“Q”

The Eternal Election Season

by
 

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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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.

Surprise Lillies, BK, “The Bear” and Kamala

by
By Sarah Kendzior

I was twenty miles outside of Normal when I heard the news.

We were at a Burger King in central Illinois. In the corner of the Burger King was a large, inflatable bear. He was decked out in a red, white, and blue ensemble with a bow tie and a top hat. He held a faded American flag in one hand and a sign saying GOD BLESS AMERICA in the other.

A crown rested on his head. It was upside down.

That is what I was looking at when I heard that Joe Biden was leaving the presidential race.

 

The bear grinned blankly. A pile of new crowns lay on the windowsill, displacing the gold standard. The new crowns said “FIERY” to advertise the new menu, which consists of Burger King putting hot spices in everything, even Sprite. Why not? There’s no way it will be the worst or weirdest decision of the year.

2024 is a good time to get away with things. And get away from things, too.

I ordered the same meal I’ve been getting since 1984: the Original Chicken Sandwich with no mayo. This is the greatest sandwich of all time. The struggle to match the glory of this sandwich is what The Bear should have been about. Now I’m not saying to go get yourself pregnant, but I will say that eating the Burger King Original Chicken while with child was the most spectacular culinary experience of my life.

This is probably not what you wanted to read about, but bear with me; inflatable inverted crown Burger King bear with me.

It takes time to dissect a week that feels like a decade-long fever dream.

I’m glad the sandwich that I discovered when I was five tastes the same. I’m glad to be rid of a politician who had been serving as Senator for a decade by the time I was five, because his horrid political instincts stayed the same too. I long to be rid of the other candidate, a career criminal who should have been serving time since I was five, because he got worse, and the world got worse with him.

We left Burger King and hit the highway. NORMAL, a sign declared, beckoning us to the offramp to Normal, Illinois. I was tempted to visit so I could tell people what Normal feels like. I unwrapped my sandwich and thought about the election.

One down, one to go, I thought, and took a bite.

*          *          *

You may think this is not very respectful of Joe Biden. But Joe Biden has not been very respectful to the Palestinians whose slaughter he funded; or the covid victims whose plight he minimized (including, now, himself); or the Americans he betrayed when he countenanced sedition; or the Black Americans who suffered under the racist laws he passed for decades before repositioning himself behind Barack Obama and hoping everyone would forget.

I’m tired of being told to rehabilitate evil acts when politically expedient. I’d rather the bad men leave and let us enjoy what is left of our lives in the wreckage they created.

I had long reconciled myself to finding the best in a bad situation, with that situation being America. But something is changing.

There is a new energy, one that took me a minute to recognize: the Future. It had been a while since I’d seen it. The Future was in absentia and now it has returned, grinning like a ghost.

Am I really seeing it? Or is it another fake-out future, like those Halloween pop-up shops that appear in the fall and make you forget the empty room rotting the rest of the year? The classic American haunt: a tease, then abandonment.

Kamala Harris is not the future, but the energy surrounding her is. This is the raw energy of possibility, of certain doom being stripped away and discarded dreams returning.

One week before Biden dropped out, a photo of Trump emerging from an assassination attempt was deemed so “iconic” that his win was proclaimed certain. Now people have either forgotten it happened or are waiting to get their questions about the Secret Service, the shooter, and Trump’s minor injury answered.

Suddenly, Trump seems like the D-grade mobster he always was, only now everyone can see the obvious. Suddenly, Kamala Harris’s offbeat behavior feels like a balm. If you’ve got two weirdos, and one is a raving sociopath, and the other is a kooky lady who laughs a lot, the kooky lady comes off as endearing instead of “not fit for leadership”, which was the old narrative of Harris. Trump is hateful; Harris is human.

Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee. I’m reserving judgment on what that means until she has policy plans, a list of administrative hires — and, most importantly, a commitment to make right what the Biden administration did wrong.

There is no shame in humility. There is nothing wrong with distancing yourself from one of the most unpopular presidents in US history, particularly when he earned the title through mass death and mass murder.

There is no shame in apologies, but actions speak louder than words, and action is desperately needed. Harris has an opportunity to end some of Biden’s most destructive policies, including his support of Israel’s genocide of children.

If you think this is unlikely, particularly from a presidential nominee who took as much AIPAC money as Harris, you are probably right, but look at last week:

An assassin targeted Trump. Biden got covid again. The biggest cyber breakdown in history took down the world, and the world came back. The GOP convention happened, and no one cared, even with the fascist chants and the fake ear bandages, because there was too much else going on. Biden dropped out. Harris dropped in.

I don’t know what is going to happen next, and for once it feels good.

As I write this, Harris has been the presumptive nominee for 48 hours. The energy from voters in those 48 hours is more than the rest of the year combined. People are excited. They are making plans. Not wistful daydreams — plans!

One of their plans should be how to combat Project 2025, because the GOP is not going to abandon their autocratic agenda if Harris wins. Another should be how to fend off The Coup: Part Two, because the Biden administration did not punish the key perpetrators of the January 6 plot, thus making a second coup attempt both possible and likely. And because Merrick Garland let Trump run out the clock, Trump was given official immunity from prosecution by the Supreme Court.

We are in for hard times. But there is a sense of a burden being lifted, of options emerging. I don’t know how long this feeling will last.

Many Americans have spent the past eight years joining political cults: a common phenomenon in flawed democracies turning into autocracies. Americans must reject cult logic if we want our nation to survive.

This includes not building a political cult around Kamala Harris. A campaign is different than a cult. It is one thing to back a candidate and cheer them on. It is another to submit to a mindset of fear, deference, and servitude; to browbeat fellow voters offering constructive criticism; and to proclaim a politician’s every puzzling move either an Act of God or evidence of a Secret Noble Plan.

Americans created cults around Trump, Mueller, Garland, Pelosi, Garland, Fauci, “Q”, and Biden, among others, to the detriment of our nation’s health and to the benefit of grifters’ wallets.

Savior syndrome is a sign of national decline. The saviors are frequently betrayers of the public — thus the need for a cult of sycophants to cover their crimes — but sometimes they are simply outlets for desperation.

Kamala Harris is not going to save America. No lone individual can with this level of corruption.

But Harris can be pressured to gut out institutional rot and pass humane policies — and yes, I realize these sound like fantasies, but don’t you know what year it is?! Don’t you know what country you’re living in? Everything about America 2024 is fantasy, usually of the nightmare variety. Why not add some good to the mix?

These ideas are not true fantasies, by the way. Americans label them fantasies because it hurts too much to hope. These “fantasies” are, in reality, demands that Americans have made for decades. They are calls for accountability, long unheeded. Americans deserve a president who will listen and care and act. We do not need another bot-brained cult to defend them if they fail.

The only American royalty that counts is the Burger King Original Chicken Sandwich. Everything else is just a whopper.

*          *          *

When I got home from Illinois, there were flowers in my backyard. They sprouted while I was gone. Pale-purple and pink petals tilted toward the sun, their elegant stems incongruous in the plain green grass.

The flowers are called “surprise lilies” because they seem to come out of nowhere. They tend to bloom in July or August, but you never know if they will arrive, or when. You only know it will happen fast.

One day, you’ve got nothing, and the next day, your yard is full of flowers.

They won’t last forever, so breathe deep, and enjoy the moment while you can.

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