A properly overdetermined metaphor begins at home. On Election Day, in the early afternoon, I went to a doctor's office in midtown Manhattan so that a doctor could cut something useless off my chest. It was a cyst, a benign shtoinker I've worn around for more than a decade, and if I may be immodest for a moment you could definitely tell that the doctor and her assistant were excited to see how hideous it was once they got it out of me. It was not imminently dangerous, just a protuberant lump above my heart that I'd become accustomed to. Removing what the doctor called "your blob" would take about 45 minutes, she told me, and would be fairly easy for her. It would surely have been easier and faster if I'd addressed its presence at any time prior to that, because it would have been smaller. But I had other stuff going on, and I had gotten used to it. Again, this is a metaphor, and also it is not.
During the procedure, which wound up taking about half an hour, the doctor mentioned that she found this part of her job "so relaxing." We had talked about the Knicks championship run for much of the time that she was very carefully and very precisely cutting this stupid thing off my body. The surgeon told me that she liked how little Jalen Brunson was, and how clever; she also liked that he and his former Villanova teammates really seemed to enjoy each other. I remember saying that Brunson "has been a winner everywhere he's played" at a moment when she cut into an insufficiently numbed patch of my chest; the ensuing jolt of pain arrived as instant punishment for having said something so trite, and she said "oh did you feel that?" A milder version of this should happen to me every time I almost mention Ryan Arcidiacono in a conversation with someone who doesn't already know who he is.
They injected more lidocaine and carried on carving. I could no longer feel any of it; we were talking about administrative bloat at hospitals and universities by this point. I could, I guess, feel the thing coming loose, and coming off. I could feel her cutting and tugging it out and then was aware of the idle friction—what would a boot feel when you lace it up?—of being stitched back together. But I could only feel it as a sort of painless jostle and pressure; it was my body that this was happening to, but as far as my nervous system was concerned it was not really my problem at that moment. I saw the blob before I left, sitting impertinently on a fluffy pillow of bloodied gauze, a hideous soft-boiled quail egg wearing a rude little patch of my stubbled skin like a jaunty hat.
I'd just been out there carrying this dumb thing my body had made around with me as I moved throughout the world for a decade or more, and then an hour after I walked into the office I was back out there doing the same stuff, a little more gingerly, without it. I stopped to vote on my way home and got a sandwich; the man who ordered after me was nasty as hell, weird and crustily sockless in Croc-style slides. He kept yelling at the men preparing his order—sausage and peppers, in a tray, plenty of sauce on it this time, not like last time, and to go, whaddaya think the tray was for?—that he wanted his garlic bread "very well done." I could hear him muttering the word "fuck" to himself as I left.
That night, when I watched the country reject the architects and overseers of the last awful decade of American political life in one race after another, in places I did not imagine those people and policies would ever be rejected, I did so while bleeding into a surgical dressing, and then pretty well through it. This was nothing to worry about, I was later told. It was drainage. Wounds naturally did that; there is an element of violence to procedures like these even when everything goes exactly according to plan. Let me know if any of this isn't overt enough.
The scope and scale of last week's election wipeout, just on its own, makes it challenging to grasp. This is a big country with a lot of shitty little villains in it, and learning about new ones—some grimacing bigot sheriff or distressingly "based" county clerk, a superannuated backbench congressman with 19th century politics and a comms team full of chittering junior fascists—is a big part of what makes keeping up with the news so unpleasant. The rise and persistence of Donald Trump and his political movement was always easier to understand as a manifestation of that fact, and as a reflection of how many dull little tyrants the culture produces, than it was along any other ideological line. There isn't much of an ideology here, and never really has been. It is just a series of idiotic reflexes, firing endlessly out at everyone and everything else—old, feral urges to steal, foreclose, humiliate, and do harm, executed by cruel, stupid people ruled by those urges on behalf of a population that can't imagine wanting anything else.
Of course it doesn't work as a way of governing, or a way of being in the world. It's too small and too scared; there's just no room for other people in it. A person would have to be very rich and very shameless to live their life in the way that Donald Trump has lived his, and in the way that the Little Trumps that have followed him live theirs. There are some consequences even for them—heart disease, highly preventable car accidents, many lawsuits, serial contentious divorces, innumerable testy confrontations in parking lots and restaurants and airplanes and everywhere else their enemies, the entire rest of humanity, can be found. But on balance it is the rest of humanity that suffers for all their recklessness; all those inconveniences are survivable in a way that simply living otherwise would, for people like that, absolutely not be.
It is a different thing for an elected official to behave like this, or for a country to be this way. All those instantly heeded impulses and disregarded consequences and disclaimed responsibility will add up, at that kind of scale, and while the people in charge—politicians, oligarchs, the lumpen population of grasping aspirants to that vast irresponsibility—will keep on doing what they do, at some point gravity will have its say. At some point, people will notice who is doing all this to them, and how greedy and giddy and gross they are about it, and they will not appreciate it.
Despite the astonishing scale at which those looters and freaks were wiped out at the polls, the media meta-conversation that has followed the election has been sour and abstracted in familiar ways. It is, in some striking ways, the same conversation that has followed every other election over the last few decades, irrespective of outcome. On the left half of the spectrum there is an intramural debate between a stilted moderation and an amorphously defined but busier and more ambitious style of politics; on the right, a spiraling and indulgent depravity goes more or less unremarked-upon. Throw in some high-pitched keening about socialism from people who don't know or care what it is and some interviews with old bigots who Don't Like Where Things Are Headed and you've got a stew going. It sucks like crazy, it is rote and impossibly smug, but there is also something kind of grimly funny about its reliability. Every one of these determined turns down those familiar cul-de-sacs can be read as an institution proudly, pathetically insisting that it will take a lot more than a generational public turn against the current order and its ruling elite to alter their way of doing things.
And yet that response came all the same. It came from different directions—from minority voters in response to being disenfranchised and terrorized, and from voters who can see a fatuous elite enriching itself and throwing endless gaudy house-trashing parties with the wealth that elite takes and takes and takes from the public, and from people who cannot stand to see so much stupid, brutal predation being done in their name around the world, and to their neighbors. If it is not quite a coherent movement in terms of ideology, it is legible and understandable as a response to the same fundamental, load-bearing insult. It is the insult at the core of contemporary conservative politics, but also at the moldering center of American life—the jeering certainty that the way that things are is fundamentally how things should be, and how they must remain.
That, we can say with some certainty, has been rejected. Not in a way that is final, but in a way that cannot be denied. It is a struggle, after the last decade of decline and humiliation and all these extravagant and whimsical national acts of self-harm, to accept even very good news as anything but a relief or a reprieve. Even when the most disgusting cruelty and overt bigotry is rejected as decisively by the public as the last round of Republican depravity was last week, there is still something that haunts and aches about it after the fact. That tide of bile came in through the front door, and is insanely corrosive to everything it touches; it has failed, and voters were not quite ready to triumphantly cast themselves as abusive parents, but its stink is in the room now, and some version of that depravity has been made normal in a way that it wasn't before. It leaves a stain even after it is pushed back.
But also this is a struggle, all of it. None of it ends, and none of what was rejected last week is gone this week, or will ever go anywhere on its own. All there is to do is to go on rejecting it, as close to together as is possible and for as long as is necessary, and to build through that rejection something more affirmative. One refutation after another, everywhere and anywhere, over and over. It's a lot of work, but not nearly as exhausting as accepting the alternative.
