Trump and Bannon are engaged in the ultimate catfight in a reality show that we don’t necessarily want to watch—and yet we can’t look away.
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Is it good that Trump and Bannon are fighting? This is a normal question to think about at night when you are chewing your fingers off your hand. Are you binge-watching this new show, The Real Sociopaths of Washington D.C. too? Instead of too blessed to be repressed housewives, it’s two deranged white supremacist guys going at each other and they don’t throw wine in each other’s faces but they do both fuck donuts and then eat them. One of them is definitely threatening nuclear war with North Korea! One of them might have the other guy’s pee tape or maybe even pee-pee DVD! Both of them are writing “TREEZON” on a Quiznos napkin with a crayon and yes, of course, they are eating the crayons! One’s face is curdling and the other’s is flaking off in chunks! This is one of those shows that involves white people voting. It’s just like American Idol except no one sings and there’s a bomb in the toilet! And we’re all sitting on the bomb toilet and now there’s a bomb cyclone too! Help!
Maybe this is the reality show tipping point we need. But shouldn’t the tipping point have been when Trump publicly mocked a disabled reporter or when he described his routine sexual assaults? Or when the KKK started to wear their hate in the light of day because Trump’s administration made them feel safe? Will the tipping point be death or something like it? I guess we can all hate-watch America until it goes up in flames, but that is a shamefully empty, subhuman way to live and die. Please, if we must choose to live and die in a reality television format, can we choose to live inside the world of The Great British Bake Off? A quaint and cozy reality show where no one is competing for the replacement of an angry father’s love, everyone is simply, sanely baking.
Everyone previously or currently in the Trump administration is in one giant, hateful, abusive relationship-beast and we feed the beast with our trembling thumbs, our stinging eyeballs and anxious hearts. How many times can you drop your napkin while shakily eating soup and trying to follow the maniacal plot of this madness? We can’t look away from the beast. We birthed the beast and fed it and now it might kill us. Our concept of reality has become lethally, robotically, dumb—and dire. Reality used to bite, now it sucks the humanity from our neckholes.
Remember the quaint hum of the internet in the film You’ve Got Mail? The click of Meg Ryan’s fingers on the comfortingly clunky keys of a chunky laptop? The delightful rush her character described feeling, when she heard the little robot voice chime “You’ve got mail?” A delightful rush of emotion, I wonder what that feels like. The modern world is losing its capacity for those kinds of feelings. Remember the tiny, soulful, Manhattan bookstore her dead mother left her to run in her absence? That little shop was basically beheaded by her shady, cut-throat, corporate yacht-baby-man internet boyfriend with a partial soul oh whoops I mean her soulmate/the love of her life! She fell in love with the monster that destroyed her! So relatable! You’ve Got Mail was a prescient American horror film with a Harry Nilsson soundtrack and I really wish I knew that when it was in theaters because maybe I could’ve helped stop this fascist regime but I’m sorry, I was furiously chasing ice cream trucks and mean teen boys at the time!
It is this cast of ignorant, greedy, malignant cowards clinging to white supremacy and misogyny with every white-knuckle they can clench, because it has served them so well. The injustice of America has been so kind to them, so comforting and familiar. So hollow and homey. The empty starfuckery and consumerism on creatine of reality television has risen to treason. Will they, won’t they? A cliffhanger with a very real nuclear arsenal. No one involved is well. No one is a human being at this point. Everyone is a hologram skeletor of a person. So we sit, gnawing our fingers in lieu of popcorn, our eyes haunted and glazed by the menacing glow of the screen.
Did Flakey-Chunks Bannon join the cast of Real Sociopaths in the nick of time? Will Trump and McConnell get back together and work out their complicated relationship because they can hate each other and need each other at the same time? Is F. Chunks distracting 45 from his BIG BUTTON? Please tell me someone made a fake button. Please tell me someone painted a donut hole red and glued it to a paper plate. If no one made a fake button, I am begging some brave, shirtless cuck with a tranquilizer dart gun to get in there and tranq that pus-filled, pussy-grabbing, Nazi tangerine. I’m anti-gun but very pro-tranq. Tranq him and lock him up. And if locking him up isn’t an option, tranq him and send him out to sea. When he wakes up tell him literally anything, it will work. Give him a broken calculator and tell him it’s twitter. Tell him it’s a woman’s vagina. Tell him it’s a golf trophy from Tiger Woods and he can eat it. Put him on a boat and feed him broken calculators, this is all I ask for the next season of Real Sociopaths of Washington D.C. I am pretty sure Steve Bannon dies while choking on a donut he “made love to” in the fifth season. They really the shark eats Fonzie’d that one! Who writes this stuff, the ghost of Joseph Goebbels? Definitely.