Two weeks and a bit more after election day, and the meltdown, panic, and dismay among the progs, the establishment media, and the entertainment world continues. I’m taking an unworthy pleasure in reading reports of panic and back-biting among partisans of the Harris/Walz camp and the noisy laments of their cis-gender or bi significant others. I’m also taking a savage pleasure in reading about or viewing evidence of the dismayed realization among the managerial class in certain industries dependent economically on the choices of the general public – that conservatives and Trump voters buy shoes, too. Also movie tickets, newspaper and magazine subscriptions and other consumer goods.
Media
Stick a Fork In…
… the national establishment corporate media, for they are done. Roasted to a turn, reduced to irrelevancy, as has been predicted by Insty and others for lo these many years. I had a sense that for decades, everyone kind of expected a sudden, catastrophic loss of credibility at every significant moment – a single spectacular event, abrupt like the sinking of the Titanic. But on and on the ship of national corporate media went, seemingly undisturbed by any such disastrous encounter with an iceberg. We kept waiting for that spectacular collapse, but it never happened, and so we started to route around. Still simmering, of course, over the willful and sneaky partisanship, the slanted coverage, and the constant overt or subtle name-calling, the constant reliance on the same-old-same-old experts from the same old same old press rolodex. We took heart in fact-checking their a**ses, but remained mildly disheartened that there was never an apology or a walk-back that mattered. About the best that we could hope for might be one of those sniveling “we’re sorry you stupid deplorable garbage people were offended” non-apology apologies. Alternate media, in the form of internet blogs – which rose and fell over two decades – Substack, Reddit, Twitter/X but more of a slow accumulation of small leaks … until everything fell apart at the final blow, and there we are.
2024 Election Plus/Delta
Pluses: admittedly much the shorter list, but we did resolve a few things.
- Thanks mainly to vote shifts in California and New York, the popular vote outcome was not at variance with the Electoral College vote, and it wasn’t particularly close (over 4-1/2 million votes).
- Largely as a result, the losing side, and VP Harris herself, have indicated cooperation with formal certification and transition processes.
- Harris is gone. She’ll get a chunk of money for a book and retire to the lecture circuit.
- Walz, same, and given the likelihood that he would have been a 21st-century version of Henry Wallace, with Chinese instead of Soviet agents in his inner circle, that might be more important than getting rid of Harris.
- Taking a somewhat longer view, Trump is gone too (perhaps not a much longer view; see the final Delta item below).
- By extension, there is some chance that ’28 will not have the electorate choosing between a crook and an idiot for President.
- Whatever one may think of prediction markets, and there are arguments on both sides regarding their functionality, the biggest prediction market of all, the US stock market, was forecasting a Trump victory all year (not coincidentally, the same thing happened in 2016).
- By the way, the media will actually report negative economic news now.
- I could have put this in either category, but I’ll leave it here: your Cluebat of the Day is a reminder that Trump is as old as Biden was in ’20, and notwithstanding some of my more apprehensive items below, to expect anything much of him is a waste of time.
- Likely continuation of relatively good space-industry policy across Administrations, which should be the only thing that matters several decades from now.
Literary Life
(A break from the election, for those who can bear to tear themselves away from contemplating Tuesday’s Presidential Election, and the judicial murder of squirrels.)
I was briefly nonplussed when a question for me showed up on my message stack on Quora last week – what did I think of Sally Rooney’s not allowing her books to be translated into Hebrew or be published and distributed in Israel, and demanding that other authors insist on the same. All because of Israeli treatment of the poor, poor, pitiful Palestinians in Gaza. My initial reaction was – who the hell is Sally Rooney?
(Subsequent brief pause for a look-up and a review of sample chapters of her books on Amazon.) Oh, that’s … precious. An Irish millennial with popular literary credentials, much lauded in the correct circles, describing the landscape of a generational navel with exquisitely elaborate original prose of the sort much favored by jaded teachers of creative writing. Four books with pretty much the same plot, it would appear, noted as a significant voice of her generation – a kind of literary Lena Dunham. Also a fashionably self-proclaimed Marxist, which is weird because that type never actually chooses to live in a place currently being run under strict Marxist lines. Curious, that. More importantly for this discussion, a raving antisemite, or as I prefer to spell it in the interests of bald accuracy, a Jew-hater. As an aside, it has always struck me as a peculiarly Irish quality, to rush into a full-body embrace with any movement perceived to be an enemy of their enemy, on the somewhat questionable grounds that an enemy of your old enemy must therefore be an acceptable ally to you. (This explains how Southern Ireland remained a neutral in WWII, while radical IRA members collaborated with Nazi Germany at the time, and decades later took funding from Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi.)
A Skin Suit, Demanding Respect
You know, the most disgusting aspect of the most recent Trump hit is the fact that it appeared to have been engineered by the management and apparently the current ownership of the Atlantic. This whole skeevy story was rather obviously intended to be the October Surprise, something like the 60 Minutes-Rathergate-Bush/ANG story, calculated to catastrophically hit in time for Election Day 2004. Frankly, I never cared much for CBS 60 Minutes, after a certain point in my development as an adult with a passing interest in public matters. It was all a rather contrived and scripted business, all carefully edited in the furtherance of the “gotcha” narrative o’ the moment. After Rathergate and the faked ANG memo, though, one did rather wonder exactly how many other previous 60 Minutes exposés had been based on fraudulent and/or sketchy documents, which no outside CBS ever got a chance to examine with a gimlet eye.
But the degradation of the Atlantic from a once-respected venerable literary and cultural publication with 160+ years of solid worth … into a purveyor of partisan sleaze is something that hits me rather personally. It demonstrates Iowahawk’s oft-quoted tweet about identifying a notable and influential institution, slaughtering it … and then wearing the pelt as a skin suit, while demanding respect.