MAGA's Stupefying Depravity

...and how to be speechless with horror.

William Blake, The Book of Urizen, plate 7.

What does it mean for a major political candidate to describe himself as a “Black Nazi”? 

What about when another major candidate, a former heroin addict and serial cheater known for strapping a severed whale head to one car and carrying a dead bear cub he planned to eat in another, believes not just that a worm ate and damaged his brain but that an international cadre led by the CIA planned to use Covid to impose a worldwide totalitarian regime? 

What do we do when two other extremely major political candidates are knowingly lying to smear Ohio workers as eaters of pet cats apparently to kick off a racist lynching campaign against them? 

These things are simply true of Mark Robinson, RFK Jr., Donald Trump, and J.D. Vance, four leading lights of the Republican party. There is nothing to make of any of this. Awed horror is the only response. 

When it comes to these figures and their ghastly delirium—which swirls with so much porn, snuff, exterminationist racism, and 4chan psychosis that it’s like a meth-mondo Freak-Off—we in the media have to stop being detached and dispassionate.

The media is very good at observing, which is a clinical posture. It’s less goo

d at beholding, which is a tragic one.

To behold is to gaze, to stop in one’s tacks, to reach the limits of speech—and also to hold. I think of beholding in the word Selah, an enigmatic expression used nearly 80 times in the Hebrew Bible. Selah is considered less a word than a liturgical or even a musical mark, or perhaps a symbolic reading instruction, that means something like “stop and listen” or “pause and think of this.”