Attention Deprivation

“It ain’t real on the ground,” we had told a friend on Friday after the respected website Decision Desk HQ called the race, “until it hits the airwaves.”

Lordy.

The moment was operatic, out of The Godfather, the networks simultaneously settling all family business, the sheer finality of it all.

And a moment later, the videos started flooding in.

People were taking to the streets. Americans were taking their joy to the streets. Shouting. Cheering. Singing. Dancing. We haven’t just been on lockdown eight months, we’ve been locked down four years, and we were finally letting freedom ring.

And in that moment, Joe Biden became Mr. President-Elect.

The final image of Donald Trump’s tyrannical reign may be Four Seasons Total Landscaping, next door to Fantasy Island Adult Books, but the final moment will always be when Americans moved on, when, for all the power he would still hold for another ten weeks, our collective attention shifted to somebody else.

We felt that happening Friday, personally, our inner Clark Gable no longer giving a damn about the cast of characters in our national clown show, their power over our attention arising from the fact they held power at all. We felt it on Facebook, our compulsion to correct idiots with facts waning by the minute. We felt the air leaving the balloon.

And Saturday, damned if it just didn’t go flat beneath all the dancing.

Historically, tyrants live for power. But the American version, the Trump version, lives for attention. The man sucks all the air from the room, as we observed a couple years back. There is no escape, not from him, not from his enablers, not from his supporters.

That’s been his real power, his hold on our collective attention. And in a single moment, the Godfather moment, the moment our attention shifted to a near-future without him, his power was gone.

For in that moment, we no longer had to take him seriously — him, his enablers, his supporters, the lot of them.

God, what a fucking relief.

21 Comments

Very true. Talk about sound and fury signifying nothing! The man’s as empty as a revival of Starlight Express without the skates. Boring. So very, very, very boring. I’m looking to see how our All Crisis All The Time news shows will adapt (Actually I’m not. I long since got rid of cable TV.) and how long it’ll be before he announces the formation of a new party and the start of his 2024 campaign.

I watched Auntie Kamala’s victory speech and sobbed like a five year old girl from the catharsis of being freed from the non-stop daily terrorism, insanity, stupidity, cruelty, and abuse radiating out of the White Trash House for the last four long years.

Those MAGAt morons’ countless misspellings and incompetent grammatical errors alone, OMFG

Dunno how the hell the CDC will be able to completely decontaminate the place, so that it’s safe to work there again, jeezus.

Saving Diamond Joe’s speech until I need another good long cry.

Red Alert: There’s a caravan of diseased Tr666p criminals sleazing their way out of DC, and they’re toxic, malignant shit-for-brains, every last one.

@Benedick: I cannot wait to feel comfortable ignoring the news for a few days! Hugs : )

@¡Andrew!: It’s gonna be odd not waking up to “Christ, what now?” but I think I can get used to it.

Remember, civilization fans: 70 million nominally sentient beings voted for a criminally insane money launderer – most all of whom are armed, crazed, toothless and eager to kill libbies in conventional armed attacks and suicide bombing runs on foot and in their pick-up trucks.

70 million and almost as many teeth between them.

@FlyingChainSaw: Granted, and very well-aware, but since we’re stuck with them anyway, I prefer the version where they’re not running the government into the ground and killing a thousand Americans a day.

@FlyingChainSaw: Is their mass suicide out of the question? Surely that’s where all this QAsshole shit is headed.

@¡Andrew!: Seems Q has been quiet since Tuesday. Obviously Killary finally got to him.

Nojo, do we have an illustrator who can do drawings for a Stinque exclusive poll:

HOW WILL HE GO?

Like Scarface on the roof of the WH with M134?

Retire to a new career as a real Kremlin call girl?

In chains, led by a leash held by Cy Vance?

In a hearse after Melania plunges a letter opener through his sternum?

@FlyingChainSaw: I can’t even doodle decent. Page-layout software was my visual liberation.

/LA Times/

Those targeted by Trump, and the bigotry he emboldened, just woke up to a new day

“If you’re Muslim, you don’t have to worry that the president doesn’t want you here. If you’re an immigrant, you don’t have to worry the president wants [your] babies snatched away or [that he’ll] send Dreamers back for no reason. It’s a vindication for a lot of people who have really suffered. You know, ‘I can’t breathe’? That’s wasn’t just George Floyd. That was a lot of people who felt they couldn’t breathe… Since 2016, we’ve been locked down in survival mode, hoping the country hadn’t lost its humanity and soul. Hoping that it hadn’t turned against us.

Trump stoked fear of Muslims, Mexicans and every shade in between, insulted Black communities and bragged about sexually assaulting women. His GOP showed a particular intolerance for LGBTQ citizens.

“People who’d been afraid to show their racism [were] getting nastier and nastier to you,” said Jones of what it’s meant to be singled out as the Other under the banner of Trumpism.

Millions were OK with, or even relished, the state-sponsored hate of their fellow Americans. And if it made them a tad queasy, they turned the other way. Apparently dehumanizing folks like me was worth getting whatever they wanted out of this presidency.

It was hard not to lose faith, and maybe I did give up believing in our better angels until this morning.”

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-11-07/election-2020-kamala-harris-pantsuit-van-jones-tears-trump-defeat-for-non-white-america

I’m actually feeling very hopeful today, regardless of the Senate.

The GOPnazis are a doomed death cult and Tr666p is their AntiChrist Messiah. They have no platform nor plans for the future, other than sucking off the billionaire oligarchs, looting the Treasury, and continuing to betray us for munnie.

The DC rumor mill is in maximum overdrive that Melanoma is gonna divorce his nasty azz. His trash palace hotel empire is near collapse, he’s heavily leveraged with hundreds of millions in unrepayable debt coming due (to the Germans? The Russian Mafia?), and Letitia James is gonna have a nice shiny stack of state indictments waiting for him in January that he cannot corruptly pardon himself from.

Regardless of whether this broken country is capable of holding him accountable, he’s gonna die divorced, bankrupt, and completely humiliated.

And not to be indelicate, but at least 8 million far-white Baby Boomers are gonna head to their final Klan rally in hell between now and Election Day 2024. They are not going to be replaced by rabid, screaming MAGAts.

HOORAY! FOR! DONNIE!

HE’S A FUCKING CUNT!

His notes were leveraged off of a line of credit from VTB Bank – a Kremlin controlled commercial bank.

Here’s the deal – the line of correspondent credit is pro forma – happens all the time – but it can be established by agreement of the parties on underwriting discipline that has to respect the banking laws of their respective nations. Russia? Hahaha. Germany, no joking matter. BaFin has been living in DB for years.

The heat may be so high that DB would call and refuse refinance or VTB could just drop the line of credit required to maintain the notes.

Notes of that size go to the board, law or not.

I can’t see what the board of either bank could imagine they get out of maintaining a note that is likely doomed and has the best regulators on the business (BaFin) breathing down their necks.

@FlyingChainSaw:

CALL THE NOTES! CALL THE NOTES!

Or even better, send in the Ru$$ian mob.

“Do you know vaht vee do in Russia vehn you don’t pay, dahleen?”

He was gonna lose those fingers and toes to the die-ah-beetus anyway.

@nojo: Yeah, good luck with that. If the last 20 years have taught us nothing else – or, we should have learned – Republicans are relentless. They didn’t stop when they burned the economy to the ground and left it to Obama to clean up, they’re not going to stop now.

Christ, they’re gonna make me study up on challenging the electoral vote in Congress.

@nojo: Okay, here go: Congressional Research Service, November 2016.

Congress meets in joint session to count electoral votes; votes can be challenged by a member from each house, at which point they break to consider the challenges separately. (This has happened more frequently than you might think.)

And then? “Both houses must vote separately to agree to the objection. Otherwise, the objection fails and the vote or votes are counted.”

So, yeah, the Dem House ain’t letting that happen. But we’ll probably get a show out of it.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL32717/12

@nojo: All that means is TORQUE THE GERRYMANDER HARDER! HARDER! until the cult controls the House and then assfuck the electoral votes and hit Berkeley and Chicago and NYC with tactical nukes!

The cult-like aspect of 2020 GOP is nowhere better illustrated than the Georgia senators attacking the GA Sec of State. I have to hang on a few of Sec of State’s offices’ online systems for different reasons and GA rocks – and they answer their phones in two rings if I need to call. Better than Delaware by a solid margin.

Delegitimizing the election and destroying the government from the inside is the next step in the Republinazis’s coup d’tat against America. They’ve shamelessly stolen the Supreme Court and stuffed it with self-righteous partisan hacks. Prezinazi AntiChrist, Moscow Mitch, Bill Barrf, Miss Lindsey Grayuhm–they’re crazy, lying traitors, and they’re all in on it.

I just smashed the donate button on $500 to Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight, and another $250 each to the campaigns of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. This is a national emergency: We have to give til it hurts and get out the vote!

We cannot let them get away with this. Even $10 helps if we all give! Act Blue makes it super-easy.

https://fairfight.com/fair-fight-2020/

Add a Comment
Please log in to post a comment