I started this essay some months ago without much idea of how I would end it. I had some idea of what I wanted to say, but there was something missing, and this prevented me from finishing the essay for a long time. But sometimes, the universe seems to rise up and place the answers that you’ve been searching for right into your hands. Something like that is what happened on the evening of June 27. 

It’s that one where he keeps talking about his hairy legs and having kids touching his hairy legs. The one that ends with that absolute banger, “I know about roaches and I know about kids jumping on my lap…and I’ve loved kids jumping on my lap.” And if you really listen, you can hear his publicists and image consultants all shitting their pants at that precise moment. 

It is flatly glorious, glorious in a way that confronts you like a brick wall. It is power humiliating itself. It is a glitch in the matrix.

And all the while, this little black girl is standing beside Biden at the podium, right there in the left hand corner of the shot, her eyes glancing about the scene, and I swear that you can see the beginnings of understanding in those eyes. She surely has been told that this man will be president, was vice-president under the heroic President Obama, that he is a friend to her people and a great man, and that she is lucky to be here meeting him. But all the same, you can see on her face the subtle indicators that she is baffled by the absurd things that the man is saying. They do not sound like the things that she hears from her parents or her friends parents or (hopefully) from her teachers.

In fact, they sound very much like a man embarrassing himself on national television.

But she will suppress these thoughts. This is a great man, she will remind herself. This is a man to be respected. She will remind herself, “What I find to be ridiculous, what seems absurd and idiotic is merely a consequence of my own lack of understanding, and I must trust in the wisdom of others who tell me that this man is great and that therefore, when he says absurd things, they are actually wise things which I must not laugh at.”

And as she grows, she continues to believe this. She continues to think that the things which she sees that are wrong are actually as they should be. She has faith in those who have legitimized this man and his insane gibbering, and she trusts their wisdom. She trusts, ultimately, in this idea that there is a place of understanding from which all of these things are justified by reason and evidence so clear and so free from error that no one with intelligence could object. She trusts ultimately in the there of that epistemology. 

And it is the sum of my efforts to teach her that there simply is no there there.

I was once very much like this girl.

I was once a believer in There, and those who came from There (or at least claimed to). And I spent many years doubting myself and trying to reach There on my own. I went into the wilderness and studied all that I could, and when I came back, I began to realize that those who claimed to be from There had not done even as much work as I had. Not only had they not arrived There, they had not come close.

After this disappointment, there are long nights of bitterness. And after those, even longer nights of wondering what can be done. She will begin to wonder who she can trust. After all, when you’ve learned that the “wisest” men and women, that the “best and brightest” can be irredeemable fools and that there are those who will nevertheless laud them for their wisdom, well then, all words start to ring hollow. “Credible” becomes a fraudulent credential. “Trusted sources” becomes a dead letter when the purveyors of trust can no longer be trusted. 

And you can never fully exorcize the lingering doubt that you have only lost your way and are only getting more and more lost with every passing year. But this is simply what it feels like to be out on the edge of what experience has to offer, out on the outer limit of knowledge, out past the fossilized errors of institutionalized “knowledge.” I want to tell her that the terror she feels, hovering over that abyss of nihilism, that is the electrical current of existence. We all build our lives on that void, but few have the courage to look down at it. 

But then…

…then there are moments when the entire machinery of hyperreal fabulation collapses, when material reality reasserts itself, and burns through an entire economy of falsehood in an hour. 

To say that the first Biden/Trump 2024 debate was a game-changer doesn’t really say it. It is a “game-changer” in the same way that if, during the last Super Bowl, the 49’ers had emerged from their locker armed with machetes, that would change the game. In one fell swoop, the entire chattering, reality-denying pundit class, was ferociously thrown into the gutter. And suddenly there was a new truth in the world: this man doesn’t know what he is saying. 

I don’t know how this election will end, or what will come after it. At this point, there is very little that would truly surprise me. But I know that this was a lesson for everyone like that little girl: sometimes you have to take your own word for it, appealing to no higher authority and even rejecting those authorities, and you have to cling to what you know for days, months, years, but eventually, something miraculous happens; the Truth descends. You just have to keep making that face–

the one that says “is anyone else seeing this?”