DEMOCRACY IS FOR LOSERS
Dude, if Trump hadn't mishandled Covid, Biden wouldn't even have won in 2020!
My architect son once told me, “The permanence of a tattoo is a rehearsal for death.” He told me this back when he was covered with tattoos and I wasn’t. I also remember him yelling once, “You’re supposed to regret tattoos!” He must have said this after I’d chided him for getting a dumb tattoo. I don’t have TOO many dumb tattoos — 3 of about 30; all in, not bad! — but the dumbest one I have I got for a dumb reason and having it sure has taught me how to die.
I got it because in July of 2016 my wife at the time was upset with me for saying, whenever it came up, that Trump was going to win. It bummed her out — I don’t know, apparently there are all these people for whom the things other people say are extreme weather events as opposed to highly evocative white noise — but I guess I’m a HSP, too, in this regard — Highly Sensitive Person — because for her birthday, I, dumbass, got this tattoo and told her I’d stop saying Trump was going to win. It pleased her, and pleasing her pleased me, too, because I was a co-dependent moron with attachment issues.
I’ve thought several times about having it amended to read “BRC2016” because I did go to to Black Rock City (BURNING MAN) in 2016 — but then changing it would become part of the story and I guarantee you everyone would say, “You should have kept it!” And I’m with them. But not because it’s cute to be dumb. I’m with them because it’s what actually happened.
Trump won, of course, just like he’s going to win this fall, the world was super-boring for four years, boring in exactly the same way the last 30 minutes of a Marvel movie are super-boring, and now we’re the fools, standing close enough to touch those burning memories.
LOOKS LIKE WE MADE IT is a master-class in populist irony. God, please give me the talent to craft something this simple once before I die! So many words for one idea — I STILL LOVE YOU delivered as I DON’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE. I — like all the artists I pick at from afar and some up close — have a bad habit of trying to do three things sincerely and calling that braiding beautiful when what other people really like is one thing announced with an obvious WINK.
There you are Looking just the same as you did last time I touched you And here I am Close to getting tangled up inside the thought of you Do you love him as much as I love her? And will that love be strong? When old feelings start to stir Looks like we made it Left each other on the way to another love Looks like we made it Or I thought so 'til today Until you were there, everywhere And all I could taste was love the way we made it Love's so strange Playing hide and seek with hearts and always hurting And we're the fools Standing close enough to touch those burning memories And if I hold you for the sake of all those times Love made us lose our minds Could I ever let you go? Oh, no we made it Left each other on the way to another love Looks like we made it Or I thought so 'til today Until you were there, everywhere And all I could taste was love the way we made it
Get it? They HAVEN’T made it! He’s just SAYING it APPEARS that they’ve made it, but they HAVEN’T! He even ADMITS they haven’t when he says, “Or I thought so til today…,” but the title is still LOOKS LIKE ME MADE IT because that’s the part that makes you ache and break, thinking of how you have to pretend it’s over and done when it isn’t, it’s the upside-down you love. Big ups to Marty Panzer for writing those words, by the way! He and Manilow met in the CBS mail room (or so the story goes) — I’ve never been ambitious like that and it’s cost me, it’s kept me from making things people actually fucking want. The measure of true ambition is you start in the mail room. I never did, and I’m not kidding (because I don’t kid), if I had it to do over again, I would! It’s like those old people down in Florida, in the Villages, getting their tits done and taking Viagra, fucking, literally, all the way to the cemetery: they WANT it. There’s something undeniably attractive about wanting it. Ask everybody.
There’s a new book called (deliciously, Virginia) THE STALIN AFFAIR, about how America cozied up to Stalin in 1941 and thus assured — hindsight’s 20/20 — the defeat of those blasted Jerrys (so named because German helmets resembled “jerrys,” i.e., chamber pots. That one’s for free.) Apparently what made it so easy to cozy up to Stalin was — you guessed it! — he was so cozy! That plus-size human fireplug who said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic” and meant it was also, apparently, a lot of fun to be with: surprisingly well-read, surprisingly witty, surprisingly droll, a fat, messy eater of fatty main dishes who could put skinnier patricians in wheelchairs at ease while openly contemplating eating them for dessert — in other words, Stalin was essentially an ironic figure, a WINKER, someone who offered something you could see through easily — I’m a monster but I SEEM so nice! — and seeing through easily is to vulnerable horny bodies what porn is to minds — a fast-track to satisfaction and a nap. And this is why democracy doesn’t WORK, because democracy isn’t ironic: democracy is sincere. Democracy spawns critiques like, “He acts all nice but he’s really a murderer” whereas totalitarianism spawns joyful effusions like, “He acts all nice but he’s really a murderer!” The reason one system spawns bitchy complaining and the other spawns fawning offers of sex or something like it is: we know people really want power…and so when we meet a person who says, “I want power but only to use it to make other people’s lives better,” we don’t trust it because they’re not copping to the pleasure to be derived from masquerading your lust for power as altruism. We might admire claims to altruism for their beauty but we don’t trust them. If some smart fellow with a degree and a conscience had set fire to the Livadia palace during the Yalta Conference, who would you follow through the smoke and screams? Roosevelt? Good luck! Even with a turkey leg in one hand and virgins of both sexes tucked under his arms, Stalin would still linebacker his way outta that mess with relative ease and you’d probably find him asleep on his back on the grass before the smoke cleared. Just like all those old horndogs in the Villages, Stalin was a fucking animal. The poet and painter Kenneth Patchen said, “The argument of innocence is lost only when it is won.” Democracy is for losers. It’s a beautiful, bad idea — and there are lots of people who will choose losing for a beautiful idea for their own bad reasons over winning for the sake of itself and those are the people who are arguing to keep Biden in office. They WANT to lose. They think — correction, they FEEL without thinking — that losing this way will be “fitting,” will be, somehow, “admirable.” There’s a word for this predilection: it’s PERVERSE — it shows '“a deliberate or obstinate desire to behave in a way that is unreasonable or unacceptable, often in spite of the consequences.”
I know, I know, Virginia, Biden’s speech the next day was AMAZING! Girl, I don’t care if he lifted a car to save YOU! I want a president who can have two good days in a row — and I don’t want that racist, sexist, small-fingered, bad-breath diaper-filling machine called “Donald Trump” either — but what really “gets my goat” (a phrase coined by racehorse breeders that referred to the goat one puts in a stall with a horse the night before a race; in other words, “what really takes the one thing that might assure me a victory”) is — people saying they’re keeping Biden to win when what they’re really choosing is to lose for what they think are “pretty” reasons. Me, I could get behind openly choosing to lose for pretty reasons and I could get behind winning for ugly ones, but I can’t get behind this self-defeating literal lust-for-losing being sold as the height of virility and gamesmanship. Crossing your fingers isn’t a plan. Crossing your fingers when you know it won’t work just so others can see you doing it and admire your — your what? — your status as a beautiful loser? ICK. I’m not rushing out to get any tattoos this time. If Biden remains the nominee, Trump is going to win, FULL STOP. And the tidal wave of snotty “told you so” memes Biden’s supporters will flood the Internet with in the months after the election as America goes to Hell will be a testimony to the puerility of the Left — they’d rather lose and go “for shame” with two fingers than win with the one that pulls a trigger. I just wish they’d admit it! It would be so strong, in its way — almost Stalinesque! Taking pride in one’s perversity is the first step to wholeness — and I say that with no irony whatsoever.