the cope that kills

Brenda and Dylan are dead

by

Sarah Kendzior’s Newletter

By Sarah Kendzior | July 16, 2024

A few weeks ago, I drove the Million Dollar Highway in Colorado. This is one of the most dangerous roads in the US, a trek on sheer mountain cliffs without guardrails on a road twisting like a serpent’s tail.

I was in the passenger’s seat taking photos. I didn’t look at them until the white-knuckle ride was over, and we were in Montrose, eating at a diner that greets patrons with a paean to God, country, and fried jalapenos.

My photos are beautiful and terrifying, like America. One stood out.

   

I thought I had captured a singular mountain. But I had photographed two: one through the side mirror looking behind us, and one looming ahead. They weave together in a seamless curve. The shades of blue in the sky — deep in the mirror, pale on the road — are the only giveaway of a breach in time.

The future and the past met, and I almost deleted it.

I keep staring at this photo. It’s a serendipitous shot, but that’s not why. I analyze it like there’s a secret message, a clue to how to process this juncture in my life.

Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis. I should be, because Brenda and Dylan are dead.

*          *          *

R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” is the most Gen X of songs. It is a profound anthem of existential angst, and it is also Brenda and Dylan’s breakup song.

When I woke on July 13 to the news that Shannen Doherty, the actress who played Brenda Walsh on Beverly Hills, 90210, had died of cancer at age 53, I put on “Losing My Religion” and cried, the way Brenda did when she broke up with Dylan.

Dylan was played by Luke Perry, who died of a stroke at 52 in 2019. I have never gotten over it.

Everyone knows you never get over Dylan McKay.

I’m not being flip. Doherty and Perry were talented actors who died far too young and had friends and families who loved them. Their passing is sad by definition.

But that’s not why my heart aches. Something about Doherty dying hits me hard. There is a chance that I am mourning other things, too, events I cannot yet process in words. Things deemed more important than the premature deaths of stars from my youth.

But tears feel like a sacrifice, and I’ve given more than my share. I save my tears for people who deserve them, like Brenda and Dylan.

I was twelve when Beverly Hills, 90210 debuted. I was its target audience, and they hooked me along with my ten-year-old sister. We watched every week with my mom, eating popcorn together on the couch, and those are some of my happiest childhood memories. My father would vanish, proclaiming it trash TV, but he had suspiciously strong opinions on “Kelly versus Brenda” for someone who said he’d never seen an episode.

Everybody watched Beverly Hills, 90210 in the 1990s, even if they thought they were too cool. In the 1990s, you could watch 90210 “ironically”. Not real ironically, but fake “ironically”, like wearing a mask of your own face. Layers and layers of quote marks, to mark all those quotes you memorized, watching it in syndication.

It’s OK to admit you loved Beverly Hills, 90210. Teenage angst has paid off not particularly well, and now we’re old. Not bored — oh how luxurious to be bored — just old.

Read more

Last Chance USA: Biden, Trump, and the Cope That Kills

by

By Sarah Kendzior | July 10, 2024

I am in Last Chance, Colorado, looking at a faded billboard of a hand-painted American flag. Under the flag is a ragged rectangle whitewashing what once was written. You fill in the blanks yourself in a town like Last Chance.

Last Chance is a ghost town. Beyond the flag are empty homes with holes for windows. Next to the flag is an abandoned diner called Dairy King. Dairy King still has a few windowpanes intact. They reflect the golden fields stretching across eastern Colorado, their defiant beauty shimmering in the sun. There is a farmhouse deep in the fields, and it doesn’t have doors or windows either.

We are driving to where the road hits the horizon. There is not a soul to be seen. A mile back, we passed a sign saying Last Chance Community Church. The sign looked fresh, the building seemed intact, but the parking lot was empty that Sunday morning.

Maybe the church was an aspiration. Maybe it was another ghost. Maybe in 2024, those are the same things.

Last Chance was so named because in the first half of the 20th century, it was the final opportunity for travelers on Highway 36 to get provisions before entering or leaving Kansas, the border of which is close by rural Colorado standards — only ninety miles away.

The creation of the interstate hurt Last Chance. Suddenly, there were many chances, on another road, for other people. Then came the tornadoes in 1993, and the wildfires in 2012, and suddenly there were no more chances at all.

There is no sign saying when you enter or exit Last Chance. There are only signs pointing to other places in other directions.

No one tells you when you’re leaving your last chance behind. You know it later, when it’s too late, and others are pretending it’s not. They act like nothing’s changed, like you’re still in a bustling town in its prime, and not a place as vacant as the look in an American president’s eye.

*          *          *

I didn’t watch the debate. I was in rural New Mexico with only enough internet to access Twitter. Judging by the comments, I assumed there was either a sports game or a nuclear war. When I realized what was going on, I turned my phone off.

I still haven’t watched it, because watching Biden and Trump is like staring straight at the sun. Or in Biden’s case, an eclipse: a retina-destroying entity that doesn’t burn you outright but kills your ability to see. “Dark Brandon” was an eclipse all along.

What emerged on the debate stage was not Dark Brandon, but Ghost Biden, one of two candidates in Last Chance, USA. Ghost Biden may still be your preferred pick. This is because the other candidate is a pathological liar who spent his life in organized crime before committing sedition, and then getting immunity when no one — not Congress, not the January 6 committee, not the DOJ, not the very president he tried to overthrow — used the legal means granted to them to contain him in time.

For four years, Trump played his favorite, most predictable game — running out the clock — as officials let our freedom tick away. What does the constitution mean to these politicians, anyway? Just a paper, just a joke. Just “justice”, a concept at which they sneer behind the scenes while striking a pose of solemnity when they beg for your money on camera.

It was unusual for Trump to win a debate. He prefers the thrill of stealing to winning fair and square. What a novel month he had: a felony conviction, a legitimate victory.

Because Trump is widely loathed, beating him should have been easy — in the debate, and in the 2024 election. All Biden had to do was remain marginally coherent and not do something unforgivably sadistic, like abet a genocide of children, but no.

It is telling that bombing the debate instead of bombing the children of Gaza was the dealbreaker for Biden’s backers.

Biden’s cult is so loyal that they had long given up on him fulfilling his 2020 campaign pledges, including enforcing accountability for Trump’s many crimes. Instead, they spent years reciting a long list of why those promises were always impossible, and stressed the importance of voting for Biden again, so he can let down America with less surprise next time.

Read more