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あらすじ・解説
I am suspending these Hoedowns for the time being. They have been going pretty steadily, on one platform or another, for several years. It’s time for a break. I don't know how long it will last—maybe a month, maybe a year, or forever. But I am as stunned as a lot of people are, and I woke up Wednesday morning, having barely slept, needing to revise myself in significant ways. I have suspended my social media accounts, also maybe for a week but maybe forever. I can't write something that's wryly funny, or hysterically stupid, when I feel like god has buried his fist in my chest. Everyone with a paid subscription to the Hoedown: your support means more to me than I know how to say, and I am thankful for it. But you may not get your money's worth for a while, so by all means suspend or halt those contributions, and put your money toward something that gets results.I find I am all but allergic to anything having to do with the recent election. I don’t want to turn on the radio. I don’t want to hear those voices, and I don’t even mean the candidates’ voices, but rather the voices of smart radio people who talk with their noses as much as their mouths. They all matriculated at the Smarm Academy, and have fond memories of casual evenings spent on the Quad Bucolic, playing lazy games of soccer and comparing trust funds. But as much as I hate this recent election, and everything about it, I will tell you this thing. I substitute taught at the luxury high school on election day. I overheard students discussing the election. One girl, a ninth-grader, was telling a classmate that it didn't matter if Kamala Harris did "something sexual" to "get herself a job," she was still a better candidate than Trump. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I don’t know where people get their disinformation anymore. Hearing that was not the first inkling I got, that things would go badly on election night. But it was a big inkling, that things were not going to happen the way I hoped they would. Why are people so eager to tell the same horrid stories about every woman they find out exists? Why do the people who hear those stories apparently clamor to believe them? Why do people hate women so much? It is true that Harris should have distinguished herself more from Biden. It's incredible to me that she didn't. She shouldn't have campaigned with Liz Cheney, but I don't even know if it would have made a difference. People have lost their minds. They will believe anything. I have read some op-eds since election night, about how as citizens of this nation we shan't disengage. We cannot give in and lose hope, because we need all the strength we have to fight and resist what's coming. We have to be the neighborhood Winston Churchill, holding the line against the horde. I think I said similar things in 2016, but what does it even mean? Where is the fight they keep talking about? Is someone leading it? How does the fighting work, exactly? Should I drive around in my car, and hope I see the fight somewhere, so I can lend it my formidable strength? Are we getting together to fight whatever we’re fighting, or are we all doing it in our own ways, and hoping for the best? What are the long-term goals of this resistance? How will it lead to a better world than the one we have now, which I want to hide from for the rest of my life?My experience of political engagement has brought me twenty-five years of defeat, horror, and disappointment. The best parts have been when the disappointment is delayed a few months, after some moments of quasi-triumph, and everything goes back to getting worse. If anyone knows how to get new results that will make me stop looking up small cities in Guatemala I can try to persuade my family to move to, before things get really bad, let me know if I can help. Because even though Guatemala is in the same time zone we live in right now, there is no way my family would go with me there. Also, I’m sure there are bigger problems in Guatemala than the ones we have here, and I have too much stuff now to relocate like that. Where in Guatemala would I put all these books? I don't think the Democrats we have right now know how to get different results from the ones we’ve been getting throughout my lifetime. I’m not sure they even want them. Not like the rest of us do. And if they run another lawyer in four years who campaigns with Republicans and/or talks about how the Republicans are fundamentally good and we need them to be at their very best, so that we can be our best, I will burst into flames. I will turn into lava. Here I am, announcing the suspension of the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand, and I can’t seem to stop typing. It’s a form of mental illness, I think, to imagine there is a point to this, to think that when you talk someone else really listens. It's not unlikely that a week or a month from now I'll be back to my old self again, spewing ...