Fighting the Demoralizing Power of American Surreality
My fellow bugbears, I want to wish you all a happy New Year, but the phrase feels a bit awkward given how off the rails the illegitimate American regime has been since the beginning of the year.
If you were asked to come up with one word that sums up the first two weeks of 2026, what would it be? For me, a number of candidates immediately spring to mind. Violent. Nonsensical. Scary. Bizarre. Unfathomably stupid (okay, that one is two words). On reflection, though, I think the word that best fits is surreal.
Our American Nightmare
Surreality can be defined as a dreamlike condition in which the rules of reality we are accustomed to do not apply, and 2026--all two weeks of it--has been nothing if not one long nightmare. I'd call it kafkaesque, except that there is a bureaucratic, even clinical quality to genuinely kafkaesque horror. Kafka's horror is horrifying precisely in its precision and attention to detail. What we're experiencing is much more chaotic, if no less dream-like.
The American government lurches from one terrifying pronouncement or terrible decision to another. It kicked the year off by kidnapping Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Meanwhile the Venezuelan opposition leader, María Corina Machado, cringingly kowtows to bumbling U.S. dictator Donald Trump and offers to "share" or give him her Nobel Peace Prize, thereby tarnishing both her own credibility and that of the Nobel committee (and no, that is not something you can actually do with a Nobel Prize). But even as Maduro is sent to face drug trafficking charges in New York--not sure how you expect to play off such an "extraordinary rendition" as "extradition" on such ordinary charges but you do you, Trumpies--the Trump regime is now threatening both Iran and Greenland, and may well take military action against either or both.
Attacking either would be unethical and wrongheaded to put it mildly, but attempting to annex Greenland in particular would mean the United States--the backbone and cornerstone of the NATO alliance--would be Article 5-ing ourselves, since Greenland is a self-governing territory under the Danish crown, and Denmark is a NATO ally. This would undoubtedly spell the end of NATO--something Trump has apparently wanted since his first term anyway, probably because the idea was planted in his head by Russian president Vladimir Putin or one of the latter's surrogates. This unimaginably reckless action would presumably also force a military response from NATO and the EU. And yet I can't be sure that the threat is all bluster, because after all the US just kidnapped a foreign leader and Dictator Donald will not shut up about wanting Greenland and keeps threatening military action. I hate to say it, but South Park's mockery of Trump during his first term seems to have been unusually prescient.
Surreal, right? And I haven't even mentioned the collective punishment of blue states (for not voting for Donald Trump) and the Somali immigrant community in Minnesota (for welfare fraud that seemingly did occur but that the Department of Homeland Security is using to illegitimately scapegoat vulnerable people); ICE agents' increasingly brazen use of firearms; or Elon Musk's ridiculous AI, Grok, allowing users to create nude or nearly nude images of minors and anyone they'd like to humiliate. But then, what would you expect from a bot that once called itself "Mecha Hitler," I guess?
The ubiquitous presence of AI "tools" where they're not wanted, constant crypto scams, coming across people known by monikers like "the Hawk Tuah Girl" in the news, and rampant generative AI deepfakery all add to the general feeling of being unmoored from reality. And to demoralize those of us with consciences further, when an ICE agent murdered Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis--with video from multiple angles showing this is exactly what happened--legacy media outlets like CNN lie to our faces and tell us the footage is too "nuanced" to determine whether Good was "weaponizing her vehicle" against the ICE agent. She wasn't. She was shot down in cold blood, as anyone can see, and we're all being told not to believe the evidence. Meanwhile, in a pattern we've seen before (remember right-wing murderer Kyle Rittenhouse?), a GoFundMe for Good's killer has netted over $600,000.
Our society is sick, our government is constantly lying to us, the billionaire-owned legacy media spread the lies, healthcare costs are outrageous and the Trump regime may further fuck up our health insurance at any time. Housing costs also remain sky high, and economic indicators are bad, but the stock market is doing just fine, and the Trump regime is now going after the chairman of the Federal Reserve because reasons?
Surreality like that which we're living through is the natural consequence of post-truth conditions, which, as I've been highlighting for years, are the conditions authoritarians prefer. If we can't get to the truth of what's happening around us, or if it's exceedingly difficult to do so, many people will become demoralized, tune out, and allow the regime to define "truth" through power. Under these circumstances, I've found it difficult not to succumb to feelings of powerlessness and purposelessness. Sometimes I've lost that battle, for days or even weeks. But in the rest of today's post, I'm going to focus on what gives me hope and on the techniques that are now helping me fight those feelings. Maybe they'll help some of you too.
