Area Nation Surprised to Find Itself in Hell

Area Nation Surprised to Find Itself in Hell September 27, 2016

I’m ripping off that great old Onion headline, obviously. Remember? Something about the 911 terrorists surprised to find themselves in hell. It was back in the bad old days when you could still talk about evil–like the terrorists were evil–and it had some kind of meaning that made sense. But at that critical moment, when the soul of the nation was given the opportunity to consider who it was and what it wanted, it–and notice I’m using some sort of gender neutral pronouns because I don’t want to trigger anyone–it decided to drink, do drugs, abandon social sanity, and sexualize its way through the next decade and a half.

So here we are, now, in hades, and a great gulf has been fixed between us, where we are in torment, and those poor impoverished countries who get to dwell in the sanity of not having our two political candidates. They, those poor countries, may not yet be in paradise, but it seems like they are from here because they haven’t be-clowned themselves with such vibrant, insolent, intellectually vacuous evil.

You’ll have guessed by now that I did watch the debate, on Matt’s splendid but old iPhone 6 with the smaller screen. I had hoped that watching it in on a diminutive device would make it better, would make it possible for me to sit, calmly, attending to the substance and optics of the moment. But actually, there was no way, no smaller device, no trick of the mind to keep me from wanting to jump out of my own skin. The grating of both voices, BOTH, was more than I could bear. I retreated into the Internet and tried to imagine a plain white beach. I would be Milton, I decided, with my red stapler. Donald Trump could be that several chinned woman answering phones in the high pitched voice. And Hillary Clinton could be Lumbergh. The only good outcome would be for the whole thing finally to go up in flames and everyone getting to pick, in total amazed relief, through the rubble.

At this point, being as I am in political Gehenna, you can’t scare monger me any more. You can’t shout Supreme Court! on one side, or Nuclear Button! on the other. What with the corruption and pettiness shining bright and stupid at center stage, the timber of each voice interrupting, the complete lack of substantive discourse, you can’t alarm me any more. You can’t scare me into voting. There isn’t any way I’m touching either of these two charlatans with a single voting sharpie.

Though I long for someone to come and cool my tongue, and relieve my torment, I suppose I am stuck here, gazing up towards Lazarus, wishing I could send someone back in time to warn the fetid past. But as we all know, no one will change their minds, even if Ronald Reagan were to rise from the dead.


Browse Our Archives