Election 2024: Yes, I’m entertained, but yes, I want it to stop

Yep, that was me, sprawled out on the living room floor at 2 in the morning, clutching my dead iPhone, having survived yet another long, dark crawl out of a late-night doomscrolling rabbit hole. 

To my loved ones who so much want me to “get a life,” I want them to know I’m trying. Really, I am.

Not too long ago, I was taking a long walk on Manresa State Beach close to sunset on a pristine Santa Cruz summer evening — sans earbuds, which is a victory for me. I was attempting to surrender to the enveloping infinity of the vast indifferent ocean, and was doing pretty well, too, until I was blindsided with a thought: “Wait, a worm in his brain? How does that even work?”

Or, later I was at the sacred rock garden in Pogonip, having hiked quietly through the majestic redwoods for an hour and a half or so, trying to commune with all the seekers and open hearts who had ever visited the place. But then I sat on a rock and began to ponder that bedeviling question, “Where the heck is Melania?”

I have to come clean — it’s got me, this new season of “America: The Mini-Series,” and it’s not letting go. As a writer, I am simply floored by the masterclass we’re all witnessing in dramatic writing. I mean, on paper, this stuff is so crude and ham-fisted, it’s laughable — debate faceplants, symbolic ear bandages, whipsaw polling reverses … seriously, brain worms? C’mon people, you know what “jumping the shark” is, right? Well, you people are jumping Sea World. This stuff is off several walls.

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But, somehow, you’re making it work. Your cast is magnificent, let’s just say it. Not a miscast in the bunch (I might say Walz is just a smudge too hammy). I thought you might have stepped in it with this Vance character. But, boy, was I wrong. This cat is so bizarre — I’m trying so hard not to use the w-word — that he’s given you all kinds of valuable possibilities to mine going forward. The least surprising thing now would be to learn that he’s an A.I. You’ve made it so that anything seems plausible. Reports are that Shakespeare is nauseous with envy in the afterlife.

And your sense of timing [chef’s kiss]. Day by day, you know exactly when to drop the beat. You feed the media monster just enough to keep it deranged with lust for more. And you’re working the stooges like me like a masseuse works a knot in your neck, just enough to make us feel good but not enough to actually fix the problem so we’ll be back for another massage.

But your greatest trick? Well, isn’t it obvious? How did you convince millions of Americans that this whole perverse melodrama isn’t scripted, that somehow this kind of absurdist black-hat/white-hat fairy tale is just kinda happening of its own accord? The unscripted world is all chaos and entropy. But what you’re doing, that’s a symphony of the American id, an opera of capitalist excess and technological anarchy. And what makes it a masterpiece is that no one can tell if it’s a tragedy or a comedy.

I don’t know who you are — no one does, apparently — but I suspect you were a kid, just a fly on the wall, when they were writing the script for “The Usual Suspects” 30 years ago. And I bet it struck a chord when the mysterious malefactor Keyser Soze, borrowing from Baudelaire, said “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” 

In a world where any kind of conspiracy theory can find an audience — there are people who actually believe the Earth is flat! — somehow no one is buying that all this stuff is one big scripted piece of mass entertainment. It’s like “The Truman Show,” except everybody is Truman! (Are you Ed Harris in a beret? ’Cause that’s my mental picture.)

I was in college back in the ’80s when a media theorist named Neil Postman wrote a book called “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” The upshot of it, at least what my impressionable mind got out of it, was that, as mass communication technology evolves, whatever political or social values we profess to hold dear as a culture will not be able to withstand the gravitational force of a more demanding and essential value — entertainment. There were a lot of books published in the 20 years or so before the millennium, most of them forgotten, that professed to predict what the world we’re living in right now would be like. This one was the most prescient.

But here’s the thing, if you’re reading this, Ed-Harris-in-a-beret: You have had a good nine-year run with this show (I’m marking the pilot episode as “The Golden Escalator Ride”). Yes, I get it that you’re building up to a big finale. I’m scared stiff by the thought of it. But once all the smoke clears, can you just stop it? Please? We’re exhausted. No one wants the title of Neil Postman’s book to be literal. Take a vacation. You’ve earned it. Besides, don’t you have a climate-change script you need to get back to?

Imagine a world where the president is some boring rando who could walk into a Chipotle and order a quesadilla without anyone even bothering to take a selfie. Imagine Democrats and Republicans behaving like accountants and dentists and not like attention-starved toddlers or professional wrestlers. Imagine voter turnout down to 10% because only civics nerds even bother paying attention. Imagine going to Manresa Beach at sunset and having the mental clarity to get lost in the majesty of being alive. 

Whoever can make that happen, they’ve got my vote.

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