Shadow Play
As of today, the government has been shut down for twenty-two days. Who shut down the government? We are told, twice on the same page, that “democrats have shut down the government.”
Who are the democrats? Nothing but a flickering fluorescent lamp equivalent of a political party — out of power — whose main concern when it comes to 'shutting down' anything is relegated to interparty criticism of Israel's genocide in Gaza. The republican party, meanwhile, is wrecking the parts of the state they find disagreeable and using the other parts to flatten political enemies. Are we really supposed to believe the democrats completely and entirely own this government shutdown — and that we need to be told twice? Do most republicans even believe that?
While all of this shutting down takes place, the diminishing opposition 'democrat' party are granted apparent powers of perfidy and destruction completely the reverse of their strength; they are ridiculed as useless and ineffectual as their wickedness mounts. To wit, learn about their cabal of evil constituents as per belching fount of gaseous black bile, Karoline Leavitt: “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”
If pointing out that the plotters and petty tyrants in the government are asking us to not believe our ears and eyes — that the democrats control everything when in reality they control nothing, and that the average democratic constituent is a violent and illegal terrorist — feels like sloppy farce, what’s coming next is worse. The instruments we use to even detect the truth are being dismantled not because of their failures, but because of their successes. Is climate change a big problem for much of life on earth? Not if we ignore that question, and when an entirely different framework for how we understand the world around us is created instead.
2021. Things were bad enough before the power went out. We were inside for months, waiting out the pandemic, and then the streets froze, the lights went out and the faucets stopped working. Many of us in formerly un-snowbound places tasted a piece of the weather’s extreme New Normal with the arrival of Winter Storm Uri, which “dragged an arctic wrecking ball southward through the nation in mid-February, leaving at least 223 people dead, 210 of them perishing in Texas,” recalls Louie Bond in an article for a Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine article published one year after the storm.
Did so many have to die? The freak storm was exacerbated by another unusual and ghastly disaster — the energy grid taking a shit and leaving swaths of the state without running water, power, or both. The University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute estimates that the “massive electricity generation failure” during Uri caused “at least 57 deaths across 25 Texas counties,” in a prelude to a report (currently unavailable from their own website) that they created, in part, to combat misinformation: “While much press has been dedicated to identifying the entities and individuals potentially at fault, determining exact causes and accurately assigning responsibility for an event this complex requires expert input and opinion. There is a strong public need for reliable information about the fundamental causes of the crisis and for identification of core market design, regulatory, and policy gaps that can be addressed to make the Texas energy system more robust and resilient to such massive shocks in the future.”
As the report itself is missing for whatever reason, we can instead read the National Science Foundation’s pronouncement of the “root causes” of the grid’s fuckup, namely “the insufficient preparation of electric generating units and natural gas infrastructure for the winter storm, and the inability of natural gas supply to meet demand for residential heating and electricity generation.” Discussions followed as to how Texas could avoid a loss of power in future storms, and while arguments as to whether to “connect the grid” (or not) frequently fell along partisan lines, what I was not prepared to see — when the power finally came back on — was a politician arguing against reality itself.
Governor Greg Abbott, interviewed on Fox News, angrily took issue not with the grid’s connectivity or anything having to do with natural gas at all, but on the purely theoretical idea for a Green New Deal, which, as he says, “thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power in a statewide basis.” The Texas Tribune article takes pains to point out that while sources of renewable energy did fail, that amount was dwarfed by the failure of thermal sources of power.
As sinister and as (possibly) intentionally incorrect Abbot was, what struck me as unique about his attack is that it steps outside the typical formations of a logical argument. It would be one thing for the Governor to blame the grid’s failure on some policy passed by, say, a majority-blue city in Texas, but it is another to blame it on a phantom. For the first time that I can remember, an elected figure has blamed not just the attitude or the beliefs of a supposed enemy (“wokeness,” etc.) for a problem — and instead is blaming a concrete and structural failure on a wish of that enemy.
In other words, Abbott does not even see the necessity of addressing the real problems that resulted in the grid failure, and then blaming the opposition for those problems. Instead he is saying that nothing caused something. It is impossible to argue against him, because what he is talking about doesn’t exist. Typically, what is called “the burden of proof” would require someone like Abbott to prove that the Green New Deal caused the grid failure, or that the Green New Deal is real. This new style of argument, instead, prefers not to.
A year previous to our disaster in 2021, killer wildfires scorched the West Coast. But as with Abbott’s explanation above, the easiest mark for conspiracy-minded finger-pointers was the hypothetical — in this case, see social media posts blaming “BLM-ANTIFA” for some kind of coordinated arson that started the blaze. It’s tempting to try and parse the falseness of such a claim, beginning with the fact that it is completely unsubstantiated and bizarre, but this kind of messaging (whether spread cynically or in true faith) might be better understood as a kind of intellectual framework that dispenses with cause and effect. Like the (nonexistent) Green New Deal causing power outages in Texas, the arsonists in the supergroup “BLM-ANTIFA” are fated to do bad things because they are bad — even if the criminals or their tools have to be invented.
Like a political Calvinism, this post-reality outlook insists upon itself but does not technically need to exist. It was fated, somehow and somewhere, that both good and evil are real and eternal, and that good eventually conquers evil. In the old politics, when an administration needed a pretext for action, they used what they had and fit the facts to make their justifications for what came next. The move going forward is for the right wing to conflate actions with the actor. Good people simply don’t do bad things, and vice-versa. When something good happens, it can only be a result of actions by the good people, despite what those actions actually are.
Problem: the government shutdown is viewed as bad by the public, but we have a republican-led government. Solution: thanks to the equation above, then of course “The Radical Left in Congress” are at fault here. The good people in charge have decided it could be no other way.
What we are seeing right now in the Trump administration is a struggle to reconcile what they are saying with an uncompromising reality. This television presidency believes it can float above everything else, and, like the real causes of wildfires or grid failure, gravity is something you can ignore. However, this approach has a very short window of utility. Purging the government of every messenger warning of climate change and other important, existential issues does not actually kill the message; someone, somewhere, is going to have to hear it.
