SONG OF THE DAY: Cumbia Pa Morirme (kudzu'd)

I was thinking back on the first older folks I encountered who had been brainwashed by too much Rush Limbaugh radio or Fox News tv, and how they were seemingly normal people who just got worse and worse as the diminished cognitive ability and disinformation seepage into their stream of consciousness made them unbearable to even casually talk to. I was thinking on this because there’s a pretty large abundance of people like this, who you can’t even discuss anything with, because if you disagree, they immediately flip on some reactionary defensive counter accusation based on the binaries they’ve been programmed with, which generally speaking have nothing to do with what I’m saying. And in all the fear and loathing about how quickly the illusion of American democracy is being destroyed, very little is being said about how many people are brainwashed by digital media sources, much less how we can ever get beyond that. And there were people pointing this out in 2016, but instead of doing anything, it’s just been left unchecked to get worse over the past decade.

A woman who used to watch my oldest when she was younger has been lost. She even took my kid to Great Britain with her daughter… that’s how much we trusted her. But she got lost to the rabbitholes and is now a Make America Healthy Again wingnut who has lost all real friends and mostly just posts to an adoring bot community on X. I saw her last fall at an opening of a play, but didn’t say hello because she had that mentally ill thousand yard star in her eyeballs, that I knew I wouldn’t be talking to the person I used to know, because that person has been altered into something else, a hollow shell of a human that still walks and talks and shits and eats and thinks it’s thinking when it’s actually just regurgitating the programming they’ve willing consumed.

I was thinking about this the other day talking with my girlfriend, too, and how bluesky can feel so demoralizing because there’s such a sense of doom, with little joy. And also how Palestinian activists, during the height of online protests, were demanding we all watch the atrocities seen in video clips, as if it was our duty to witness those horrors. There is no gauge on these things that tell us when we’ve reached our limit, that we’ve had enough. There’s no bar at the top of our screen letting us know, “Okay, you’ve consumed enough horror for the day… log off for the night.” We just keep sucking from the demoralizing tit of social media, feeling worse and worse about it all.

Today’s horror of the day is the dimwitted devils are threatening to cut the VA staff by a large chunk. Anybody who’s ever gone to a VA hospital knows it’s already a slow and tedious process, but depended upon by a lot of people. Bob was my step-grandfather, and I have fond memories of riding with him in his truck to the VA hospital off Hull Street in Richmond – over an hour drive each way, which he had to do in order to get the care he needed. He’d take me to an all you can eat cafeteria style buffet afterwards, and it was such a treat. He was a good dude, and for all intents and purposes all of our grandfather. But we just called him Bob, and he had throat cancer but the trach never healed so he had the voice box you stuck under the tongue, and he’d click it at us.

Bob and my grandmother lived in a trailer most of my life, after the first few years. The trailer was in a segregated trailer park in Farmville, Virginia, through the woods from the projects. I spent a lot of time there, and it was exciting on weekends because they had cable and I could watch World Championship Wrestling on Saturdays. Wasn’t no cable at my country house, not even possible. It didn’t exist. Even when they moved their trailer to down below my mom’s house, they got a satellite, which was much cheaper by that time, and Bob and Gramma would watch baseball. My grandma loved the Braves, but they’d watch the Cubs too… basically if baseball was on, it was in the background.

A lot of what we’re filling our time with is just that – filling our time as background. I wonder if old people could’ve just had free access to baseball all these years, would we have less brainwashed folks? They could be mad about free agent signings instead of tricked into thinking Venezuelan gangs were taking over cities.

I actually watched like 5 minutes of Fox News a few weeks back, just to see what it was bantering about. I found it shockingly hateful. It was some sort of pseudo-talk show trying to be funny, but all the jokes were cruel, and it all was just sugar coating for driving home talking points for the bullshit going on right now by the dimwitted devils. It was well produced bullshit, basically, but I imagine if I left that on in the background every night, thinking it was useful, I’d start to think like that. That’s how propaganda works. None of us are impervious to it. It’s not a free will thing the entire way, as it eventually turns into neurological manipulation. And with long covid and how much digital consumption we all have now, who knows what early dementia rates are going to look like in a decade. And of course, the act of scientific study itself is being dismantled at the same time. It’s all pretty crazy to be living through, and wondering how violent the summer is going to be, whether there’s going to be elections in 4 years, or 2 years, and if so, how many among us will still be allowed to attend the theater of voting.

I guess I say all this as a reminder that you don’t have to absorb all the seepage from the poisonous political swamp that is the United States right now. It may not do you any good to do so anyways. And I also remind you that America, the land and place, had people here and existed before the United States. And using history as a guide, it’s more likely than not going to still exist after the United States is gone. That’s likely hard for some folks to accept, because we’ve so deeply internalized this notion that the United States is a uniquely special snowflake amidst human history, that shall never be melted by the political hells known to all other people throughout time. I find myself still untangling some of those meritocracy myths lately, expecting checks and balance might still check and balance, when in actuality, like every other government or empire or nation-state throughout time, all it takes is one small group to aggressively put their thumbs on the scales to fuck it all up. The propaganda, the dehumanization of your actual neighbors, the steadfast denial of reality until the horrors swallow you personally… it’s all been seen before, many times over.

And people lived beyond it. They still had moments of joy amidst the worst times, for the most part. There are pretty horrible atrocities that have happened where it’s hard to imagine folks still finding joy in there. And I still tell myself these dimwitted devils aren’t competent enough to create that level of atrocity; they’ll just smash a bunch of shit thinking they can do it better, and make a few dollars off the upgrade, until they realize they can’t easily replicate a labyrinth of public service that took centuries to build.

I don’t really have nothing hopeful to end this on. I’m just sharing my thoughts today. All of what’s going on is hard for many people in many different ways, and to varying levels. I know of people who have lost jobs already. I also know folks struggling with their health right now, so the politics is background anxiety to life and death worries. Life remains life, and if you still got it, you gotta live it. I hope you are still able to practice finding joy in your life, and I hope that never stops. I hope you are able to share joy when possible. I know I hope I do. I want the world to be better, and feel better, because of my actions and how I am. Not worse. And I just can’t understand how people can think they make the world better through cruelty. I hope they have to answer for it at some point down the road, but that’s not my role in this universe.