by Lucy Ellmann
Are birds so bothered by THINGS? They don’t seem it. When you’re building a nest, stuff must go wrong all the time. No nails or glue available. If you drop THINGS, they land miles below. Twigs must sometimes refuse to be woven the way the bird planned. A cotton wool ball the bird carefully carried to the nest is whipped away by a breeze, an egg falls out, a cuckoo or cowbird baby is born. It’s a tricky THING, at the best of times, bringing up young THINGS at a great height on a platter of grass in the crook of a tree branch. But birds soldier on, patient and forgiving towards THINGS. Birds just let THINGS be. Birds get on with THINGS. They don’t dwell on THINGS, the usurpations committed against them by THINGS they can’t control. Or I sure hope they don’t, because it blights your life, having this THING about THINGS.
We bear grudges, and often take it out on THINGS: slamming doors, violently thwacking THINGS with a stick. We waste THINGS like water and plastic bags, and use up too much loo paper, just for the hell of it. We are mean to THINGS. We hurl THINGS when petulant, we squeeze THINGS harder than strictly necessary, we ignore THINGS, junk THINGS, fly-tip THINGS, refuse to clean or tend THINGS or repair THINGS or recycle THINGS. We disobey the clear will of THINGS. And with 3-D printers we even downgrade the organic integrity and traditional nature of THINGS!
All these little comebacks we have against THINGS – our revenge against THINGS for all the THINGS THINGS have dumped on us. And then, in the calm after the storm, we try to make THINGS up with THINGS, try to get along with THINGS again for a while if we can. But the rapprochement soon dissolves into some sort of sordid kind of stand-off THING, with each side doing little THINGS that eat away at bonhomie. THINGS have their own agenda, and it’s rarely our kind of THING.
THINGS probably started it, but we’ve carried on the fight: polluting THINGS, shooting THINGS, refuting the basic nature of THINGS. Lugging poor old boulders all the way to Stonehenge… We’re always wrecking THINGS, exploiting THINGS, belittling THINGS, dislodging THINGS, exacerbating THINGS, delaying THINGS, extinguishing THINGS. We are so ignorant of THINGS. We just don’t fit into the grand scheme of THINGS, and THINGS know it.
So it’s understandable THINGS might take the hump.
THE UNDERGROUND BUNKER
On January 6, 2021, the USA imploded. Trump’s rabid followers, a lynch mob sporting Nazi slogans, nooses, Confederate flags, guns, spears, explosives, and plastic zip-tie handcuffs, attempted a coup. They rioted, assaulted police and reporters, broke into offices and scared politicians half to death with the threat of assassination. They erected a gallows outside the Capitol building, sprayed gas at opponents, and desecrated a public landmark with pee and shit and blood and spit. They killed one police officer by beating him with flags and a fire extinguisher. With others they took selfies. To cap it off, they participated in a superspreader event during a pandemic. All because their leader, a delusional mass murderer (who let thousands die from Covid-19) wanted to continue illegally as president. And what a president. The MAGA hats and Trump brand are now signs of infamy. But those treasonous bums had the time of their lives!
Still, Americans blather on about how great America is. They’ll salute their ruined nation till the whole place is awash in corpses, swastikas, and radioactive waste. They’ll be clinging to the roof, barbecuing steaks up there, talking god and cars and UFOs and QVC jewellery lines until there’s nothing left alive but a few DDT-resistant bugs.
Americans are acutely unaware of the past and the future. Also, the present. History is infinitely malleable for them. So is reality. Are they just undereducated, indoctrinated, chronically indifferent, hypnotised, or too damn busy makin’ a buck? Consumed by consumerism, they wallow in army fatigues and self-regard, coveting the next dynamite Apple doodad or an AK-47, plasma screen and some Nikes. They have worried everybody and ruined the earth, all so that they can prance around, effect insouciance, drink beer, watch football, guzzle Sloppy Joes and Oreos, wear pro-Auschwitz sweatshirts, make pipe bombs, absorb incessant rock music, object to positive discrimination and the public display of female nipples, wonder whether the mailman has shut the mailbox properly, and choose a new euphemism for excretion yearly.
Dazed and furious, they wrestle with a world of distraction and fake facts, their minds ravaged by malign corporations, PFAs, PCBs, dioxins, cocaine, caffeine, and any creed on offer – American god-lust is among the many forms of self-sabotage that gave us this male-order muppet show in the first place. The US is now the worst Boy Scout jamboree or jerk circle in history.
MEN HAVE GLORIED IN THIS. Men with their hierarchies, their secret handshakes, gang warfare, ownership, privilege, entitlement, and extra helpings of roasted meat. They glory in death, and the chastening of women. Women are exhausted! Fifty women a day are shot dead in America by so-called partners. How can women thrive in such a society?
Not just in America but elsewhere too. What have we got to show for putting up with thousands of years of male rule? On the plus side, Roman mosaics, rocking chairs, and the Chrysler Building. On the minus? Fascism, poverty, carnage, the Large Hadron Collider, tornadoes, tirades, Boogaloo Bois, Three Percenters, Elk reunions, the internal combustion engine, and oceanic levels of plastic.
Patriarchy has trashed the place. Wildlife is pretty much finished now. Walruses drop helplessly to their deaths from iceless rocks. Soon there will be no orangutans. There are now queues on Mount Everest. Next thing you know, everyone will insist on riding the Loch Ness monster.
Men have wrecked everything of beauty and cultivated everything putrid on the face of the earth. Not all men, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I’m generalising. But it’s for a good cause: sanity. Men have a death wish. Violence is not just a drug for them, it’s a security blanket.
Men learn early on to mock the female body. Girls are mocked for menstruating, which they cannot help, and breastfeeding too is frowned on by many a well-fed man. Everything women do is taboo. Anything men can do, women can do better – but somehow, everything women do, men say stinks.
Men couldn’t oppress us any better if they really did get together in an underground bunker and plan the whole thing out. Which I half-suspect they do. How else would they all come up with the same identical thoughts on high heels, inflatable sex dolls, and the pay gap? (Though Trump’s taste in femininity always seemed a little corny.) In the absence of anything positive to contribute, male power rests on a tiresome combination of volition, violation, and volatility, along with booze, biz, bellowing, and boring the pants off you.
The United States of America has now reached a whole new level of patriarchal absurdity. You mean they massacred the Indians, enslaved the Africans, cut down all the trees, poisoned all the rivers, and extinguished or imprisoned all the animals for THIS, this hellhole of bombast and hamburgers and opioid addictions and cardboard-box houses and pretend ideas? You mean they used up all the oxygen on 4th of July firecrackers and forcing kids to pledge allegiance to the flag every goddam day, drank Coke till they choked, spat tobaccy till they puked, fought cancer (but only for people with lots of money), nestled in Nestlés, slurped slurpees, burped burpees, handed on herpes, Tasered the wayward, jailed the frail and tortured about a million billion chickens (then fried and ate them), just so people can drive around and shoot each other and create GoFundMe sites to pay the hospital bills?
Make America abate again.
TRAPPED FAMILY FINGERS
When exactly did America give up on love of life? Are they the victims of some awful experiment? You almost expect the gigantic bald pate of a mad scientist to appear over the Rockies one day, checking on his helpless specimens, all stuck in their hamster wheels of indefatigable optimism.
Flummoxed by fake facts, Fox News, and the phoniest guy they could find for prez,1 Americans rely on Disney for comfort, along with vaccine evasion, Vietnam bombing-raid re-enactments, and whole days devoted to YouTube gaming videos. For the few remaining centrists and liberals, there’s a self-congratulatory movie now and then about R
uth Bader Ginsberg or the more prominent heroes of the Underground Railway – while everyone unites to await execution at church, the mall, the gas station, convenience store, or parking lot. Or, of course, at home.
When they tire of killing each other, they slaughter some Iraqis or Afghans. No wonder extraterrestrials haven’t the stomach to visit the US any more.
Every child in America has now been drilled in how to climb under the desk when a shooting spree is going on. The latest idea for preventing school shootings is to train dogs to confront the gunman. The dog is supposed to make his or her way to the homicidal maniac, mid-rampage, and wrestle him to the ground. These are kamikaze K-9s, doomed from the start to be shot along with everybody else.
Or here’s a good move: arm the teachers! This they’ve done and, as a result, children are now exposed to guns, gun threats, and gun accidents at school every day. Parents dutifully join campaigns for ‘gun sense’ while their kids have nightmares and panic attacks and try to run faster than a speeding bullet.
For extra protection (at least for the upper torso, if shot from the rear), your child can wear a bulletproof backpack:
THREE TIMES THE FUN!
BOOK BAG, LUNCH PAIL AND LIFE-PRESERVER, ALL IN ONE!
Or just pretend Sandy Hook and Parkland never actually happened. Then you don’t have to doubt the American system at all.
Never in all this is the possibility of simply banning all firearms raised. Forget gun control, gun reform, gun sense. How about NO GUNS? There is no unassailable right to own a gun or be shot. Babies are not yet born armed.
But not to worry. Rube Goldberg’s here and he’s just turned on his think-faucet! Republican senator (A), on way to receive large cash donation (B) from NRA (C), slips on wife’s alligator handbag (D), out of which flies cockatoo (E). While senator is out cold, bird spies blueberry muffin (F) on desk (G) and settles in for big breakfast. Scrabbling about, cockatoo upsets bottle of Kahlúa (H). Bottle spills, bird steps in puddle (I), and produces sloppy but legally ‘X’ on important document banning guns (J), which only required one more signature. Before senator (A) even regains consciousness, total ban on private ownership of guns in America has been instituted, and all guns (K) have been thrown into either Pacific (L) or Atlantic (M). Random child (N) is now able to attend random elementary school (O) in safety and learn alphabet (PQRSTUVWXYZ).
Freud said America was a big mistake, presumably because it was a place where the id was allowed to run rampant, from Columbus’s outrages on through all the land-grabbing, massacres, slavery, greed, insensibility, Oscars ceremonies, and ice-cream sundaes. As Randy Newman put it:
Hide your wives and daughters, hide your groceries too, Great nations of Europe coming through.
By the mid-1800s, the experiment had undeniably turned sour. Fanny Trollope was appalled by Americans, finding them not only cheerless, misogynistic, murderous, and unneighbourly, but so vulgar! They ate with their knives and she couldn’t believe how much they spat. The only time they seemed to brighten up a bit was on Independence Day, or at least the men did (‘women have but little to do with the pageantry, the splendour, or the gaiety of the day’, she wrote):
On the 4th of July the hearts of the people seem to awaken from a three hundred and sixty-four days’ sleep; they appear high-spirited, gay, animated, social, generous, or at least liberal in expense; and would they but refrain from spitting on that hallowed day, I should say, that on the 4th of July, at least, they appeared to be an amiable people.2
Some spit, others are spat out. The go-getters go get, the rest get got. The US has long teetered on the verge of ‘mobology’ and is subject to the ‘mobocratic spirit’, as Lincoln put it.3 America was always each man for himself, with a big investment in lawlessness. Abolition’s still a work in progress.
Carlos Fuentes identified the ‘anguish’ intrinsic to the American way of life, the anguish of ‘doing, getting things done, making it’. Failure, pretty much guaranteed in such a merciless set-up, goes unloved. That’s why Trump, one of the biggest failures of all time, tried to transmogrify his every fiasco into a supposed success.
Fear of failure drives Americans into uptight bubbles of ME, only relieved by the collective daily orgasm of consumerism. Shopping is proof of citizenship. This provides Americans with the us in US. (Undocumented ‘Dreamers’ just dream of buying stuff.) Even the niceness of many Americans seems suspect, because you never know if it’s just a precautionary kindness. What if all those chocolate chip cookies suburbanites offer each other are really SOS messages? Chip-on-the-shoulder cookies. What if American politeness stems from Stockholm syndrome: three hundred and thirty million captives, all being pleasant just to avoid being shot in the head?
‘When terror descends’ (as Edward Albee put it4), these helpless, cornered creatures easily swap democratic rights for gossip, lobbyists, peer pressure, Super PACs, gerrymandering, voting restrictions, that antique gewgaw the Electoral College, pre-election dismantling of the postal service and post-election dismantling of the vote count.
‘I just want to find eleven thousand, seven hundred and eighty votes,’ Trump boldly declared, two whole months after losing the 2020 election. Sad.
But there’s an upside! All this powerlessness leaves more time for the ME stuff. Because, you know, there’s like all this pop music to consider, cosmetics to apply, and foreign slave-labour jeans to purchase, so many beggars to belittle, billionaires to emulate, elders to ignore, and theories about the purifying effects of mindfulness or green tea to propound. So much purifying and putrefying going on. It’s really very absorbing! Never mind what the police are doing just down the street to Black men who don’t mow their lawns in the right direction.
Patriotism, charity, and heroism have been replaced by one essential task: the moral duty to go to the gym. If only these people, so enamoured of exercise, would use their muscles for the greater good. Instead of scolding the sedentary, these eager beavers could help out a bit more. Plant trees, lug food to the poor, scoop plastic crap out of rivers, fortify cities against flood and fire. Forfeit their cars and run (if run they must) to work. March too, on Washington – and stay there, dammit, till all the nitwits depart.
But so much time is devoted to the self, there’s none left for society. Americans count the calories, not the capitalists. Meanwhile, the ICE man cometh: Guantanamo wasn’t enough for everybody, the Republicans now want immigrants incarcerated for life too.
At the sight of child prisons and all the screaming, self-described liberals cry out, ‘This is not America, this is not who we are!’ But it so clearly is who they are. Or what they became while drinking the requisite amount of sody-pop and gawping at their smartphones.
‘Why can’t I have anything just for me? Is that so selfish?’ ‘Actually, that’s the definition of selfish.’5
Americans hardly think beyond the bounds of family. Thanksgiving and Xmas won out against the Covid scare. These are people drowning in family life, family fun, family businesses, family secrets, Family Paks of aspirin and burger buns, Family Size gallons of milk, beer, and OJ (the drink, not the felon), family cars big enough to shove trucks off the road, family pets, family movies, family vacations, family affiliations, family trees, family traits, family genetic diseases, family men, family matters, family favourites, family hunting trips, family vendettas, family murder–suicides.
Americans are trapped in trapped families – and the hills are alive with the sound of gunfire.
You’d think mothers might be awarded high status in such a family-oriented set-up, but women in America have no status at all. As we saw with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, not only are some men called Brett, but American women never get a word in edgewise.
Professor Christine Blasey Ford offered the nation a lesson on integrity. It didn’t take.6 The US is really just one big internment camp for women, where they are gagged, cuffed, and detained, awaiting a (fair) hearing.
Kavanaugh good for Amer-ic-a.
Women not heard in Amer-ic-a.
Women not safe in Amer-ic-a.
Women just slaves in Amer-ic-a, free to wait tables and shine shoes.
America’s no place for women. It’s so depraved that a woman can’t even work a shit job in a shirt store without having to choose one day if she wants to be sodomised or shot in the head. Whatever happened to compassion, or a sense of community? But that word is awkwardly close in sound to communism, which frightens Americans more than death itself. (And the intensity of that fear frightens everybody else!) All their help-thy-neighbour impulses quail at the mere hint of communism. Socialism too – though paradoxically they don’t mind socialist programmes like Medicare, state education, the fire service, search and rescue volunteers, national parks, and transport infrastructure. The latest nickname for protestors against climate change, people hoping to preserve future life on earth, is ‘watermelons’: green on the outside and red on the inside.
Nah, we don’t want life on earth. Leave us alone.
Just as Brexit is the apotheosis of age-old British self-hatred, America embarked in 2016 on its own act of self-immolation. The nation mulled things over, Stan Laurel-style, blinked its eyes, scratched its head, and decided to go for more corporate criminality, more exploitation, more inequity, more poverty, more sickness, more indifference, more conformism, more conservativism, more waste, more plastic, more violence. And astonishing levels of sadness. The mad scientist must be about to begin his vivisection. Obediently, the lab rats lounge before their big TV screens, munching apocalypse stew – dumbo gumbo – and railing against RINOs,7 every house blazing with the sinister blue light of unreason.