The Shameless Shall Inherit the Earth
In fact they already have.
I slept well last night for the first time since the election, distracted by a wonderful dream. It was like the final scene of Fight Club, when Ed Norton and Helena Bonham Carter join hands and watch the world’s consumer credit infrastructure crumble. In my version, however, I am holding hands with Kim Kardashian, and we are not watching something being destroyed, but something being released, generating a blinding supernova of light.
What is being released is everything now hidden on the Internet. All our emails, our dick pics, everything we’ve ever said about anyone, everything anyone’s ever said about us, the identities of all trolls, and all the dreams that we have forgotten about and squirreled away in Google Docs.
At first, I am horrified. Bob Dylan whines in my ear. “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” Kim looks at me — she is beautiful, glowing — and competes the line. “It’s life, and life only.” I figure she should know.
“There are no second acts in American lives,” Fitzgerald wrote. His full view was more complex, but I doubt he could have seen a future in which only second acts matter. We have fallen so in love with redemption stories that fame and influence take root most readily in total personal disgrace.
Kim Kardashian is the apotheosis of this logic. Her career began in disgrace, possibly engineered by her mother, and her reputation and seriousness have grown ever since. Where could they go but up?
Even celebrities whose careers begin in the traditional fashion — through achievement — feel compelled to backfill a first act with some tale of debauch and moral compromise. It is a kind of future-proofing. What can you say about Kim Kardashian that could harm her reputation? That she is cynical and base? Our esteem for her is built on that knowledge. It is priced in, as it were, but her stock soars.
Likewise, with our President-elect. He is not Teflon because things slide off. Rather he “appears” to be Teflon because he’s so covered in shit that a little more hardly matters. This is terrifying because it is hard to see what could possibly bring him down, with so much already priced in.
Which brings me back to my dream. Part of our precarity, and our rapt obedience to authority, arises from the fact that we still have so much to lose — or think we do. The invulnerability of disgrace is asymmetrical. Trump has shed his shame but we are still bound by ours. In my dream, the streets run red with secrets — a mass digital desublimation. I imagine the aftermath, as we all first hide from each other, then emerge, blinking in the sun, and get ready to start over, without our illusions.
To quote another Gen X staple: “Let’s pretend I blew up the school… all the schools. Now that you’re dead, what are you gonna do with your life?”
