politics.

As a side-effect of looking for a job, I’ve had a lot of time lately to reflect on my past lives, the work I’ve done, what I really believe in and what I need. Trying to find my real, authentic self. Speaking from experience: it’s terrible. Don’t do it. It is impossible to overstate how much you will hate doing this. If you have dishes to do or need an oil change, get on that as soon as you start to feel thoughts happening. They’re no good. They lie a lot and they aren’t your friends. Try cardio instead. It’s like walking, but faster.

I’ve gone pretty far down the list of things to reflect on. Should I start taking baths? Is Martin Amis actually worth reading? Do I secretly like jazz? The last couple days, regrettably, I finally got to politics (American electoral politics, not real politics). I was a poli-sci major. I wrote some political editorials for my college newspaper. And, hold on, right, I was a full-blown political correspondent for literally MTV News during the 2016 election. That was my day job.

Still staggering to comprehend. Felt like I’d won the lottery. It was the only time in my whole life that I was offered a job, slammed a pot of coffee, paced and smoked cigarettes for awhile, and realized it was something I could do. It was a lot of hard work and I was hanging by the skin of my teeth the whole time but deep down I always thought “if I focus, this is easy. I know exactly how to do this job.” 

That job was impossible to comprehend. I got on an airplane for the first time. I covered presidential campaigns. Drove across the entire United States despite never having left California barring a family trip to Florida I barely remembered besides going to a Piggly Wiggly’s and learning what humidity was. Met the former president of Mexico. Had conversations with Alex Jones and Don King. 

Went to the Republican and Democratic conventions. Intimately followed Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns though my heart was, you know, actuarially speaking, I liked Bernie (we’re both James McMurtry fans) and I’ve had a couple beers with Will Menaker. First time I meaningfully voted. Figured out what ballot initiatives are and worked on the Paramount lot in a building named after Preston Sturges, hopefully because he was in there once. It didn’t have enough electrical outlets but I didn’t even care. People with a bunch of money said my voice mattered.

Trial by fire, moving from the middle of nowhere to the middle of everything. Went to a thousand places I never thought I’d see. At one point a thinktank/publishing industry goon, high level, skyscraper vampire, actual money, even tried to convince me to write something stunningly similar to what wound up being Hillbilly Elegy. Michael Savage spent an entire episode hollering about me before saying I should ghostwrite his memoirs. I had a piece featured on Chris Hayes’ show at MSNBC. I shit you not, just nine months after publishing a feature about driving to Chico to buy my little brother a copy of Super Smash Bros. for the DS, I had bodyguards.

You’d think after all that I’d have a career in politics, but the fact is I’m only a writer. I sit at a computer and try to be entertaining. The reason that job happened is I was a good representation of something: educated, but from blue-collar stock, and I became an adult during the recession, which meant I was totally disillusioned and alienated. I was one of the ones who fell through the cracks. That whole rural malaise bit. People figured it could help everybody understand the Bernie and Trump campaigns.

But all I ever knew about politics was stuff I got from Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke, two writers I enjoyed as a teenager mostly because they wrote jokes. And I had a family member in local talk radio, so I heard a lot of it and knew its relevance was underrated. That same family member was also one of the first guys to publicly endorse and stump for Arnold Schwarzenegger during the California recall, which I knew had been memory-holed. This put me in a position to say, with sell-your-bonds-and-drive-to-Vegas confidence, that Trump was definitely going to be president. I never quite got to say that professionally because of peer pressure and a single-minded desire to hold on to my job for dear life, but it was always there between the lines. Funny how that seemed to matter back then.

I say “back then” because I couldn’t do that job now. First because it doesn’t exist and second because I no longer have relevance to the political economy, the churn, all of which is ephemera. I was accidentally in a Moment, and now I’m not. That’s all. The only way I could have continued that career would be to lie my ass off by writing a bunch of elegant op-eds about the sad state of America. Succeeding at that requires you to write solely for points, truly treat it like a game, know when you should say the “right” things. Read a bunch of H.L. Mencken and John Steinbeck and chase it with the Bible, watch the news too much, log on as hard as you can, and you too can be a scumbag.

I learned to care about politics while I was on the clock in 2016, but it was never a natural interest. Now it’s an election year again. In a few weeks we’re gonna pick a new president. I’ve been trying, mainly as a thought exercise, to care. Of course I care, I have morals and empathy and I want people to live instead of die, but I’m not a meaningful part of the process and it doesn’t work that way. The process is strictly about money, and the job of president is sort of a TV job. They’re all beholden to billionaires and it’s marketing and you know that already. When you pay too much attention to national electoral politics, it’s manipulating the same parts of the brain as football games and soap operas. A perfectly natural waste of time, an “elevated” form of watching television.

The following contains no ideology. This isn’t an op-ed, it’s a reflection. 

It’s theoretically interesting that the current president is so old that he medically could not run for reelection. I didn’t know that was possible and it shouldn’t have been possible. I imagine it’ll emerge, sometime after the next president is sworn in, that his health was deteriorating for longer than we thought and it was worse than we knew. That’s an embarrassing problem for America’s reputation, it literally makes us look like we’re in decline, and it poses some hypotheticals that had never occurred to me before. Jimmy Carter, 100 years old, asked our sitting president to speak at his funeral, and it’s a legitimate question mark whether he’ll live that long.

Harris is sort of interesting in that she immediately had a ton of momentum because she’s a normal type of an age and she’s relatable. But it feels like that momentum has been squandered as her campaign has become more codified, as advisors and focus groups and ultimately money have taken over. Her excellent first slogan, which was essentially “vote for me and I will become president,” has been replaced by corporate gobbledygook. 

Trump is, as before, his own thing. Everything he does feels like a chapter in a generationally defining book about American hubris, including his decline and his becoming boring. Much was made of the assassination attempt for a few minutes, but assassination attempts aren’t actually unusual (I grew up thinking being president must be a lousy job specifically because you have to think about assassination attempts for the rest of your life). What was unusual was how fast it died in the news cycle. It wasn’t sticky. And now he just seems tired. The campaign has lost the narrative thread, which in 2016 was actually pretty consistent. What’s still unusual about him is how long he’s been the star of politics. 2016 was a long time ago. This is the third time he’s been the nominee for president. It shows on his face. The whole bit seems tired. A show in the 9th season where they add cast members you hate.

I’m usually positive about who's going to be president. George H.W. Bush lost when he checked his watch. Clinton was a rock star. Kerry lost when he couldn’t catch that football, plus he looked like a bad guy in Caddyshack. Obama had youth and vigor. Hillary Clinton was never going to win because of favorables and she was too legacy anyway. Trump was never going to win reelection because you don’t win reelection during a pandemic. He ran a campaign against nothing, and lost. But in 2024, for the first time I have no clue. I suspect Trump loses again by a boring margin, but it feels like a coin toss.

And interest in the election feels low in general. The media types I know aren’t talking about the horse race like they did in 2016. The urgency isn’t there. You’ll still occasionally find older people or resistance cosplayers trying to drum up memetic outrage, but it’s nothing like it once was. Meanwhile, in my own bubble of blue collar and underemployed people in the parts of L.A. where regular people live, the election has yet to come up at all. Usually they just talk about the Dodgers, not having any money and the search for steady, full-time work; a collective “times are tough out there” sigh. Signs about believing in science outnumber political signs by a thousand to one. I saw a guy with a Lebowski 2024 t-shirt at the gas station yesterday. That’s it. Without cable news to turn on, this all feels like a movie that died at the box office.

As for the role politics plays in my own life, my experience with politics as a career, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have the money, time, or energy for it to matter. I’m just trying to get by. All I know is what we need to do as people, and it’s the same thing we’ve always needed to do. Help the poor and needy.