Sitting here thinking about Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, and how the initial fantasy conceit of that book was a perfect example of taking an obvious joke and running with it until it's something dark and serious
That the abandoned Post Office is haunted by "dead letters"
Every letter sent but not delivered, you see, is like a tiny death
A little piece of "unfinished business"
An open loop in the emotional fabric of the universe
A broken promise, a missed opportunity, a lost glimpse of a world that might have been
In the grand scheme of things, one message undelivered is no big deal, something that can be cleared up a week later
But what about ten letters, a hundred, a thousand
What about when the central hub everyone was counting on to send their mail catastrophically shuts down
The idea that the Republican candidate winning the White House in 2016 was some kind of struck-by-lightning impossibility is exactly the kind of infuriating hubris that got us here and that has me so pissed off today
It actually makes me very, very angry in hindsight that that's how people felt going into 2016
"How were we supposed to know the Republicans might win the election?"
Well there's two fucking parties so usually start with a 50/50 chance as your baseline
Maybe you could look at, you know, all of history and see that the White House flipping to the other party every eight years is how it normally works and the times it didn't do that are big notable exceptions
The goal of trying to objectively measure competence and put truly competent people in charge of the things they're competent at is called "technocracy", and Nazis fucking despise it
Opposition to technocracy is central to populism and therefore fascism (populism's worst form)
The loose collection of shitty memes that make up this thing we call fascism orbit this gravitational center of "normal people" and "common sense"
The core of the fascist aesthetic is this idea of good, decent, ordinary Americans/Germans/whatever throwing out "elites"
There is absolutely no reason to believe that the process that led to 280k dead so far will slow AT ALL as winter sets in and in fact every reason to believe it will keep on accelerating
Regardless of what happens on Election Day, nothing about this can change until January
It's so bad that even Deborah Birx, who's spent this whole pandemic being as much of a self-preserving job-protecting coward as she possibly can, lost it and started yelling at her bosses about how deadly the next wave is gonna be
Probably falling on her sword uselessly
It's this kind of thing that justifies my lifelong kneejerk emotional dislike of "optimism"
One reason it's gotten so bad is people are so fucking eager to believe we've "turned a corner" and "it must be over by now"
Tear down the moldy drywall, tear up the rotting floorboards, strip everything down to bare wood and brick and build anew only on what is structurally sound
It's too hard, it's too expensive, you'd have nowhere to live in the meantime
It'd almost be easier to just burn all of it down and build a new house
Everyone tells themselves they'll fix up the fixer-upper but it's a sucker bet, a money pit, a losing investment throwing good money after bad
I hate being the annoying realism guy but pitches like this always remind me of the meta Seinfeld joke where he tries to make a show about having a guy sentenced to be his butler after getting in a car accident with him
Japanese TV executive: "And is this punishment... customary, in your society?"
George: "No! That's the whole source of the humor!"