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Lately, I’ve been experiencing an unsettling sense of fuzzy thinking—as if reality is blurring, as if language is a vessel with holes in the bottom, and meaning is leaking out onto the floor. Sometimes I have to search for words after I write them down: does “illegible” mean that the text is too messy to read? The day after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, my verbal processing continued to falter: I received an email from the children’s clothing company Hanna Andersson and read the name as “Hamas”; on the street, I thought “hot yoga” was “hot dogs”; on the subway, a theater poster advertising “Jan. Ticketing” read “Gia Tolentino.” Even the words that might help me more accurately describe the feeling of “losing it” escape me. Sometimes all that comes to mind are images: misty white rain, melted rainbows in a puddle of gasoline, pink foam insulation bursting between slats of splintered wood.
Maybe I should have written this on the form of a neurologist’s appointment. Maybe the fog hasn’t cleared from my third round of COVID. Maybe it’s the self-destruction of having two small children but spending half my day pretending they don’t exist. Maybe this is exactly what my mother warned me about two decades ago when she found out about my marijuana habit. But I have a feeling a lot of people are going through something similar all the time.
The root of this obscurity may lie in a strange shift in the way I perceive time. I track it mostly on my phone, a device that makes me feel glued to a chalkboard of an unreal present: the past is gone, the future is unthinkable, and my eyes are clamped shut to see an endlessly replenished present. More than a decade of complaining about this situation has not changed my urge to induce dissociation anew every day. And while there was once a time when my physical surroundings felt more real than what I observed on my phone, this year has been a turning point. Now, the cognitive tendrils of phone psychosis often seem more descriptive of contemporary reality—“a small group of Houthi politicians,” and so on—than the narcissists I see sprouting in the park. The phone absorbs time; it forces us to live as if we were in a casino, pulling down the blackout curtains on the windows to block out the world, except that the blackout curtains are a screen showing too much of the world, too quickly. As Richard Seymour writes in The Twittering Machine, this avoidance of the actual passage of time, this attraction to the chronophage, the time eater, is a horror story that is likely to occur only “in a society that busily produces horror.”
But now reality seems to want—you can feel it—to swallow up time. For example: Ten days before his inauguration, Trump was sentenced to unconditional release on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records. But I don’t remember that, and I don’t know if it mattered. I remember the first day of his presidency, when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico, signed executive orders ending birthright citizenship, reinstating the federal death penalty, and uprooting anything remotely resembling DEI. Ditto on day five, when he fired the comptrollers, ordered the government to stop investigating book bans, and proposed shutting down FEMA; and on day ten, when he announced plans to resettle migrants in Guantanamo Bay and claimed, without evidence, that the U.S. had sent fifty million dollars’ worth of condoms to Gaza. But there have been ninety such days and counting, and the events of each seem unthinkable as they materialize in the headlines and then are swiftly transferred to the cognitive dump of things that have not been fully digested, processed, or fought against, but have been pushed into reality, where they will remain as the fading backdrop to each day's new, grotesque parade.
I felt this way early in Trump’s first term, too, but those times seemed strange compared to these. Now our president, along with his content-generating sidekick Elon Musk, operates at the pace of an internet that has been accelerating relentlessly for eight years. He exploits that speed by exploiting the way it has damaged our sense of reality; he draws from it, outpaces it. Outrage now seems almost antiquated, a holdover from the first administration, when it was new and necessary to think about things like “He can’t do that—it’s illegal” or “If he does that, it will lead us straight to fascism.” We’re already there; twenty-first-century American fascism is on its third aesthetic wave. The administration is acting like a group of pharmaceutically-addled children setting fires and slashing furniture; the members of the Democratic opposition, with about three exceptions, imagine themselves as exasperated parents holding signs that read “FIRE IS BAD.”
I'm glad we got past the “Orange Cheeto man bad” #resistance – if only
Sourse: newyorker.com
