We chew and spit you out

After he won I was in shock for I-don’t-know how long. Weeks. Months. The world felt bizarre, surreal. I remember looking at people who looked like Republicans. I remember eating lunch in restaurants with people who looked like business people eating lunch. I’d come to know they were not to be trusted, but I didn’t know they were like this. I mean, I knew they were like this, because they were not like what my textbooks had taught me we should be like. Not freaking out. But I didn’t know.

I checked the news I-don’t-know how often, for months. I thought the story would break any moment now. Any second. I thought we’d fix this. I thought he’d be removed.

I should have known better. They had so many chances to stop him. If they’d wanted to, if they were going to, they would have. The founding fathers, some of them at least, are spinning in their graves, beating fists against coffin lids, wanting out, wanting to shout how this is exactly what they were talking about, why they fought for things like checks on stupidity, on demagoguery.

There’s no point in following the news anymore. It’s all corrupt. All of it. There are those who fight to bring him down, and those who fight to prop him up. And the only ones who pay attention are the ones who’ve already decided, and they aren’t influenced by the other side. At all. Unless by influenced we mean fueled for the fight.

I’ve lost interest. I am exactly what they want from me. I am the outrage beaten into submission. I am the ignorant masses who forget last week’s outrage after this week’s outrage. I am the one who becomes numb to outrage in the face of outrage after outrage.

I used to say that what we call corruption in other countries we call here ‘doing business.’ And now I say we don’t even bother doing business anymore, we just do what we want, fuck it all and fucking no regrets, as James Hetfield once said. We just lay our corruption on the table and deny it being what it is. We lie, and we lie, and we lie. And we fight. And we lie some more.

My professor arrives fifteen minutes late to every class, plops down at his desk, unloads his bag, asks what we learned last week, what was in the news, what might affect our profession. I want to tell him what I’m saying here, that it doesn’t matter, that it’s all horse shit and we’re all going to die, and the sun will become a red giant, a fireball that consumes us all, if we’re still here when it blows.

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