America the Surreal

An Assassination Attempt, Fake National Unity. and Our Fascist-Enabling Media

A Personal Note

Tomorrow I’m heading to Indiana for a week to celebrate my dad’s 70th birthday. I almost never travel with my laptop anymore, as I can’t use it for long without a decently ergonomic setup due to chronic neck pain. As a result, there will be no Bugbear Dispatch next week, but I’ll be back the week after and ready to finally get into a solid routine in the new place.

Meanwhile, the summer subscription sale is still on—$1 off a monthly subscription or $15 off an annual subscription. If you’re already a paid subscriber, could you please help spread the word?

Political Violence and America’s Surreal Mediascape

A lot has changed since I last posted—four whole days ago. Not for me, personally, but certainly for the country and the news cycle. And yet it also feels like not much has changed at all, in spite of the assassination attempt against Republican presidential candidate and convicted felon Donald Trump, Trump’s choice of a running mate in the equally unlikable J.D. Vance, and Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon throwing out Trump’s federal classified documents case after months and months of dithering that benefited Trump.

The news cycle has moved rapidly this week, but almost seems to have been on something like a circular trajectory. It’s bizarre and uncomfortable.

Original pic by Ad Meskens, via Wikimedia Commons. Edited by Chrissy Stroop.

An assassination attempt on a high-profile political figure is always sobering, at least briefly. But this moment of “national unity” the legacy media and cable news outlets have tried to conjure up is clearly nothing but wishful thinking on their part.

I’m old enough to remember a real moment of something like national unity, even if that unity had a dark side—the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, during which George W. Bush’s approval rating soared to 92% and remained sky-high for several months. In retrospect, the way most Americans uncritically rallied around Bush and, in New York, Rudy Giuliani, wasn’t a good thing. The Bush administration exploited the moment to pound the war drums, and the unity was at least partly held together by rising, and increasingly vicious, Islamophobia. But all that aside, our current moment is absolutely nothing like that.

Beyond that mild initial shock—this is probably an unflattering admission, but I’ll make it anyway—I felt pretty much numb. I certainly knew there was no American “unity” coming that would in any way include me as a transgender woman.