It's Morning in America
Let's wake and bake
I wake up early on Thursdays, around noon or 1 pm. I prepare a hot cup of detoxifying weight-loss tea, which I buy on Instagram from a single mother whose eleven children all have mumps. I swallow enough nootropic supplements to make a chimpanzee do algebra. I do a 5-hour guided ASMR prostate drain on the Headspace app. I do my mindful journaling practice, which involves scratching the word “KILL” into the wall five hundred times with a metal shard. I’m finally ready to write Chazzy’s World.
When I sit down to write my weekly screeds, I’m usually inundated with a slurry of outrages, crimes, scandals, injustices, and affronts to decency. And I don’t mind. My job as a columnist is to put my mouth around the exhaust pipe of history and inhale the pollution of our age. But something is different. My rations taste less rancid. The Trump era is over.
The inauguration of Joe Biden was deeply, unsettlingly normal. It was also a total snooze. Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez performed, instead of a Frank Sinatra impersonator, the banjo kid from Deliverance, and someone named Gloria Glock who makes handguns “disappear.” When fireworks bejeweled the night sky, Biden simply looked at them and smiled, instead of clapping and dancing like a sugared-up youngster at the county fair. After four years of speeches about how O Magazine is a total rag and McDonald’s has gotten very stingy with sauce packets, I forgot how presidents usually just say boring Model UN bullshit. Biden didn’t even do a single impression!
I read through the 17 executive orders Biden signed yesterday and felt something I have not in the past four years: approval. Under Trump, just about everything the government did was the exact opposite of what I wanted. Disappointment was the norm. Even when things did happen that I agreed with — prison reform, withdrawal from Afghanistan, acknowledging the Uyghur genocide — I was so suspicious of ulterior motives and ancillary profiteering that I could never fully support it. It was bizarre to read 17 executive orders and find them not just unobjectionable, but impressive.
Four years of constant rage were not good for us. The risk now is that we will be unable to see the good in anything again.
I already see it happening. When Biden unveiled his $1.9 trillion stimulus proposal, people immediately attacked it for interpreting “$2000 checks” as the existing $600 we already got plus $1400 more. That has a certain sleazy, legalese feel to it, for sure. But the instant diaper moistening over it caused everyone to overlook the $15 federal minimum wage and elimination of the tipped minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage to $15 would be a huge, huge progressive victory. It more than doubles the current wage of $7.25, which is used in 20 states. That will meaningfully improve peoples’ lives for years to come, and isn’t that the point of all this? For unemployed people, the stimulus plan calls for up to $1400 in benefits per week. Focusing on a missed one-time benefit of $600 is unpragmatic, and more about getting to complain than helping someone else. I know it’s not the cool opinion, but fuck it. It’s not good to be angry all the time!
Of course, the Biden presidency will disappoint us. I’m not optimistic about our most pressing needs as a country, such as single-payer healthcare and a Green New Deal. But what do you expect? There are roughly seven national politicians who publicly support those ideas. Many of my policy priorities have no backing at all in mainstream politics, such as statehood for Long Island, the Smithsonian Museum of Bass Guitar, and psilocybin in our schools. But the point of having radical ideas isn’t to see them happen immediately and without struggle. If your goals happened immediately with the installation of a new president, you were not dreaming big enough.
To be clear, though, politician worship is not the answer. Lord knows we have enough of that already. Chris Cuomo is calling Congress “heroic” for investigating if anyone used the “Fr-do” slur during the Capitol insurrection. The New York Times is launching an IGTV show about who served, who threw shade, and who flopped in Washington.After the Twitter president, Andrew Yang is trying to be the first iFunny mayor. Stephen Colbert can’t stop crying. If these people won’t do their job of holding politicians accountable, we will have to do it ourselves. But that doesn’t mean we need to make ourselves miserable in the process.
Rest assured, there will be scandals in the Biden administration. He will accidentally call the Prime Minister of Canada “Jesse Turdo.” During a 60 Minutes interview, he will ask Leslie Stahl multiple times if her eyes are brown or hazel, then compare hand sizes. He will be caught on tape discussing “that hairy fella in the unitard with the big mouth,” referring to Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness. He will inflame tensions with North Korea by telling Kim Jong Un that he’s “in the ring with a crazy ass white boy who knows how to dance.” Hunter will launch a company called Lake Day Lenses that makes casual sunglasses with bottle openers in the arm. Lake Day Lenses will be given a $70 million contract to manufacture precision optics needed for an escalated military conflict in Somalia.
Tomorrow, I’ll wake up, Inshallah. I’ll make my skinny tea, swallow my brain pills, and do my guided meditation. Then I’ll grab my metal shard, dig it into the wall, and carve a great, big smile.