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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.

*          *          *

Thank you for reading! This newsletter is funded entirely by voluntary paying subscribers. That allows me to keep it open to everyone, and I don’t paywall in times of peril. This newsletter is also how I feed my family. If you like what I do, please subscribe!

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Red, White and Blue Screen of Death

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By Sarah Kendzior | Sept 18
 

Six days after one presidential candidate claimed he got shot and two days before the other candidate dropped out, the world ended, and everyone forgot.

I was on the road between St. Louis and Appleton, Wisconsin when the cyber breakdown hit. Appleton is the hometown of Harry Houdini, the magician who could escape anything: straitjackets, coffins, cops. During World War I, he registered as “Harry Handcuff Houdini” (real name Erik Weisz) and taught US soldiers how to elude captivity. He outran the hell of the world by devising his own hell and surmounting it.

It is a seven-hour drive from St. Louis to Appleton, mostly through Illinois — a jaunt by Midwest road trip standards. It is the rare drive that is almost impossible to make interesting, even though I am the easiest rider, dazzled by a sixteen-hour haul through eastern Colorado and Kansas culminating in a giant ball of twine.

The highlight of I-55 is a vitriolic soybean field describing your impending death in a series of rhyming signs. I like the field because it gives me novel ways to imagine my demise.

I’ve written two books about the nexus of government and organized crime. As a result, I live under a double bill of apprehension: They’ll catch me too early, and you’ll catch on too late.

It was a countdown summer, so I headed to Houdini Town to dream my death threats away.

But then it happened: the red, white and blue screen of death shut America down.

And for a few days, I wondered — was I free? Were we all? Or was this a new trap, the end of a game we never agreed to play?

*          *          *

We were in a truck stop in rural Illinois when we got word. There was no gas, the proprietor explained. Or rather, there was, but no way to get it into the car. Their machines ran on credit cards, and credit cards were dead.

A long line of people stood at the ATM, looking worried. Others looked vindicated.

Others felt vindicated but hid it, so that they didn’t look like an asshole. I know, because I checked my expression in the mirror multiple times. I bought sunglasses to block the knowing gleam in my eye. I paid with the cash I always carried.

Earlier that July morning, the largest cyber breakdown in history ground much of the world to a halt. American cybersecurity company Crowdstrike had installed a faulty update that caused over eight million systems using Microsoft to crash.

For one day, the dangers of digital dependency were laid plain.

In the US, thousands of flights were grounded, leaving the sky as blue and clear as September 12, 2001. Hospitals canceled surgeries. TV channels vanished mid-air. Companies sent employees home, unable to use their software or open their office doors. Supermarkets closed, as did chain stores relying on apps, until they could remember how to function like it was 1999.  

The cyber breakdown was unevenly distributed. In some places — those not relying on the tainted software — life went on as usual. Not so for the regions of our route.

But we were prepared, because most of the Midwest is not part of the cashless world creeping into the coasts.

In March, I went West and was shocked by my inability to pay with cash and access basic services without apps. I had a traumatic experience attempting to order Dunkin’ Donuts from a peopleless purveyor near Pahrump, Nevada.

I wanted to raise Pahrump hometown hero Art Bell from the dead and tell him he was right. Humans had been replaced with robots and a faceless tech cabal monitored my glaze consumption.

“Traumatic” is perhaps overstating my Dystopia Donuts quest. But there is an uncanniness to having a site of happy childhood memories overtaken by your most absurd childhood fears. Et tu, Dunkaccino? Then fall!

There are folks who, if they could go back in time and give their younger selves advice, would tell them to buy Apple stock. And there are others who would tell their younger self to burn down Silicon Valley before it burns down the world.

*          *          *

I don’t buy a lot of stuff because I don’t have a lot of money. I don’t use a lot of technology because I don’t like it. I don’t like it because the people who control it are bad.

They ruined every good innovation of my life. They encouraged us to destroy the analog world, and after we did, they replaced it with bullshit and lies.

Google, once a wellspring of information sorted by chronology and preserved in caches, is an unusable cesspool. Photos taken by real people of real places have been replaced with AI fakes. Niche online hobby forums were sold to corporations and became unusable due to spam and bots.

The early excitement of reconnecting with old friends on Facebook was replaced by the relentless push of automatons. You reach out for connection, but the algorithm ties your hands. You follow friends but are instead shown influencers. Where did everyone go, and who are these made-up strangers in their place?

On YouTube and Tik-Tok, people transform their lives into infomercials, often to make cash in the gig economy that politicians deny exists. On Twitter, people become indistinguishable from the bots and paid operatives of political groups. Mobs spout vicious mantras in service of a cause or candidate that onlookers are told merits the cruelty inflicted on the last real human beings.

There is no safe place to talk to a friend. Privacy has been obliterated. Anyone can go viral, and virality, true to its early internet coinage, is a disease. You go viral in pieces, devoid of context, like a chalk outline at a crime scene. Your crime was existing.

Humanity has been stripped from the virtual world: deliberately, maliciously. The goal is to make humans less human. Less imaginative and more callous; more desperate and less kind. Less demanding of authority, but ruthlessly demanding of ordinary people who hold neither leverage nor power.

What you have left is your soul and they demand its surrender. They are molding the ideal fascist objects. I would say fascist subjects, but you are not granted even that level of autonomy. It is a mindset that they crave: gullible and groundless.

You are a pixel in the propaganda. You would be a cog in the machine but that’s too concrete. You cannot see the machinery, because then you would learn how it runs.

Cults thrive and truth drowns.

There is no way to opt out and still make a living — I’m here, aren’t I? This is where my words are published, but I don’t know if it’s where they will be preserved.

I watch site after site go down — decades of real-time news coverage erased. I watch movies and TV shows and music rendered abruptly inaccessible. History is a menace and imagination is a threat. Pop culture combines the two, creating a communal shorthand that defies political boundaries.

Pop culture is now considered dangerous. Billionaires want it destroyed even though it’s profitable. It’s not worth it to them anymore. It’s the wrong power, in the wrong hands — yours.

Your memories are the tech lords’ enemies. They seek to scramble history, erasing touchstones until you no longer recognize your world. They monitor you as an object but discard you as a person. You attract scrutiny, but not care.

So when the machine went down, I felt apprehension — but also, release.

*          *          *

By the time we stopped for lunch in Rockford, the cyber breakdown had spread. I got panicked texts from friends trying to fly to see ailing relatives, worried they wouldn’t make it.

I felt bad about my initial Luddite smugness. Life is hard enough, in a way often unspoken, without yet another shock.

We ate lunch at Johnny Pamcakes, a restaurant founded by a couple named John and Pam. We ordered enormous plates of pancakes — excuse me, pamcakes. The window of our booth looked out at desolate strip malls. But the homespun diner was humming, unaffected by the cyber breakdown.

It’s hard to break the Midwest because we’ve been broke so much already.

But at our hotel in Appleton, our apocalypse dodge came to a halt. The rooms used electronic key cards, which meant they did not open. If we wanted to enter, we had to find an employee to unlock our room with the one working key.

I asked a hotel worker if he had any clue when the cyber breakdown would end, and he said, “No idea, it could last forever.” I had asked workers this all day, and they became more forthright over time.

At an early stop at a chain store, employees were afraid to tell me what happened. Apparently corporate had instructed them to pretend all was normal. When I told them it was on the news, they relaxed and said “Yeah, we’re fucked, you should try somewhere else.”

At a later stop, workers had posted “cash only” signs and had tips for panicked travelers who only carried cards. Workers were resourceful and strangers gave cash to parents with small children so they could buy snacks.

What the day showed was the necessity of people instead of automation. People with ingenuity and compassion. People who could improvise in a way machines never could. People who kept the world together as technology tore it apart.

People who should be earning a hell of a lot more than they are.

We thanked the hotel staff for their help in tough times and left for our destination. We were in town to see my daughter perform in a string quartet. That night I watched her play a centuries-old song with such passion it moved me to tears. I thought of the generations of people who heard musicians play this song and who responded with similar reverence. How this song had predated and outlasted every technological change of the past two hundred years.

How this, in the end, was what mattered.

*          *          *

The next day we went to the Harry Houdini Museum, located in a former Masonic temple. The museum is full of traps and tests. Can you balance, can you lift, can you break free? I tried on a straitjacket and immediately cried to my husband to remove it, because the feeling it evoked was terrifying.

And familiar.

When Houdini wasn’t performing stunts, he was telling the world it was full of shit. His popularity coincided with the rise of “spiritualists” that took advantage of people’s sorrow to sell them lies. Frauds thrived in the 1920s in the aftermath of World War I and the Spanish Flu and the nationwide grief that had nowhere to go.

Houdini debunked the swindlers and fakes. Magic was real, he said. The world was full of it. But it was not supernatural. Magic came from the uniqueness of the human mind and its refusal to accept limitations. Theatrics are different than lies. Creativity is different from a con.

Houdini had an arrogant streak, and after daring an audience member to strike him repeatedly in the stomach, he developed peritonitis. He died on Halloween 1926. Born in 1874, Houdini witnessed empires crumble and pandemics spread and new technologies transform society faster than it could handle.

No wonder he felt satisfaction in having his own bag of tricks. No wonder he hated fakes with such ferocity. When there’s this much real pain in the world, you need a real balm to heal it. One created by man, not mimicked by machine, or exploited by imposters.

The next day we drove home. The cyber breakdown was gradually being remedied, but no one cared. As we passed the vitriolic soybean field, Biden dropped out. After the brief freedom of shock, the worst of the internet gathered, building new digital cults and cages.

And here I sit in invisible chains, dreaming of escape once more.

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

QAnon Didn’t Just Spring Forth From the Void — It’s the Latest From a Familiar Movement

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If you’ve been online at any point in the past year—if not, welcome!—your aimless clicks and doomscrolling may have brought you glimpses of the “world” of QAnon: the conspiracy theory that argues that US President Donald Trump is in the midst of a secret war against sex-trafficking, Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Its increasing prominence and power, especially as a worldview dissociated from fact, have compelled many an analyst, journalist, and pundit to festoon their analyses of QAnon in religious language. According to this speculative genre, QAnon is a new American religion, or even a cult. It’s an abusive cabal unlike any other form of belief and practice preceding it.

Enter religious studies scholar Megan Goodwin, co-host of Keeping it 101: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion, and author of Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions. Fluent in the place of religion in the media, and with a recent book on the religio-political history and power of sex abuse allegations, Goodwin contends that QAnon is far from unprecedented. Goodwin traces the group’s prominence and lineage, as well as its zealous determination to “save the children,” to the rise of the New Christian Right and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.

Calling QAnon a cult or religion marks the movement for its alterity and supposed irrationality, and hides how its practices are born of American social and political traditions. Its apocalypticism and accusations of pedophilia are but a contemporary symptom of a religiously-inflected political strategy older than Christianity itself. Historical precedents further suggest that the state lacks the tools and incentives to curb the group’s rise.

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