this week while I, desperately trying to feel normal, feel sane, feel…something wandered around my gym one morning, all the while knowing full-well the future state of the country and the world for that matter was about to swing from oh fuck to OH FUCK!

For me, the foundation of this horror (forget parallels of President-elect Trump who now shares the same felon status and appears to be on the same path as Hitler in 1933)
is really grounded in the overall loss (and death) of Carter’s character and the relentless, mutating birth (s) of President-elect Trump’s.

They couldn’t be more different in their lives, their actions, their words…so the physical sight of watching President Carter in a casket (hopefully resting peacefully) and about to be buried alongside his wife as President-elect Trump observed in the pews, the light from above emboldening his freshly minted spray tan, was a scene so symbolically fucked…all I could do was stare dumbly as it all, frame by frame, unfolded before me.

Luckily for the other gym goers worriedly watching me about to spin into a nervous breakdown, I got it together enough to write some notes. This lead me to remember one of my favorite lines from President Carter followed by one (there will be more) of President-elect Trump’s.

“Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” Carter once said in his "Crisis of Confidence" speech, also known as the "Malaise Speech," on July 15, 1979, during a national television address. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

Now, for President-elect Trump:

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” To prove to the world that apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., visited Greenland on January 7, 2025, delivering a message from his father, stating, “We’re going to treat you well.”

Right.

Was I witnessing the symbolic final nail in America's figurative coffin, or was my already drama-prone mind exaggerating to cope with the onslaught of dread and hopelessness that seems to have been flowing through most of the country and the world since the pandemic? If you know me and have read my work, I tend to embellish to cope with the day-to-day trials of living, so it wouldn't be far off. In my mind, there is a certain comfort in crafting a narrative that, being self-generated, creates this illusion of personal control. In fiction and hell, in this essay, I am providing a narrative to hopefully craft sense out of nonsense that is this new reality to maybe, in some farfetched away, effect change. And yet even the fiction writer, who may swear they will never change a word, or a director a frame, will most always bend to an editor or agent to ensure - speculatively - that it gets published so the world, in whatever way, can see some of what the creator was trying to get at. This coping mechanism of mine has been in my arsenal for years yet, at this moment, feels almost like it may not be enough as that little voice in my head rambles on like this:

Jesus…What a scene, right? What a thing to have to be conscious of…have to witness and absorb…where…just four years ago, the man incited hundreds of thousands to storm the Capitol, believing full-well the presidency was rightfully his. Now, four odd years later, that same man is legally permitted to enter the very office he once tried to seize by force. And this, just days after the burial of one of the most charitable, selfless former presidents in American history. What a head-fuck for all those who witnessed this and logically voted against it. What a dark victory for all those who supported it and believe in it, wholeheartedly. I mean fucking shit the lecherous leech-ghoul Mitch McConnell was even there.

I and I’m sure some of you have been living in that brain-mushed frantic self-talk stupor since November 24’, so I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know and haven’t felt. But still…I’m vexed by something…almost like the feeling of having something to say is on the tip of my tongue but my mind and my memories have completely been thrown away with no amount of pleading or begging or swearing to allow or give me mercy.

Mercy…what a fitting word and one, I sense in the next four years, will likely have to be provided to loved ones, i.e. family, friends, and hopefully strangers in arms that will see/feel what everyone is going through. As the world rages, lucky moments of peace, be it simply stirring homemade soup at the stove with your partner sitting quietly at the kitchen table in wait or hitting snooze on your alarm to get an extra ten minutes of rest before finally entering the day…mercy, mercy, mercy will be integral to not only reminding yourself that you and everyone is alive but that you are a human being, born free, and must fight to keep said freedom and the right to survive ringing loud.

Mercy - at least for me - is often found in books, in writing, even though I’ve been having my own bouts of existential nihilism mixed with flashes of eternal recurrence, leaving me at times paralyzed…sipping on this rotten cocktail even Friedrich Nietzsche himself (even though the bastard conjured it) would likely hesitate from partaking in. One book and quote I’ve ranted and raved about for some time now - Yanis Varoufakis's Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism - feels entirely relevant now, especially when examining President-elect Trump's carefully crafted public persona over the many, many years he's been on every iteration of TV and media from "The Jeffersons" to the inauguration in less than a week. Not to boost his already massive ego, but Trump, love him or hate him, pioneered media manipulation - first through traditional entertainment and later through social media - that allowed him to present one carefully curated vision after another while maintaining a vastly different private reality that, today, has mutated into this almost mythological far-right Zeus for the Maga crowd. This duality, perfected over decades, fits almost a little too perfectly into the themes Varoufakis explores and how these modern power structures operate through media, technology, and the algorithms of social media. Which has been perfect for Trump, as he's like a candle with media/social media and its users as the moths, leading people via these platforms' already well-established invisible systems designed to modify behavior through a continuous feedback loop where algorithms shape human desires and actions.

In connection to this, Varoufakis writes:

"For young people in today’s world, even this small mercy (fencing of a portion of one’s life to remain “autonomous, self-determining, free) has been taken away. Curating an identity online is not optional, and so their personal lives have become some of the most important work they do. From the moment they take their first steps online, they suffer like Movatar (In Yanis Varoufakis's interpretation, Movatar was a robotic exoskeleton suspended by a cable in an art space near Sydney, characterized by awkward, jerky movements that symbolized the future relationship between humans and technology) from two perplexingly contradictory demands: they are taught implicity to see themselves as a brand, yet one that will be judged according to its perceived authenticity. And so before posting any image, uploading any video, reviewing any movie, sharing any photograph or message, they must be mindful of who their choice will please or alienate. They must somehow work out which of their potential ‘true selves’ will be found most attractive, continually testing their own opinions against their notion of what the average opinion among online opinion makers might be.”

I’m old enough to remember the beginning of all of this, holed up in my dorm room in Chicago about to venture forth at DePaul University to study acting, and talking to my then girlfriend on the original iteration of Facebook (now Meta). The whole experience felt like a cooler, more optimized version of AOL Instant Messenger (yes…I am that old) but in no way did I feel in that moment that I was feeling pressured to curate, edit, or censor any of myself from what I said to her, others, or shared via the platform. Though…looking back at how many drunk photos of myself that I posted willy-nilly…I probably shouldn’t have but shit…it was college. I digress because, as I said, that was the beginning of all of this and everyone, whether they liked to admit it or not, was slowly being guided by the invisible hands of these platforms algorithms creating a whole new definition of character and self that had to be both online and offline simultaneously to succeed not then but, in the very near future.

What kind of character and self? Well, one that rewarded the algorithm which, as everyone knows by now and has seen, is all about divisiveness and controversial content of all kinds around the world. What happens to the character of an individual on these platforms who, like President Carter, is all about good will, donating time and energy towards charity, and selflessness? They’re invisible, left out in the digital cold for few or no one to find and discover. And what about someone like President-elect Trump who lives and breathes toxicity? Well, he will soon be the Commander and Chief of the most powerful country in the world.

It is in this current reward structure where a prioritization is blessed (or cursed) by this character, and thus increasing ones popularity and engagement through likes and comments which only leads to the ongoing amplification of offensive attacks, false information, etc. And to make matters worse, this content often spreads faster and more widely than truthful or "nice" content because the platforms' algorithms are designed to amplify attention-getting posts, where the working out of these young people's "potential true selves" is then directly tied to this machine of hostility. This is what made the sight of President-elect Trump standing by President Carter's casket so heavy as it was a stark visual metaphor for how predictable yet disheartening America's political trajectory has become when viewed through the lens of just twenty-some years ago.

So, where does that leave us?

Do we sit idly by and let Zuckerberg with his chains and “cool” t-shirts run the world from now on? Do we let Musk with his rockets and X blowhorn and Bezos with his “digital fiefdom”, a man Yanis Varoufakis calls a "techno-feudal Lord,” take the game for the next one-hundred years? For I fear this will continue on (don’t be mistaken…it’s already started) unless we stand up as one together rather than one divided. In what way, I don’t know yet…I’ll be writing…stewing…but white knuckling our way to some manufactured, algorithmic end for some nameless, faceless shareholders of companies who would sell us a casket before we are even dead doesn’t seem - at least for me - the life I was planning and wanting to live.

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