Talking to a super smart friend (1) last night about the State of The World, we got onto the fun and games to be had before, during and after November 5 (the US ‘elections’).
I found myself saying that all of us – even those who should and do know better – find ourselves hoping or at least talking as if we hope that there will be a “resolution.” We go on as if, if Harris were to win (2) not just the popular vote (likely) but also enough of the swing states to win through the Electoral College AND also – to use a choice phrase – ‘stop the steal’ by Trump’s gang (Supreme Court shit, militias etc) then somehow we will “return to normal.” When pressed people will say “no, obviously not immediately, but, you know, a process of healing, rebuilding, on the road to recovery.”
Yeah, look, whatever you need to tell yourself. Or we need to tell ourselves, because I fall into this too.
The cat is out of the bag, the shit has hit the fan, the rotten apples didn’t get taken out of the barrel, Robert Carlyle didn’t get headshot by that Marine (3). The jig is up. Almost half the US (or rather, half of those who voted) will think “the game is rigged” (4) and on “it” will roll – whatever “It” is. The murderous clownshow will keep going.
There was enough of a whitelash when the WHITE House was home to an articulate (5) Black Man who reminded them all of who they aren’t. But at least Obama had the common courtesy to have a cock. I mean, this one, she’s Black and she has a … I can’t even go there.
This morning, on the way to buy some comfort sugar… I mean, fresh whole grain bread from the local bakery, a quote from a Book I Read Twenty Plus Years Ago sidled up to my neocortex and said mockingly “I heard you were looking for me? Reporting for duty, sah.” This happens frequently. I should see someone about it.
And the quote was from a rather excellent book called “Global Warming: The Science of Climate Change” by Frances Drake (6) It’s in a section, clearly inspired by Joseph Tainter’s work on complex societies, about the cultural response to crisis (7) and it notes Well, here’s photos of the relevant stuff, from page 131 and 132.
“The last records from Norse Greenland are of a Christian marriage and a burning for witchcraft.”
(Drake, 2000: 132)
So that’s it. This is just magical thinking. It turns out that it isn’t just those hunter-gatherers with bones through their noses who have a cosmology made up of weirdness. Turns out that you can be a white man with advanced degrees from places like Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, the Sorbonne, University of Manchester Business School (8) and still be an absolute textbook case of irrational thinking, the kind of person who falls for any passing cargo cult. Who knew?
“But it’s in a glossy report, with regression analysis and some nice graphs. Look, this peer-reviewed paper in a three-star journal used Advocacy Coalition Framework, which means there are numbers. It must be science…” (continues in this vain vein for years, through grant applications, promotion panels, professorial inaugural lectures etc).
Tl:dr (which should be at the top). “Sophisticated” white people got their anticipatory salvation rituals, and US presidential elections are one of them.
References
Drake, F. 2000. Global Warming: The Science of Climate Change. London: Arnold.
To read
Tainter, J. .1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies.
To write
More about how anthropological and psychoanalytic perspectives (not so much on show here) really mess with the technocratic worldview. (see next post. Or the one after that. It’s about performative cruelty by our Lords and Masters. Nom nom.)
Footnotes
(1) Shout out! Superhelpful on the info-management
(2) No point bothering with outlining a “Trump” victory. It will be at least as bad as you imagine, even if you have a vivid imagination. One prediction – they’ll 25th amendment him within 6 months. President Vance.
(3) 28 Weeks Later.
(4) The game is indeed rigged, but not the game they think they are playing.
(5) Yes, I chose that word deliberately. It is, as Malcolm x pointed out, code for “my god the [insert horrific racial epithet here] can string a sentence together”.
(6) Two years ago I had reason to contact her. She’s lovely and as smart on the phone as she is on the page, which is going some.
(7) See also Thinking the Unthinkable, a 1987 book by Lydia Dotto
(8) To choose an example entirely at random
marchudson.net 
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