. . .problems in your life aren’t real; the real problems are the ones that nobody, except for everybody on this stage, has the courage to talk about. The media wants to brainwash you; the Marxists are massing outside your idyllic suburban lawn; if the enemy gets its way, small businesses will be decimated, Thomas Jefferson will be cancelled, and 911 will go straight to voice mail. The speakers at the Republican National Convention keep ringing the same notes: fabricated panic followed by hoarse, manic Panglossianism. Jobs were lost under past Democrats, and they would be lost under future Democrats, but with President Trump there is only milk and honey. Joe Biden is a stultifying agent of the status quo, too boring to mention by name; he is also an unprecedented break with tradition, a threat to all that we hold dear. Climate change, of course, is waved away as mass hysteria; even the coronavirus pandemic is mentioned rarely and almost always in the past tense, as if the decision to deliver speeches in a cavernous, empty auditorium were merely the whim of a quirky location scout. Anyone watching from quarantine, during a once-in-a-century unemployment crisis, would not need a fact check to know that this is all a stretch, to say the least. Still, who doesn’t like a bit of flattering escapism now and then? A disaster movie is supposed to have a clean arc: hero nukes asteroid before it can collide with Earth. Who wants a muddled plotline about a real and intractable disaster—a hurricane supercharged by global warming, or the long struggle against police brutality, or a President who may or may not be on the verge of stealing an election and triggering a constitutional crisis? Sounds depressing. Besides, movie theatres are closed right now, for reasons it would be too much of a bummer to mention.
“America is not a racist country,” Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, said on Monday night, twenty seconds before referring to the “discrimination and hardship” she and her Indian-American family had faced.
