Shoddy People

The redemption of disgrace.

(Photo: Getty)

America has been successfully invaded by an army of shoddiness. Our bones are gnawed upon by lazy rats. Even our pervasive sense of menace is shoddy in its approach.

The government has organized itself to please the King of Shoddiness, a man wholly concerned with spectacle to the exclusion of substance. The announcement of a program or action is all-important; what happens after that, no one cares. We watch federalism reshaped into the edifice of a casino, a swooping artifice of neon hung on a flimsy frame, fronting a blocky and neglected interior whose employees are rapidly losing interest in the customers.

The Secretary of Defense is a drunk newsman whose ideas for history’s most powerful military extend only to “increase your max bench,” and tail off from there. Likewise the FBI director, whose bug-eyed macho posturing evinces the desperation of a man trying not to think about the contempt in which his underlings hold him. The Attorney General’s primary qualification is the willingness to make loud declarative statements that are provably false while maintaining the serious visage of a television anchor. The Secretary of Homeland Security spends her time donning tactical gear and tossing around her inhuman ringlets while making videos for those with a Nazi propaganda kink. The Director of National Intelligence, a self-promoting political chameleon, has achieved the neat trick of being both incompetent and frozen out of power by other incompetents at the same time.

The Transportation Secretary, a former reality star whose official White House biography boasts that “Rachel and Sean are America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple,” is not even close to being the cabinet’s least qualified member. The Education Secretary and head of the Small Business Administration are just rich women seemingly assigned their positions at random. Others have, if such a thing is possible, negative qualifications. The Secretary of State landed his job by proving himself willing to adopt a posture of submission towards the man that he had tried and failed to cast as less manly than himself during the 2016 primaries. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is a certified loon, a classic dissolute child of privilege swirling into ever deeper cesspools of fringery, a former environmentalist transformed into a pesticide-boosting anti-vaxer, a man with no emotional or mental grounding in anything other than his determination to fulfill his destiny of poisoning the family name forever.

The Labor Secretary and her husband are both under investigation for different sex-related violations, simultaneously. The Vice President combs expensive lotions into his beard and practices taking the oath of office in his mirror at night, tears running down his lonesome face, dreaming of being able to hurt enough people to prove to his mother that he is worth something.

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If these people were concerned with carrying out a coherent ideological mission they would be in trouble. They are not. Their small personal ambitions to have official titles and taxpayer-funded private planes occupy their small store of energy. For these baubles and modest perks they are happy to perform a gruesome pantomime of deference to a tacky know-nothing whose plastic skin droops further towards the gutter with each passing day. Embarrassing, one might think; but the smallness of all involved serves them well. They are too shallow to be filled with shame, overflowing as they already are with the yokel dazzle of a Price Is Right contestant who has just heard their name called, at last.

Propping up this leaky and flatulent balloon of misplaced careerism is an even more debased substructure of boosters who find satisfaction in the firm placement of a brown loafer on their collective carotid artery. A parallel world of media, which cultivates the appearance of news with none of its reality, exists to help prompt these political actors when they forget their lines. Awkward young white men in tight blue suits, their minds marinated for years in the virtual fascism of internet marginalia, find rewarding jobs as twitchy boosters of real world fascism for imaginary audiences of pale and insecure peers who never had anyone to urge them to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The Non-News propaganda world has slippery quality of an MC Escher staircase to nowhere; with no attachment to anything but lols and lies, it can never be pinned down by any arrangement of facts, no matter how painstaking. Not even the greatest chess grandmaster can beat a child who doesn’t care how the pieces move anyhow. It thrives equally on your outraged attention, which it counts as a boost to its reach, and on your inattention, which leaves it alone to build its fantasies in peace. It is a cancer that grows whether you think about it or not, placid in its malignancy, driving you deeper into despair.

Saddest of all is “the base.” Base in class, base in emotion, regarded by those it supports in the same way they would regard any pedestal: A thing to stand upon in order to boost themselves, and then to promptly forget. The paltriness of this entire movement’s gestures at any version of substantial truth mean that it is impossible to be a genuine supporter without having an overwhelming amount of ignorance, delusion, or both. Bolstering the ranks of the purely deluded are the movement’s cynical supporters, aware of its bullshit but willing to overlook it due to a traumatic belief that nothing really matters. This layer of unhappy and unsuccessful con men lurk about in grudging respect for the more successful con men they see in charge. These are the angry small business owners with violent daydreams, the wheedling would-be hustlers trying to take advantage of modest and clumsy bribes, the Mar-a-Lago ghosts who haunt suburban Fort Lauderdale McMansions, clutching cheaply framed photos of themselves posing with the president in a holiday party receiving line. This coalition of the doomed lines the road to perdition, grasping for any crumbs that might fall to them, forsaking all earthly pleasures other than hypnotism.

What defines our seedy era is not its dishonesty, which has always been the government’s baseline orientation, but rather the pointed lack of concern for covering that dishonesty up. The well-crafted lies have given way to careless ones. The conspiracies all fester in plain sight. The payoffs and the quid pro quos are conducted casually. The motivation to appear more just than they really are has left the ruling class. In its place is an odd sort of affinity for tawdriness, a newfound respect for disgrace. If everyone abandons all pretense at telling the truth all at once, well, the pressure’s off, isn’t it? It feels easier than ever before to sink into a warm bath of mediocrity. Acceptance of permanent decline is the only item on the menu. You might as well grab what you can before it all collapses. We are a nation commanded by the sort of people who would have stolen something off of a coworker’s desk before evacuating their World Trade Center office on 9/11.

So what? It’s all falling down anyhow. All your facts and logic can’t make it matter. It only matters if you think it does.

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Also

• Related reading: A Television Show Called the USA; Now We Will Get What We Asked For; The Land of Greater Fools; Getting Yelled at by Dumbasses.

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