The Algorithm Took My Mother Away
I’ll be honest — I was more excited when I thought he was going to die. Which is not to say he isn’t currently trapped in a form of living purgatory, but I desire more than existential dread. I want to watch him impotently gasp for air. I want to watch him beg a God he doesn’t believe in for mercy no God would ever provide. I want to watch him flatline, and after that I want to watch someone in short shorts exuberantly wave a LGBTQ flag from behind a barricade. I want to watch it all, and I want to watch it live on television.
Let the record show I am not typically a blood lust aficionado. But I understand now why the family members of people who were murdered push for the death penalty. Death is finality, and finality is irrefutable. There is no such thing as “fake death.” When you check the pulse, and you see it isn’t there, that’s that.
Death is the end — to our knowledge, anyway — and that’s good enough when we have experienced an unconscionable loss we can blame on one person. That’s all we want. An end. And since we can’t be in the room while it happens, we want a feed of it we can watch on an app while logged into our parents’ cable account.
I watched the victory speeches tonight and felt little. There was no smugness, no mic dropping, no unscripted commentary. The only thing that struck me was their overwhelming banality. My crank was not turned. My nut remained unbusted.
I suppose diplomacy is punk now, or at least the powers that be are trying to sell it as such. It is true that Trump attempted to, and arguably did, both usher in and nurture the end of American empathy. A president elect even acknowledging the needs of a country over his own is something we have not seen in years.
“He’s so presidential!” the pundits gushed. Yeah, I thought, he’s a politician.
The speeches were over and still we sat in front of the TV, watching the pundits analyze what we had just watched. In much the same way I am not usually interested in blood lust, I am not usually interested in television. Yet I couldn’t help but reflect on the past four days, in which everyone I knew, myself included, binge watched a guy finger fuck a touch screen and tell us things were too early to call. Now things had been called, but nevertheless we persisted in keeping the television on.
If our country has become The Walking Dead, we were watching Talking Dead. I had to leave.
When Obama won re-election, I watched it unfold in a bar and fucked off once the race had been called. I was still drinking then, with aplomb. I can vaguely recall stumbling outside to call my mother and smugly rub my belligerent enthusiasm in her face. I didn’t feel little. I felt orgasmic.
In the months that preceded that call, my mother’s husband had taken it upon himself to mercilessly mock my leftish leanings. His campaign peaked when the two of them went out of town and I was tasked with watching their house.
I entered said house alone (I am only allowed to enter it when they have exited it, and they usually exit it because they have retreated to “the lake”*) to find a series of crudely drawn racist caricatures mocking the president with the word “Nobama” written on them scotch taped to myriad walls. They were the handiwork, naturally, of my mother’s husband. The message was clear, and the message was that I was unwelcome in my childhood home.
One, which he had inserted between the toilet seat and bowl so I could not avoid it, depicted the president as a Dumbo eared, anthropomorphic plane flying into the Twin Towers. The fact that I did not keep or even document this drawing in particular will forever haunt me.
I entered their house a couple months ago (alone again, naturally) to find two eggs in the fridge, raised on decorative cardboard tubes. One read “MAGA,” the other, “TRUMP.” Easter had transpired weeks prior. Their yolks had no doubt turned gray as ash, inedible. I immediately documented them.
My mother does not believe we have reached the end, and I know this because I spoke to her today.
“I bet you’re pretty happy, right?” she asked.
“I mean, yeah...I don’t particularly like Biden, but, y’know…”
“Me neither. Not my choice. We still have to see what happens.”
“In spite of it all?” I asked. “Still?”
“He’s obviously got dementia,” she replied. “And he’s, y’know...a pedophile.”
My mind immediately jumped to Epstein’s plane, and Trump’s feet getting rubbed by an enslaved teenager, but I said nothing. Why did I say nothing? Because I was too busy wondering if Debbie had gotten into fucking QAnon.
If you sit down with her at my grandmother’s kitchen table and talk about, well, socialism, Debbie seems all for it. She has seen how her corporate overlords have taken loans from the government “that should go to actual small businesses,” she thinks healthcare is a human right, she agrees when you tell her Prop 22 was a crime against organized labor. How can she be so reasonable when it comes to these issues, but so irrational when it comes to others? How can she believe I know what I’m talking about when I talk about propositions, but not when I talk about the presidency? Somewhere she must know I’m the smart one. Somewhere she must know that’s why I’m the one who left. So why can’t she believe me, and my ability for complex thought, in perpetuity?
Debbie used to be a progressive. Debbie voted for Nader in the ‘80s. So what the fuck happened? Phones happened. Facebook happened. The algorithm took my mother away.
She is living in a different reality, a different timeline, than mine. And it continues to live, it continues to fester, until we can say it’s dead. We can say a lot of things, but can’t say that yet. And so I can’t be too happy.
* “And folks are saying...a lot of folks, actually...they’re saying, life is better at the lake.”