I feel like... culturally, we keep trying to skip the rage and the pain and the grief and jump right to the healing uplifting shit. And you just can’t *do* that.

Corporations are trying to sell us on their products with optimism when what we want is to scream and scream. https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1358610507452854276

That’s only one of the things wrong with the Super Bowl this year (and every year), but it’s a thing that’s been going on basically since this started, and it’s gotten weirder and creepier with every ten thousand needlessly dead and countless others seriously ill.

I don’t want someone to tell me things will get better. I’ve decided to believe that they will eventually regardless of whether or not I’m told so. What I want is for how OVERWHELMINGLY SHITTY THIS ALL IS to be recognized without a sentimental veneer.

It’s like being told to come together and find common ground with the people who spent four years saying “fuck your feelings” and recently smeared shit all over the inside of the Capitol and murdered a cop.

Thank you but I don’t think I will.

Stop trying to skip steps. You can’t.

You can’t get to healing until you face and accept the agony.
You can’t get to reconciliation until you have accountability.

And yeah, I know I’m leaving some of the even bigger problems with sentimentality and capitalism largely unaddressed here, but it’s a much bigger cultural tendency that I’ve noticed in general, that the ad makers are tapping into in order to sell things.

I was listening to some of the Conspirituality podcast this afternoon and they played some of Jimmy Carter’s Malaise Speech—which is really an extraordinary speech—and pointed out that it was mature, nuanced, honest, empathetic, and clear-eyed about the challenges.

It was a “we’re in a bad place as a country, so let’s describe it and understand it and work together to get somewhere better” speech.

And no one wanted to hear it. They wanted to hear someone say things were already fine, no need to do any work here.

So they elected Reagan.

We suck real bad at this as a country, basically, and of course we are all fucked the fuck up.

Just... fucking read this speech. Read it. It’s amazing. It’s *vulnerable*. It’s a president saying “I’m trying to work this out just like you are. I need your help and I’m trying to listen.” https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jimmycartercrisisofconfidence.htm

And it’s not a downer speech. It’s deeply, profoundly optimistic. The problem people had was that it talked about confronting old wounds and old disappointments that we hadn’t fully confronted. And white Americans just did not fucking want to.

This is a white America problem. We’re the ones who want to skip the steps. We’re the ones who want to feel better ASAP, and not think too hard about why we feel bad.

Much of that is because we’d have to face deep complicity. But I don’t think that’s all of it.

I don’t totally understand all its dimensions, I think. Again, the fear of facing complicity is probably the lion’s share of it, and I do get that part.

But the point is, we keep turning away from people who try to level with us.

We elect the people who tell us everything is great. We buy products from companies that tell us everything will be fine. No thinking required. No work to do.

Maybe we should stop doing that, in part because it’s really bad for us.

And no, I don’t actually think that we’ll stop. I wish I did.

But in the meantime, hundreds of thousands of people are dead and we’re in the middle of what looks increasingly like a Cold Civil War, facing down a fascist political party that still might seize power again.

And Bruce fucking Springsteen is telling us we should go hang out with Republicans in a chapel in Kansas, and we’re “honoring” frontline workers in the middle of a superspreader event while denying them a living wage, and I just.

I just want to be told that we should be angry.

Most Super Bowl ads are reliably pretty terrible, and frequently offensive. But this year was just really something else. It was deeper, and weirder, and it’s part of a much bigger problem.

Okay seems like we’ve reached self-promo critical mass

1. Please donate to your local food bank
2. Scream at your reps to do the right thing
3. I do Tarot readings and am trying to build it more as a professional practice https://www.etsy.com/shop/TarotDruid