On the second to last day of one campaign’s death rattle, at a late-in-the-game rally, the name of a brand new enemy is conspicuously dropped. The stalwarts gathered in the cold, Pennsylvania night, many believing themselves to be not so very different from the soldiers addressed by General George Washington, not so far away, at Valley Forge on March 1, 1778, are assured that the present President will not, as in Washington’s words, “scorn effeminately to shrink under those accidents and rigours of war.” No effeminist he, the President has determined that, for him at least, one of these wartime rigours is one Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (code name: Lady Gaga), lately of New York, New York, which remains a known archarcist jurisdiction to this day.
“Lady Gaga…is not too good,” he says, shaking his head. “I could tell you plenty of stories. I could tell you stories about Lady Gaga. I know a lot of stories. Lady Gaga.” As he himself was a once-citizen of the same no-guardrail island borough as she, and since he also once belonged to an unsavory, always-happy-to-party circle that included the suicidal, child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, he would have been a regular customer himself in zones of bad behavior as well. So if she did it, he saw it. Or he would have known someone who did. Or maybe that’s not what he’s talking about. Maybe he means that Lady Gaga and the Professor from Gilligan’s Island could have cooked up the coronavirus together in their fifth floor walk-up, zero-gravity, windows covered with cardboard and visqueen Bed-Stuy lab. Well, whatever she did, he–as our hotshot playboy turned primo national security bulwark–would surely know. And if Americans knew, too, they would, you would, we all would recoil in horror.
Emphasis on “if.” If known. If told. If revealed. If exposed. If disclosed. If, under great duress, perhaps even under actual torture, which he doesn’t especially seem to have a problem with, as part of an end-of-your-rope, false confession.
Perhaps the same investigators who were dispatched to Honolulu to pore over boxes of paper birth certificates now also have the damning goods on Ms. Germanotta. Perhaps the investigators are sitting on a cache of infrared video tapes, chemtrail samples, hacked email threads, and thousands of pages of transcribed hearsay from multiple witnesses, all proving…something. Or not. The stories could be told, but in the end they never are. Like the one about the humongous unveiling that was supposed to happen a few seconds after the very bad thing was repealed and replaced. Or about what was lurking on Sleepy’s cokehead of a son’s laptop. Or the truth about what we know happened to that thumb drive that went missing, but we can’t yet talk about because the time isn’t just, just, just right. Yet. That thumb drive. You know. The one up in Michigan. Or Wisconsin. Wherever. Or maybe it was a hard drive. Whatever. The one that was digitally filched and got all corrupted up by some nasty person on a bed somewhere who weighs 400 pounds. Or maybe it got eaten by that deep state affiliated, vote tabulation server that the late Hugo Chavez hooked up and turned on. Whomever. You know.
Criticism bombs from haters are hurled, in response. All hat and no cattle is one common accusation. That dog don’t hunt no more. Promises, promises, promises. The haters, too shell shocked to confidently predict anything ever again, can at least hope that the endless teasers about the perpetually unaired episode will, in time, grow stale. One must eventually do more than tweet. Doesn’t that seem like some sort of law of nature? At some point, the manbaby surely must produce the actual corpse, the actual bank accounts, the actual evidence of the malfeasance of his enemies and of his own exculpation. And then, when he can’t–which he can’t–this naked emperor will take his final bow and stumble into the orchestra pit. Such is the creed of the fingers-crossed.
But thanks to what amalgam of circumstances does that see-through moment come about? And when? Exactly? Truth is, it’s not going to happen because it doesn’t have to. Put his nude remnants in the ground or shoot them into space and the zombie spells of the foretold-yet-untold will still go marching on. There shall be a second term. And a third. And so on. In perpetuity. That the proof of how an election was stolen never comes to light is precisely what makes the grift so great.
Get the hook in. Get it in, tug, and take them right to the cusp, right to the edge, right to the moment when disbelief remains in constant suspension. And then discreetly abandon the bandstand, the carnival barker’s megaphone, the invisible university. Leave them right at the moment of greatest expectation with a two-bit diploma in hand. You’ve brought them all the way to the sweet-spot moment that can, if properly played, last forever. That swamp that so needs draining will be empty by tomorrow afternoon, you swear. And that nebulous revolution the crowd says it has been itching for: that will happen the day after said epic emptying.
To complain that the fulfilled moment never actually arrives misses the point of why one hops the thrill ride in the first place.
The world, as we know it, was supposed to come to a full, sudden stop, and all good souls were supposed to fly to heaven on July 10, 1844. So said William Miller, an American preacher from sleepy Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who was deeply sure that he had deciphered the inside scoop. The subsequent, sad clown let down of July 11 came to be known as “The Great Disappointment.” The run up had been such nerve-wracking fun. The aftermath, most bitter. How, then, to keep the anticipatory glee going without then having to give a where’s-the-beef-there’s-no-beef press conference? How to stay right at the notch on the clock when you fell asleep the night before with cosmic sugarplums in your head and thus sustain the jittery, pleasing dread, the high sense of impending triumph over and vanquishing of heathen enemies? Without getting the light of day, subsequent backlash, the ego-skid-out crash and burn? You gotta feed the otherworldly buzz so that it never wears off. The Kool-Aid drinkers, the Heaven’s Gaters and the Branch Davidians came up with one way of doing it. You kill yourself, or get yourself killed, so you never have to let go of the promise. So you expire in media res, spared any kind of ultimate denouement–even though, by the looks of it, you sure seem to be one stone cold denoumentee just now, pardner.
You just have to keep the faith. Keep your hands on the wheel. By jingo, there just has to be a less gross, less creepy way of getting the job done. America is one big, can-do proposition, after all, and it will figure out how to cryogenically preserve the communal feeling of walking into the gambling hall with gold strike money to burn without having to ever walk out with pockets well picked. It will keep the roulette ball forever in play, forever bouncing, the slots forever spinning, lemons and jackpots in perpetual motion.
Sooner or later, big pharma and big data will surely team up and hit upon the magic. They’re always brewing up a new secret sauce for us, you know. So we say. Until then, here’s another way. Select a day, any day, for the final boom-or-bust. Draw a line around it on the calendar. Go draw a line in some sand, too. Make it a bright red one, if you want. This will be the day of the biggest payoff or the biggest takeaway of all time, you declare: a-once-and-for-all, total thumps-up-or-total-thumbs-down kind of day when some will be made totally free and joyous and others totally pained and miserable. Call the day itself anything you want. Call it the day of damnation. Call it Armageddon. Call it the rapture. Call it an election, if you feel like it.
And, yes, the not-so-carefully-selected date will come…and go. And afterwards…nothing much seems to have happened. Were any souls thrown down? Were any lifted high? In the end, the siren warnings and the big blast itself didn’t seem to make a big, visible difference, pro or con. The birds are still singing. Was all of it just some kind of joke? Why is anything still here? Everyone was talking about that coming galaxy-sized iceberg. Remember?
You were in luck, as it turned out. You can keep your shirt on and your family fed, pal. The congregation that first picked up on the news of the awful, awesome day also pleaded and prayed for just a little more time, for a smidge more forgiveness and mercy. Thanks to their fervent supplications, an evangelical effort made largely on your behalf, by the way, you poor sinner, the big rod of the universe was spared. For now. But it was touch and go there, for a while. The delicate, metaphysical series of operations could have gone sideways. They might go sideways next time. We can’t say for sure. Our always-on congregation-staffed rooftop receptors could well receive another signal sent from within the deep and distant that makes every last one of our million, trembling, extra sensory antennae really jingle-jangle. We may again be served notice about some new, coming, ultimate and potentially unpleasant reveal.
Which puts us right back in an anticipatory pickle.
Which is exactly the point. If you regularly predict and prevent disaster, there can always be another cycle of despair and rage and woe leading to the promise of sweet relief and delight. The names-and-plots-withheld stories can spool out, one after the other, without stopping. 24/7, 365. Telling without telling, the cashout stays in the just beyond, in the future conditional. We never find out exactly what Lady Gaga did. That’s okay, actually. It’s better that way, even. The unbound imagination can thus run amok, ready for, hanging onto, the next salacious wink. The Wizard of Oz doesn’t have to be revealed at the movie’s end, you know. That bit was just another part of a pretty trippy and frankly unrealistic story. The redemptive, exemplary, truth-and-justice-league, I-am-but-a-mere-man politically correct ending was also a kind of bummer.
Keep the Great One’s curtains shut. Let us stay in the dreamscape.
That’s right. Turns out, you are just one really lucky so-and-so whenever you play this Jesus Casino thing.
Meanwhile, back here in the real world, operators are standing by, waiting for you to accept a time limited offer that will make it so super frictionless for you to submit monthly, direct-deposit contributions that will help us keep the world’s greatest prayer hotline up and running, full steam ahead, so it can knock away, Superman-style, the next approaching calamity, the next big tell, which might spill some information not to your liking at all. Constant vigilance has a price and you look like the type who would never accept a handout. Made of proud stuff, you don’t want any freebies from us or the government or from anyone else. You know you are not owed anything. You know that only by the sweat of your own brow shall you be saved.
