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Intermission

by
 

Tired of the Trump Show? Time to change the way you watch

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Nov 2024
 
 

It’s been a long, lonely year with so many people lying. I keep waiting for nightmares, but my dreams have all gone blank.

I’ve been here before. William Gibson described it in 2003:

“We have no future,” he wrote in his novel Pattern Recognition. “Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did…For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile…We have only risk management.”

Nowadays old political science reads like dystopian sci-fi and dystopian sci-fi reads like new political science. Or self-help, if your goal is to be less despondent. A hall of mirrors is a lonesome place when you’re trying to escape yourself.

In 2016, Donald Trump was proclaimed the president of the United States and immediately prepared to rule like an authoritarian kleptocrat. I had warned of that outcome all year long, and people called me paranoid. After the election, a book I had written four years before, The View from Flyover Country, became wildly popular. Articles about me appeared with titles like “A Cassandra in Trumpland”. People took my warnings seriously now, enough to want to kill me.

In 2024, Donald Trump was proclaimed the president of the United States and immediately prepared to rule like an authoritarian kleptocrat. I had warned of that outcome all year long, and people called me paranoid. After the election, a book I had written four years before, Hiding in Plain Sight, became wildly popular. Hundreds of social media posts calling me “Cassandra” appeared. People took my warnings seriously now, enough to want to kill me.

I’m banking that my aspiring assassins are too tired to follow through. Aren’t we all?

It is intermission in the Trump Show. Full-time programming will resume in January. The Trump Show is the only show Americans watch together, but we can never change the channel.

The remote got lost, like truth and the rule of law. The remote is buried in the couch cushions of the American subconscious. You dig under the seat but all you find is dirt and chump change. Your couch is the media economy.

You sit and surrender to the screen, remembering when the damn thing turned off. There can be no competition for the Trump Show. In a spectacle state, there is only one star — and in a mafia state, he can do anything.

Over the last four years, massive shifts in technology and culture made that much easier. Network television — the last gasp of the American pop monoculture — is no more. The partitioning of TV into streaming silos followed the dissolution of the music industry and foreshadowed the downfall of Hollywood. Cheap entertainment, one of the last unifying American pastimes, was sliced and diced away.

Days after the election, Yellowstone, the most popular TV show in America, returned after a two-year hiatus. For one night, Americans united: not to watch Yellowstone, but to bemoan their inability to find it.

Yellowstone was not streaming even if you subscribed to its streamer. It was said to be on TV, but TV no longer has TV in it. When you googled how to watch it, lying robots gave conflicting bad advice. Yellowstone, the tale of an American who refuses to leave his ranch, now resides in no man’s land.

William Gibson called it: the sky is the color of television, tuned to a dead channel — dead because it is owned by oligarchs. The oligarchs kill fictional politicians and purchase real ones. The same oligarchs who program your TV program your president and your sky, where Starlink slithers. You can’t watch television, but you can watch the sky — and the sky watches you back.

It is not a coincidence that plutocrats are attempting to own everything at once: entertainment and politics and information and transportation and nature. Digital technology is the barbed wire binding their corral, inside which Americans are told to graze on less and less.

Shared American entertainment had to be annihilated, because it fuels comradery and imagination. You might bond with a stranger whose politics don’t align with yours, and the overlords cannot have that.

Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook had to be drastically restructured. You may have a serendipitous exchange, maybe lend an offer of support, and that can’t happen either.

Journalism, archives, accurate search results — those had to go too. You may want to really do your own research — the much-derided concept that is and always was necessary — but it is trickier than ever before.

* * *

I had a mantra in 2016 when people would ask how I knew so much about Trump’s dark ambitions.

“It’s in the public domain!” I would exclaim.

I was not predicting the future so much as I was rehashing the past. I researched public figures and ventured that they would continue the same corrupt activity they had been carrying out for the past half century.

I assumed that institutions would allow it, because those institutions would have never allowed Trump and his criminal cohort near federal power unless they were already rotted.

This was common sense: conclusions verifiable through public documentation of crimes.

But now that documentation is gone. Print archives, digital-native sites, even the time-stamped Twitter accounts that tracked Trump’s first term: much of it is erased or locked behind prohibitively expensive paywalls.

The oligarchs purchased history — and then they rewrote it.

Free information is still out there. It is on YouTube channels that proclaim the glory of the incoming administration, on TikTok influencer informercials, on partisan podcasts hosted by hired hands. I don’t trust them, for obvious reasons. I don’t trust the Democratic versions either, the ones that intone Trump is a fascist and then ask for your money instead of your refusal, like a cuckoo clock endlessly striking thirteen.

I don’t want to be influenced: I want to be informed.

But it’s hard. As I wrote in my book They Knew, there is no longer a public sphere, but there is a public flat earth.

* * *

Since 2020, we lost the shared experiences of TV, movies, and social media. Unfortunately, we did not lose the shared experience of Donald Trump — with the consequence that there is but one national pastime left, politics. There was one national story, and few told it true. As a result, folks began to tune out.

News outlets like MSNBC and CNN are baffled that their ratings have plummeted since the election. Trump used to run like a gravy train with biscuit wheels, fattening network coffers. Those days are over.

For cable news heads failed to understand something essential about their audience: they actually care about their country.

During the Biden Placeholder Presidency, networks created a Trump legal soap opera that sucked in both the well-meaning and witless. In their narrative, Trump’s imprisonment was always imminent yet mysteriously derailed each time. These plot twists were framed as “luck” instead of “corruption”. The Trump legal soap opera ignored a more compelling backstory — the mafia, Jeffrey Epstein, what it means when the DOJ abides sedition — in favor of false saviors and bullshit legalese.

Some folks really believed it. They thought the pundits were bad guessers, not paid liars. They thought the DOJ worked to protect the people and not to protect its own secrets — which requires that they protect Trump, an operative privy to their corruption. They trusted they were getting real news instead of watching a career criminal run out the clock while networks profited off their fear.

And they wonder why ratings are down.

* * *

I am writing about intermission because I am still getting my bearings. The second Trump administration will proceed much like the first, in the sense that superficial changes will happen very fast while the broader crisis of corruption — a transnational crisis — will quietly deepen and become more dangerous.

Reporters will waste time on appointments that never occur, on threats never carried out, because Trump is the president, and they feel they have to cover whatever he says. Actual threats will be carried out, but because those threats reflect his mafia and espionage roots, they will be ignored. Crimes will be covered up with scandals.

The deadliest situations will be the most difficult to assess — not only because of a paucity of information, but because of new restrictions on free speech.

Americans may move even further from political participation, as often happens in autocratic states. Many have already done so due to the terror and disappointment of the past four years. A pandemic that wouldn’t end, skyrocketing inflation, genocidal wars, unpunished state crimes, unaddressed national trauma, the end of rituals — even something as simple as watching television — that held our country together.

The American psyche is worn from paying so much attention and learning so little truth in return.

Americans are battered by hypocrisy: Trump is a fascist, Dems say, yet they look forward to accommodating him? This is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, the CDC says, yet both the unvaccinated and vaccinated keep getting infected? “Cancel culture” is a scourge, the GOP says, yet the right-wingers bitching about it are the ones restricting speech and violating privacy? The economy is “booming”, Dems say, but everything is less affordable — and bank statements that prove it are dismissed as “vibes”? And now that the GOP is in power, they’re going to rehash that lie too?

It is intermission and the first half of the show sucked. But intermission is a time to take stock of why it sucked and figure out how to handle the rest.

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The End of Days Inn

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What Trump’s team wants to do to America, and how to fight it.

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Nov 2024
 
 

I am in northern Ohio, looking down at the End of Days Inn.

The parking lot cracks like an outstretched palm no fortune teller needs to read because its future is too obvious. The cracks spread to the dead mall next door, a vacant behemoth with CLOSED and THANK YOU written on an old marquee. I wonder about the person who placed those letters there one by one. That final demarcation, the words you write when you cannot say goodbye.

At the condemned Days Inn, the “D” was removed from all signs. As if folks needed a clue that the old days are gone, as if weeds winding to empty windows weren’t enough.

“AY’S INN”, my children read, laughing.

“This is what America looked like when you were one year old, after the economy collapsed,” I said to my daughter, born in 2007.

“And this is what America looked like when you were one year old, when they said we’d recovered,” I said to my son, born in 2011. “But they were lying.”

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Totem and Taboo

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An interview on politics, music, journalism, tech, and our not-so-inevitable doom.

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Oct 21
 

The oldest store on Route 66 in Missouri closed last month. I don’t remember the last time I visited. But I will always remember that it was the last time.

The Totem Pole Trading Post opened in 1933 and moved down the Mother Road until landing in the small city of Rolla. I was in Rolla to see a geology museum rumored to have minerals shaped like a Missouri breakfast — bacon and biscuits — but it was closed. I went to the Trading Post because it had always been there, and would always be there, and found that it was there no more.

*          *          *

The door was unlocked but the lights were off.

“Are you open?” I asked, confused, looking at a sign with a buxom redhead cooing “Y’ALL COME IN NOW” and the cavernous empty space behind her.

An old man sat on a bench, packing items in a box. The Trading Post is a junk store, or in local parlance, an “antique mall.” I am always buying crap — excuse me, treasures — at antique malls. The Trading Post was king of the road.

“We’re closed.”

“Today?”

“Forever,” the owner said. He sounded like he didn’t want to talk about it. “If you’d come earlier, you could have gone to the retirement sale. Now we’re done. Two generations. My father’s store.”

“I used to come here,” I said. “Not looking for anything in particular, just looking for a place to look around.”

The man looked bored. Unlike his wares, I was interchangeable.

“Not much to look at now,” he said, and motioned to the door, where I exited.

I stood behind rusted gas pumps and gazed skyward at billboards advertising moonshine and moccasins. Like other Route 66 landmarks, The Totem Pole Trading Post borrowed Native American iconography as the road tore apart indigenous lands. *

It might have felt like poetic justice that I’d found it shuttered on Indigenous People’s Day. But it didn’t. It felt like wandering into a wound.

The Americana icon had collapsed so gradually, no one noticed. Maybe no one was left to spread the word. Maybe I’d have known if one local newspaper, The Riverfront Times, hadn’t replaced its staff with AI robots and the other, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, hadn’t downsized into a shadow of its former self.

Antique malls sell serendipity and safeguard memory. There’s no organization, no order, no internet — just life after death. Bound books and free spirits: a return to the past, where possibility lives now that the future has been stolen.

I wander halls of history, radio waves tuned to a dead station. Sometimes a ghost plants an object before me, so I know what to do next. These secondhand store specters have been far more useful than my PhD in providing guidance.

I’m not joking. In 2021, I was in Prairie Archives, a sprawling used bookstore in Springfield, Illinois, browsing in a low-key panic. I had a book to write and no clue what to say. I was sick to death of Trump, sick to death of death, and needed a change.

“I’m going to cover my eyes,” I told my kids. “You two walk me through the store and put me in front of a shelf. Whatever page of the book I open, that’s what my next book is about.”

They did as they were told, guiding me through the maze of aisles and spinning me around for good measure. Eyes closed, I grabbed a book, opened it, and exclaimed “Oh, fuck!”

It was a Hunter S. Thompson essay collection from the 1980s. The page I landed on was about Donald Trump and Iran-Contra villain Adnan Khashoggi.

I bought it and spent the rest of 2021 writing They Knew, a book about real conspiracies from the 1980s and how they are marketed as “conspiracy theories” so facts are never found and justice is never served.

Missouri has no shortage of junk stores. But I wonder what I would have found at the Trading Post if I’d gotten there in time. Maybe something to tell me what to do, because I sure as hell don’t know when my country is dying the same way. No fanfare, no pinpoint. Slow and steady surrender, bit by bit — murder disguised as death.

Murdering the United States until it is so unrecognizable, even the mementos are gone.

 

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The Eternal Election Season

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Make It Stop, Already!

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Oct 8
 

“Jesus Is Coming,” the sign said. “Hopefully Before the Election.”

The sign was under two stained glass windows in an old brick church in central Missouri. I was driving back from visiting a spring said to possess magical healing powers, so I was in a believing kind of mood.

Believing in a miracle: Election Season will end.

We have been in Election Season for a decade. The season has no predictable pattern other than its steady series of disasters. It is like climate change, with each catastrophe first denied and then weaponized. We know the roots of the crises, but no one is held accountable. We know how to mitigate the damage, but the powerful insist it is ordinary people’s fault.

“You should have voted the hurricane out,” they scold. “It’s your job to evacuate before fascism arrives!”

Maybe I got that backwards. It’s hard to keep messaging straight in Election Season, when authority holds no sincerity and time loses all meaning.

There are no sweet summers or crisp autumns or cool winters or lush springs in Election Season. There is only the memory of a bygone era when things changed, instead of dragging on and on.

Once there were four seasons and now there is one: climate chaos. Once there were rotating four-year presidencies and now there is one endless campaign, a pale horse race whose rider is Death, and Hell follows him. Hell follows you too, on social media, and demands you follow Hell back. Hell follows your phone and your car and your right to privacy and asks you for a donation.

I don’t know whether the small-town church was rooting for the end of the world or a better one. I don’t know for whom its congregants vote, and I don’t care. I arrived pre-converted. That sign preached to the choir in my mind.

Jesus, make it stop already! the voices cry. Make Election Season end!

So sure, I’ll take the literal version. Come on down, Jesus. Get ready for folks to bitch you out too.

*          *          *

The church is in Piedmont, the UFO Capital of Missouri. Piedmont’s status was made official in a decree from the state legislature in 2023. It was the only useful thing they did all year.

I am of the mind that the Missouri legislature should confine themselves to such activities, like proclaiming a dog to have psychic powers or designating Provel the state cheese, since the rest of their actions rape our rights.

In 2022, the Republican state legislature signed away my bodily autonomy. That means if extraterrestrials return to Piedmont and abduct me, they will only get a semi-person, by legal standards. I don’t know if aliens care about legal standards, but I don’t think the government does either.

Piedmont has embraced its UFO Capital identity. In 1973, residents spotted strange objects in the sky. In 2023, Piedmont commemorated the 50th anniversary by building a park decorated with plastic extraterrestrials and a pagoda shaped like a flying saucer.

Businesses flaunt the UFO theme. At the gun shop, an alien grins in camouflage. On a tavern mural, a little green man drinks beer. Pet stores and garbage companies add flying saucer decals to their signs for no reason. Life is just more interesting that way.

There was not a soul to be seen in Piedmont the day my husband and I arrived. Maybe they got lucky, and the UFOs took them. Maybe Jesus came early.

Maybe we were too late.

*          *          *

Technically there is less than a month until Election Season ends, but that’s a lie. It will stretch beyond November 5 because there is no longer a firm winner, only contestation and violence and profiteering, swirling like storm water in a sewer.

The 2024 campaign discourse was a rerun in which pundits gave the same warnings about Trump’s autocratic aims that I gave in 2016 but ignored that he has since held office and carried many of them out, including sedition, yet was unpunished and allowed to run for president again.

That is the real story of the 2024 election: sanctioned illegality. Impunity countenanced by all sides. No one in power takes the sovereignty of the US seriously and now they don’t even bother pretending.

My worry about the election is surpassed by my worry about war with Iran. War will likely happen regardless of whether Harris or Trump wins, even though Americans don’t want it. The will of the people is no longer an important part of US elections.

The Trump administration was packed with Iran hawks like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner. Harris touts her alliances with the Cheney family and other Bush neocons along with her desire to have the world’s “most lethal” military (not the smartest, not the bravest, only the most lethal). Both candidates have vowed unconditional support for Israel’s violence, which they call “self-defense.”

Whatever words of condemnation Democrats occasionally have for the country that massacred at least 16,000 Palestinian children are negated by the billions in military aid they sent the murderers. There are no red lines other than blood. The invasion that began in Gaza under the pretense of “rescuing hostages” has expanded to Lebanon.

But Iran is the prize. It has been since I was born.

*          *          *

Much as I can remember no time before Trump, even though he’s a career criminal who should have been banished decades ago, I can remember no time before US officials sought war with Iran. The warmongering ebbed and flowed, back when there used to be seasons.

But now it is everywhere, all the time.

I am terrified of this war. I have dreaded it my whole life, like the inverse of war criminals like Elliott Abrams — employed by the Reagan and Bush and Trump and Biden administrations — who spent 45 years salivating over it. He is in a cohort of bloodlust ready to realize their nightmare dream. An Iran War fits Armageddon fantasies as well as American revenge plots guised as realpolitik.

Do not be fooled by claims of self-defense: the only politics at play are necropolitics.

In Iran there is a site called Naqsh-e Rostam. It was the necropolis of the Achaemenid dynasty from around 500 BC. A necropolis is a city of the dead, comprised of elaborate tombs. Naqsh-e Rostam is one of many historic marvels in Iran, a country full of ancient ruins of diverse empires and feats of Islamic architecture.

I worry it will be destroyed, like the ancient churches and mosques of Gaza. I worry Iran will become a necrostate.

I worry most that Iranian civilians, people who did nothing wrong, will be murdered, like the Palestinians. I worry because when Israel is doing the murdering, the US does nothing but abet and obey — and now may join full throttle.

During my junior year of college, I studied in Vienna. I visited the neighboring former Warsaw Pact countries, amazed that what would have been an impossible trip for my parents’ generation was easy for mine. It was 1998. The USSR had collapsed, South Africa was free of apartheid, 9/11 had not yet happened. Pundits proclaimed world peace was inevitable, and people believed them.

I imagined having a son who could study in a free Iran, like I was doing in countries once labeled off-limits. I pictured the two of us as tourists in Naqsh-e Rostam. I would explain that when I was his age, Americans visiting Iran for fun was unthinkable, and we would laugh in relief at how times had changed.

Now I have a teenage son, and I worry his generation will go to Iran — for war. The 1990s dream of peace died long ago. My worry is for the people who die with it.

*          *          *

In the Ozarks, I kept seeing four horses. They were wild, so I consoled myself that this was not Revelation. We still have time before the riders arrive, I thought, dipping my hands in the magical springs. We have a month of anxiety before bedlam begins.

A hurricane is bearing down as I write this, and I only want it to stop. A war is being plotted, and I only want it to stop. A genocide is raging, and I want it to stop so badly that my heart pounds until it breaks.

But none of it stops.

Israel and its partners never intended to stop at Gaza. Nor do they intend to stop at Lebanon or even at Iran. I watch their maneuvers not only in sympathy for the victims of those lands, but for the selfish reason of wanting to protect my country, my sacred sites, my son.

In Missouri, Election Season coincides with hunting season. It used to be limited to the months between the vote and the inauguration. But when Election Season never ends, hunting season doesn’t either — not when people are the prey.

So yes, Jesus, come on down, the price is right, and I know because I’ve paid it. You too, UFOs. I will meet you in Piedmont or wherever you want to go. I know an underwater boulder that flips canoes, but we can wink and call it a baptism. I know a field so remote you can see the Milky Way under the moon, but no one will notice a flying saucer, not in this crazy weather.

Abduct me before Election Day, UFOs, for I’ll take living in light years over enduring seasons of sorrow. Raise me up, Jesus, for Judgement Day is here, only I’m doing the judging and no one cares. I hold the perpetrators in contempt — inherent contempt, like the kind the courts have that they never impose on criminals with money — but they keep criming our lives away.

You can’t vote out Election Season.

I’m left doing what candidates do: thinking about running. Running away, running out of time. But also running to time, to where the clocks don’t strike thirteen, to where there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the sadistic philosophy of my government. Where there is more earth, more air, more chances.

I miss the seasons, and how they would change.

*          *          *

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