american election result
The only thing to do is rip the bandaid off, so let’s do it. Walk through the front door in broad daylight.
I spent Election Day 2024 at a polling place in a well-off suburb in California, so my observations have no writerly power or character of place. No declining manufacturing town or Route 66 voodoo. The people I saw were comfortable but annoyed, whether from getting scripts that need complete rewrites (“the literal dick-measuring contest just doesn’t have the propulsion it needs, the third act dies there”) or not getting the financing production deserves (“so if Atlanta gets back with fucking this, you’re somehow totally okay with that”). I got asked to participate in two comedy sketches. The hell with me.
In retrospect, I could have spent more time reflecting on how the average dude I met in real life at like the gas station had become Trump-sympathetic, and on how the average person I know is unemployed or wildly underemployed and everybody’s too embarrassed financially to meet for coffee. The lumber mill my brother worked at went out of business. Going to the grocery store actually, tangibly did become a weird nightmare.
Culture war stuff always goes cancerous when something real basic is real wrong. The economy felt horrible under Biden, and voters didn’t forgive him for it. Voters wanted to punish him for it. Harris had the professional class bloodlessness of a boss from head office who flies in to fire your ass and she said the main problem with Biden was nothing. Everything sucked. Maybe that’s all there is to it.
Before the election, it was kind of interesting that Biden took a year too long to get out of the race. But it’s now clear that if he had been the nominee, he would have lost in an electoral landslide people broadly thought was impossible in the 21st century. His legacy is secure before he even leaves office. He’s ruined.
The only interesting thing is that Harris didn’t lose. She got killed. It wasn’t even close. The campaign failed catastrophically in every single way that we can measure. The Democrats didn’t lose. Losing is boring; leads to boring articles “analyzing” “missteps.” The Democrats got hurtled into a ravine and we burned their house down.
Trump didn’t win. He achieved flight. He’s Mega-President now. Forget that stuff about Clinton just being a historically bad candidate because this guy is Super-Reagan. His comeback is exactly as insane as it looks.
What to do with the Democrats, those perverts, that barely legitimate cover for a humiliation fetish? I don’t care anymore. Make it look like an accident and make insurance cover it. Somebody else’s job. Have fun, kids.
It’s important to be plain about that stuff because the media is complicit. It’s an enabler for misery. No more flowery bullshit about trying to understand Trump voters, no more digging deep in holy books to find enlightenment, no more clucking our tongues and stroking our beards and saying “what’s to be done with this Homer Simpson?” because this thing is precisely what it looks like. No wallowing in it. Time to assess and respond. Art of War type shit.
It all boils down to this: when Juror #2 was announced, there’s no way people really believed the production would succeed. The pandemic was still an X factor. Clint Eastwood was well into his 90s and had to call in sick several times. Strikes kept holding things up. It didn’t really have any stars. And it’s, what, a legal thriller? Sounds like a fake movie so a 94-year-old can feel like he has a job to go to.
Yet it’s apparently amazing. Every single impression I’ve seen has been “this reminds me of something I’d click by on basic cable and totally fail to turn off, in a good way” or “wow, this thing is actually lit correctly.” Quietly, it’s (by consensus, I haven’t seen it) Major Eastwood.
You’d think Zaslav would let go of his monstrousness here. Clint Eastwood didn’t just become the oldest human being ever to direct a real movie. He made arguably one of the best movies of 2024 as a 94-year-old. He’s Old Hollywood. Been in the business since the Eisenhower administration. You don’t have to be a “Clint Eastwood guy” to admit he’s one of the finest Hollywood directors and one of its greatest stars ever. Hell, it’s enough just to point to Unforgiven and High Plains Drifter. Those are two of the best movies ever made.
You’d think Zaslav could set aside cocaine blowhard thoughts about ROI because this is something to confidently brag about. Warners should be celebrating the fact that one of Hollywood’s greatest icons just made one of the best movies of 2024, which is comfortably The Future, and he did it at an age where the average American has been dead for 17 years. That’s Evel Knievel stuff. That's heroic. That’s not just good for, as Philip Chevron of The Pogues liked to say, the Brothers Warner, it’s good for the whole town. It’s good for movies as a concept. The frustrating thing is that Zaslav doesn’t care at all, he never will, it’s beyond him, and that’s all there is to it.
I thought about doing one of those comedy sketches about the election. I was supposed to be outraged that a dog was voting for Donald Trump. I wanted to do it! I really wanted to do some comedy again. But it wasn’t funny. Even talking about how it wasn’t funny wasn’t funny.