Early this morning, the City disappeared into a storm. Low, gray clouds leveled the skyline. The rain whooshed and pounded and made loud metallic plinks on AC window units. The governor declared a state of emergency and Twitter blinked nervously with weather alerts, people anxious from recent memories of flooding.
Yesterday, at the For God & Country Patriot Double Down 2021 convention in Las Vegas, the man who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) gave a rendition of William Wallace’s speech from Braveheart (1995). After which he added: “We are headed into the storm of all storms. Yes, the Storm is upon us. [Cheers] But not without Jesus, our rudder. And in the words of Reagan, evil is powerless if the good are unafraid. God bless you. [Cheers].”
For followers of QAnon, The Storm is sort of like the Ragnarök of their volatile mythology, the day when the child-eating, pedophilic Democratic establishment will be swept away by the true Patriots. The enemies of Trump—Clinton, Schiff, et al.—will be tried and possibly executed for their part in a global, satanic cabal of misery whose hidden architecture is truly too convoluted to relay here.
QAnon is many things: Internet subculture, millenarian cult, MAGA offshoot, moral panic, “media literacy” gone wrong. But at least in a superficial sense, it is a jumbled incarnation of familiar themes and characters of the American right. Mel Gibson, Jesus, Reagan, and Braveheart? Freedom, defiance, and Christian-sounding calls to arms? Everyone check your bingo cards.
The speech at the Vegas convention, for all its insanity, was actually rather familiar: a combination of the sweaty TEDx talker, the motivational televangelist, the conspiracy theorist at the school board meeting. These are the humorless prophets of the day, peddling endlessly more inscrutable narratives of retribution and righteousness amid wild-eyed mashups of Patrick Henry and Henry V.
The strangest thing to me about these figures is not knowing how seriously to take them. In the case of a Patriot convention in Las Vegas whose logo is a Q-7 poker hand and a bunch of chips: probably not at all. But with the January 6 riot back in the news, along with Facebook’s inability to adjust, let alone admit, its own role in fomenting outrage, the garish stupidity of QAnon has an unsettling edge. Are they fringe fanatics or indicative of some larger end-times fixation? The panic, the mindlessness, the conviction—it may be spangled in rightwing American imagery, but the underlying fear and bloodlust seem less silly, or at least harder to write off as a smattering of wacko beliefs. After all, you do not have to think that JFK, Jr., is still alive or that Dr. Fauci created the coronavirus to feel like a storm is looming or upon us.
In the City the flash flood warning remains but the rainfall was not nearly as bad as people feared. Still, things are ill-engineered for heavy rains. In the City, everything flows downhill and gathers in basements and low-lying streets. It takes far too long to drain, stormwater spewing down through trash-encrusted grates. After the rain, we watch the swirling dregs of a paved-over world find their way underground. Later today, we like to think, they will finally all be gone.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
meme museum
from the discourse
Max Read’s great new piece about DAOs and the Silicon Valley fantasy of abdicating from society on his new substack, Read Max. “Mass democracy getting you down? Try Musktopia’s brand of nerd-authoritarian capitalism!”
from my incoming texts
“-Pitstop en Coyote Ugly (o cualquier otro bar)”
“It has been a trifle hectic recently”
“I think she would disapprove me going out barhopping at this hour”
“This number isn't monitored. Text STOP to unsubscribe - message and data rates may apply.”
weekly wiki
Join us on Discord and Twitter. Read back about the death of storytelling, the end of 2020, and our age of disasters. Grab a print issue.