Yosemite Fire Sunset, 2024

It’s increasingly hard to keep up with any cogent view of the news cycle, in these last couple of weeks in July. Short version — Donald Trump was nearly assassinated on July 13, 2024, at a rally in Butler, PA. The breathless press first didn’t want to admit that Trump was shot, but then that was followed by an endless litany of calls for essentially civil war, especially in the subjunctive (“If Trump had been killed,” for all of those that weren’t forced to study Latin) and then followed on the heels of all this, the announcement by Joe Biden on July 21 that he was dropping out of the presidential race.

Screenshot from CNN after Trump was shot. Even then, CNN was attempting to monkey with the script

Everyone assumes that each of these events are independently momentous, finally, FINALLY leading to some Manichaean conclusion and Götterdämmerung, after which the world will be destroyed and born anew. History must have SOME inflection point, no? The press insists.

But no one’s asking any structural questions on any of this (except for a few voices like this blog.) If Donald Trump had died, how would that civil war actually have taken place? Other than gathering for meetings in the town square, or local park, with their pussy hats, or marching along avenues reserved by the multi-billion dollar entertainment mountebanks known as Black Lives Matter, Americans can’t hardly organize anything political. I have yet to be at a large rally where anyone was collecting names and phone numbers for future contacts. The Old Gods in both parties know this. But the show must go on.

And it does. Geography, as I’ve explained, is functionally dead, save for looting stores in Blue states. What you see on your computer screens, via TikTok, or X, is a postcards-from-the-edge approach to news. Some people manage to get together and break some windows. But more and more, what’s really happening is a slow slide into decay. I visited an old friend in Portland a little more than a month ago. There was some evidence of rioting activity present in downtown Portland. But the biggest sign obvious to me was the lack of shopping in what was once an energetic downtown retail district, as well as miles of dilapidated RVs parked along Lombard Street.

And fat people everywhere, of course. The national obesity rate has passed 42%. The real crisis is in the metabolic health of Americans, as well as a constant slide into poverty and homelessness. As well as the adaptive reality that if you’re going to live in a broken down RV, it’s a whole lot more comfortable to do it someplace where it is warm, and food is still relatively cheap. Folks have some eatin’ to do.

I still marvel at the people in the press claiming that the nation is on the brink of civil war. Wars are physical things, historically fought by young, healthy males. That’s just a statement of fact, with the truth of it aligned in our genes. When all your young males are fat, you’re not fighting anyone. Regardless of how many AR-15s you spread around.

And I still am impressed with the raw stupidity associated with calling January 6, 2021, an insurrection. Do people have any idea how utterly impossible it is to control anything from the U.S. Capitol? The elected officials on salaries of $200K, with a complete complement of near-slaves, in the guise of interns, can’t do it. Insurrections put different people in power that actually command some level of authority and respect. Not dudes with buffalo headdresses made from Gray Owl kits. It is a mystery to me how to get the federal government to do anything. How would the ostensible insurrectionists even know who to call to bark orders or threaten? I’ve said over and over that most people don’t even have any idea where their electricity or water comes from (give yourself a quiz and see if you can accurately answer that question before feeling smug.) “The Grid” is not a valid answer, though I’d be impressed if most people could even say that.

What’s really going on in front of our eyes is what I’ve decided to name a Leaky LARP. LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing game, a combination of re-enactment, storytelling and gaming—players are given a role and act out their character’s actions within an overarching story, from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The reporters on said LARP are actually intrinsic, and important Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in the game. They certainly can’t comprehend the extent of complexity of modern society themselves. But they do know where they’re supposed to line up with the general story line. And they also know their paycheck depends on them delivering, through clicks and other measures of engagement on the Internet. So the story must be exciting.

The problem is, with all this “through a glass darkly” stuff, is that it’s like a fictional movie that leads with a trailer that says “this movie, while a work of fiction, is based on historical events.” Except those historical events are actually real, and are happening, and usually involve the harm or death of someone in the Real World. It’s all scripted. Until, well, it isn’t. Trump was nearly killed by a 20-year-old male (at least at this current time I’m writing) who set himself up as a LARP-player extraordinaire. The incompetent bureaucracy assigned to President Trump played their part as incompetent bureaucrats, replete with local law enforcement clowns, and DEI agent hires unable to holster their guns. Trump dutifully played his part as well, not dying, of course, but then standing up with the help of agents and raising his fist in the air and mouthing “fight, fight, fight!”

Of all the players in this Leaky LARP, Trump has known he’s a central figure, and his performance didn’t disappoint. Whether he authentically, instantaneously shoved his fist into the air, or did a great piece of improv. doesn’t in the end really matter. When someone nearly blows your head off, at least in my book, they get the benefit of the doubt. Fight, fight, fight it is. He was still a 30 degree twist of his head from getting his brains blown out.

I wrote a piece on Donald Trump back in 2016, right after he was elected the first time. It still holds up, and contains one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written. It’s solid, and I recommend reading it.

But in the larger Theory of Empathetic Evolution scheme of things, he’s just another relational disruptor inside a system declining for other reasons. 

And like a play based on characters violating the Fourth Wall with the audience, our LARP only occasionally grounds itself to the outside world in real terms. Bullets hit ears of presidential candidates. Small sections of major urban areas get turned into No-Man’s Lands, with looted Walgreens, or spin-out competitions in intersections. And while the line may seem blurred between fantasy and reality, the other truth is that people actually die, and lives are wrecked in the context of those grounding moments. As Melania Trump’s letter to the American people elegantly stated, Donald Trump has a family too. Regardless of which part of his brain center lifted his fist into the air.

If there’s a takeaway from this, it’s that we need to pay more attention to the backdrop, and less to the scripted moments. Shit never stopped getting real. And it would behoove us to focus on the long line of trailers on Lombard St. in Portland, or the fat folks waddling through the local Walmart — or Food Co-op. Not nearly as exciting — but a telling signal in a pattern of nationwide decline.