One of the distinct sensations of this moment in time is that no one really seems to be in charge, the social order is adrift, but also that people feel powerless to do anything about it. They’re not actualized, and they have little agency to make the changes they see as pivotal to a continuing human narrative. This is a combination of powerful alienation from a social structure that promises the world and delivers a continuing decline, always offering less. Everything is more complicated and less accessible, there’s simultaneously too much consumer choice and too little, and the future is always happening 5 minutes in the past.
We have entered a time period of political purgatory: a space where the crimes of the past go unpunished and a better world seems but is not impossible. Our media compresses time down to its own 2 day cycle, disinterested in explaining what is happening to us, more interested in what draws eyeballs for that moment. We are bombarded by news, so much news it feels exhausting, a draining experience. Much like the endless polling of political candidates, too much media is a surface level glance at the deep rotting stagnation at our core.
The same cycles repeat. The next video on the autoplay list starts. Nothing lasts. Nothing sticks. Politics is still a media reality show: the script feels already written, the stock characters take their place. How did this shitty show start?
For this generation, the Iraq War and 2008 financial crisis fundamentally broke something about our expectations of justice and accountability. The expectation that no one will be held accountable for anything whatsoever was not developed by Trump, but by Bush, and then anointed as holy truth by Obama.
The buildup to the Iraq War was an act of collective, cooperative madness between the mainstream media, a public terrified of its shadow, and the Bush administration’s propaganda effort. 64% of Americans, brains deep fried by 9/11 hysteria, supported this disaster. The Iraq war was a bipartisan love affair, one of the few areas where the effete corporate liberals and the white supremacist cavemen locked lips and sent 500,000 to a million people into their graves. And it was all based on a lie and Bush was “punished” by being re-elected in 2004 by one of the slimmest electoral margins ever.
No one was prosecuted for their sins (except Chelsea Manning, of course). No one was held to any sort of account, including those who had voted for it enjoying long political careers afterwards. No one paid a single political price for murdered hundreds of thousands of people. I think I need you to absorb this with the correct gravity: the US government lied us into a war that murdered hundreds of thousands and not a single decision maker spent a second in a courtroom.
Members of the Bush administration, horrified by Trump’s naked depiction of their own goals, held their noses and were warmly welcome by liberals too dumb to live. Imagine the power that the lie held over people that when proven objectively false, seeing 4,424 caskets of people who died for literally no reason, did not tear down the US government piece by piece. Imagine the sense of powerlessness, combined with the might of American arrogance. Anyone defending this monstrosity and its apathetic lack of blowback is, without a doubt, your enemy.
And then came the series of horrors after that, the 2008 financial meltdown: a combination of loans designed to fail, packaged with safer, more reliable investments, and a lack of regulation concerning rating those packaged financial products. Once again, a monumental fuckup that cost real lives and nearly sank us into another Great Depression. It’s a dark moment when you realize the Bush administration, one of the most destructive in American history, was tougher on white collar crime than the so-called liberal White House of Barack Obama. Eric Holder’s Justice Department actively resisted criminal investigations into wholesale fraud, preferring fines and limp, non-confrontational regulation. (In 2005, the CEO of WorldCom, Bernard Ebbers, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for an $11 billion accounting scandal. Or to put it in perspective, 1.5% of the initial cost of the Iraq War.)
And the Obama administration made the damning decision to not prosecute or hold anyone to account for either of these great crimes. This decision cemented them in the public’s subconscious as flawed, broken mechanisms, far from the transformative aspirations of Obama’s 2008 campaign. Even if you sincerely disapprove of the carceral state, you have a moral center. The damage these monsters inflicted upon the world must be corrected, and the Obama administration decided to try and play nice, make friends, and look at where we are now. His single biggest failure was assuming the Republican Party has a conscience, that what America needed was to turn that big dial to being more racist, more conservative, more cruel. No one asked him to do that.
The other failure was not acknowledging the decay in our economic system after 2008, leading to the Uberconomy: a system of unsustainable gig jobs designed to turn people into digital serfs. Nearly all the jobs created in the “economic recovery” where part time or contract, and the unemployment rate looks great but overall morale and faith in these institutions has crumbled. The stock market is as high as ever, the banks are bigger that they’ve ever been, yet America is ready to break in pieces.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is bizarrely resistant to impeaching that piece of shit, and she’s been trained well. She’s internalized the wrong lessons of Iraq and the financial crisis, along with the absolute fucking lack of self-reflection that came after Clinton’s humiliating loss and Trump’s nascent fascism. The rule is thus: don’t rock the boat, trust the process, maintain decorum at all costs, because if the American people see that this is all a gigantic illusion, they’ll eat us alive.
You feel it, don’t you? You probably feel it everyday at this point. That raw, hungry anger inside when the elected leadership of this country lets the Jeffrey Epsteins get away with whatever they want to, even welcomed back into the upper crust. When the Mike Pences of the world stare at caged human beings with dull, bored eyes. When the Trumps of the world are accused of rape and theft and near impossible corruption multiple times over and over and over again, and nothing happens. There is no Resistance from these so-called leaders, it is acquiescence, it is negotiating with human predators to simply devour less.
When the bombs keep dropping. When the wars never end. When the media just goes along with the program, never challenging, just nodding along. When you can’t make ends meet. When your medical bills destroy your life. When your job has no future, no past, no end. When the cycle of everyday horror just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. The sun sets and rises in a time loop of modernity.
This is what is called a liminal moment in time. Everything is falling apart. No one has any answers. Trump’s only gift to us is that he expresses all these contradictions and failures so perfectly, so purely that it’s becoming increasingly unavoidable to see something is so fundamentally broken in us.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.