rigorousintuition.ca

Rant
By River Clegg November 18, 2016

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, arguing starving hysterical on Facebook over whether a vote for Jill Stein was defensible, and whether Hillary could possibly be as bad as our old high-school classmate seemed to think,

who cracked their knuckles and made public their electoral opinions, clicking or tapping the “post” button dizzy and feverish and high,

who hours later sat up in their kitchens hollow-eyed trying to figure out how to respond to being called a cuck, which is short for cuckold, which apparently is a political thing now,

who dealt with the ascension of a fascist to the highest office in the land by typing eighty words per minute and shuttling them out into the gray hallucinogen void of the Internet, and many of those words were “fascist” because that’s what this man seems to be and, fuck, that’s really something,

who no longer speak to their cousin, yes, that one, because she said the wrong thing about Bernie Sanders that one time,

who were ecstatic screaming in 2008 and very pleased also in

2012 but who aren’t happy at all now and who had sort of forgotten what that felt like,

who now sit scrolling with bloodshot eyes naked and all-seeing down the screen past other people’s posts that say things like we’re all Americans and other generally annoying shit like that,

who now cross lances in the sweaty heaving fray of comment threads and subthreads and whose attendance at Thanksgiving is now being called into serious question by that thing Uncle Jim just shared,

a lost battalion of liberals and Marxists and socialists and people whose food allergies would go unrecognized in much of the country, whose mute righteous anger finds new life with every “like” acquired, and bonus points if it’s one of those smiley-face reactions that Facebook now has,

who still can’t fathom their nation having clanked its way to this precipice—

rocky, barren, staring down the maw of catastrophe unreckonable yet with frightening historical precedent, and plus now we all have to watch this orange man on our TVs and phones for the next long while, Jesus, fuck,

who wonder whether it’s too soon to start just donating money to Elizabeth Warren right now and the hell with it,

who could not and cannot abide the dim flameout of the American experiment and who’ve decided to combat this insidious flameout with ten tweets a day, and, hey, why not, it seems to have worked for Trump,

good God, President Trump is a thing we have to get used to saying,

O.K., back to the poem,

a party of souls adrift, wandering, travelling the broken gray landscape and confined to the trundling Internet boxcars they’ve hopped aboard, sharing online petitions and think pieces as though they were cigarettes and whiskey and asking what news from home but there is no news save the thing Uncle Jim posted, you wouldn’t believe it,

Thanksgiving is out of the question, we’ve said it before but we mean it this time,

a people who once believed that a formal endorsement from the Ku Klux Klan would be enough to sink an American Presidential candidacy, lol,

who now walk unblinking and mad with heads cast downward and muttering powerless at their phones as they cross the crosswalk because a mildly famous person just tweeted something about how they’re proud to have not voted at all, you have got to be goddam kidding me,

who now need to take a deep breath and count to ten per their therapist’s orders, O.K., breathe, O.K.

who have come home and are breathing deeply, breathing breathing in through the nose, slowly, lying supine naked in bed and with eyes closed unfeeling and with headphones, having YouTubed the words “relaxing meditation” and who’ve gripped onto the topmost result like a life preserver and the water rising Biblical and absurd and totalitarianism never comes all at once but gradually step by step and when did our first step take place and could we but retrace our blind steps we could surely carve out a new destiny and arrive at someplace other, right?

Hey, I should post that.