If today doesn’t feel surreal enough for you, why not indulge in an audio version of this article recorded over loud mariachi music blaring from the block party that’s been going on all day outside my apartment?
Trump wanted to know where his shoes were.
It has been about two hours since someone tried and failed to kill former President Donald Trump and already my social media is full of people insisting this was staged: it can’t be real, there’s just no way, look at the pictures of Trump raising his fist above his blood-streaked head as secret service members protect him. Pure fascist pornography, too good/awful to be true. But the fist-raise wasn’t Trump’s first reaction to being shot. His first reaction was to fall to the ground, and then, when the secret service told him it was safe, to look for his shoes.
We are all looking for our shoes right now, I think.
The world that existed before the shooter pulled the trigger has been undone and is actively being remade into…this one. There aren’t really words in a liminal space like this one, but Twitter is doing its best. An amazing platform. I’m sorry I ever talked shit. No matter how insane the world becomes, this platform rises to the occasion. The dumbest shit you’ve ever heard in your life, sure, but also the kind of black tar humor this moment calls for alongside moments of blinding clarity
The rules are changing very quickly. Reality has fundamentally altered.
Trump is a 78 year old man fueled entirely by hamburgers and an undying thirst for vengeance. Many people believe Trump entered politics because Obama made fun of him at that White House Correspondent’s dinner. Trump has spent the last four yeras pining for revenge: his 2020 election loss, the FBI raid of Mar a Lago, his arrest, his conviction. None of those things ever even came close to today’s unforgivable attempt: wiping his massive ego off the earth. Fatal narcissistic injury.
There will be blood.
Trump is no longer on Twitter but he is of Twitter; he got where he is because he is a creature of the Online. It is a capricious platform, where someone you’ve never heard of can become a Main Character overnight, sometimes because of something they posted years ago. This would be a very bad time to, say, post a joke about how you wish the assassin had succeeded, or to ridicule Democrats already reciting the expected condemnations.
Indulging in false flag fantasies is less dangerous but also, I think, a poor choice. Completely believable that someone wanted to shoot Trump in the head. Nothing to suggest that it was faked. If evidence to the contrary emerges I’ll reconsider, but the world is reacting to consensus reality so there’s really no point in dwelling on it. It’s like worrying about whether the Titanic struck an iceberg or a sea mine as the ship begins to sink. Who cares. The iceberg’s not the problem anymore.
The biggest question, right now, is the identity of the shooter. If the shooter is cis, straight, white, and male, than revenge will be less focused, more arbitrary. There will likely be a crackdown against “Antifa,” which will mean whatever they want it to mean. If the shooter turns out to have some other affiliation, gender identity, sexual orientation, or ethnicity…well. Let’s just hope they don’t.
By the time you read this, you know more than I did when I wrote it, but the world will continue remaking itself for quite some time. One of the most dangerous things you can do as a human being is to play a new game by old rules, which is why it has never been more important to quiet your mind and see the world not as you wish it was, or how you fear it might be, but as it truly is, right now. A lot of people are going to be yelling a lot of things in the coming days, probably me included. Nobody knows what is going to happen. This is the time to find as much calm as you can so that you can listen to that small, quiet voice that is not influenced by any of that shouting: the one that tells you when there is danger, the one that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up before you even know what’s wrong.
Be careful.
We’ll get through this.
Wake the fuck up is going to be yelled alot.
But no can. We are sleepwalking toward hell
en masse in what will appear in hindsight to the slowest dumbest, saddest stampede ever. The script is now in Stanley Kubrick territory.
Take care of each other.
I put the kids to bed, and tried not to show much of what I feel. My soon to be first grader who is learning to read, asked what "civil" means; he already knew the word "war," and saw the two on the screen as I was scrolling to see updates.
Somebody tried to make a martyr, and instead made a mythological hero. Every week, the worst possible thing happens. It's all getting a little hard to deal with. If anybody happens across a monkey's paw, just, please leave it alone, okay?