An Era of Apathy

the Chapo is dead, long live the Trap House

It occurred to me, sitting on the beach in Mexico lathered in coconut oil with my face in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool Aid, that nobody has yet — not loudly enough to reach my eyes or ears, thus far — admitted that it is all over, the political window for change, the neo-Civil Rights Movement rewind and rewatch, the Bernie-to-BLM rendition of the mid to late 60s. Nobody seems to have adequately declared that we’ve flat-circled ourselves and that a fully engorged Era of Apathy has long-settled across the culture and stitched itself to that homogenous metropolitan beast like the shadow of Peter Pan with the opposite behavior. 

I am not making a case for apathy. I could. There is no need. It simply is. Apathy is, and it is the air that we currently prefer to breathe—even those who would last admit it. I suppose I mean political apathy, but it certainly creeps into most other things. Apathy is the central column of cool — it’s whatever, it’s fine, it doesn’t matter babe are columns of the apathetic cool lexicon. Being heatedly passionate about anything in the outer realm, especially that of politics, is the least attractive characteristic and treats all columns of cool like a full-head-of-feathered-haired Samson of character and personality. 

There were about four years there where we couldn’t stop giving the biggest shit we could squeeze out of our tight little voting anuses. And there was actual momentum. Nothing happened. We all felt a wave in 2016, it was almost duplicated in 2020, and it was followed by a murmur of outrage that fell to the muffled whoosh of a great collective sigh. Bernie lost twice. And then BLM happened, and we all went to our personal brand of protest to collect the badge that came with attendance, and then most of us went home before or right after the cops got a little too close to upending our otherwise snug, room-for-improvement, some-kind-of-drug-on-the-weekend existence. Some of us took photos. Some of us sold stories. Some of us started careers. A lot of us were grifting, or just  lying. All of us wanted to try. We learned that it didn’t make a damn bit of difference — too many had too much to lose if the old way went the way of the waste paper basket and preferred to keep their anuses tight and voting. 

But what’s really odd is that some of us are still there. The whole damn thing, we went and got it wrong—for the time, for the reality, who knows — who cares? whatever, it’s fine, it doesn’t matter babe—and it all got co-opted by imbecilic feel-good Instagram activist liberals, which describes many a great number of people who consider themselves radical and use words like appropriation, casual violence, systemic racism, black bodies, many of whom attended social and cultural analysis courses (whether they knew it or not!). And there are still people living in this utterly corrupted outward way—particularly they ‘live’ this on Instagram—despite the fact that it’s been obvious for quite some time that the only people pulling strings in that timeline are a new version of what Tom Wolfe cited as fraternity boys in their mustangs, except only now some of those fraternity boys with mustangs take their cues from the queer-ideologia and BLM-professorial intelligentsia. 

This! When at least for two years it’s been over and the new age of the Consciousness has begun and the Great Inward Turn long been made. Nomadism is here, some are actually doing it, even the ones who say they’re doing it are occasionally, by accident and not by intention and understanding, doing it, but those who really do it probably have never used the word and dare not share the secret if they were at all cognizant that they were keeping one.

In other words, it’s bacchanal time. It’s the end of the civilization that we knew and the way we knew to understand it, and meaning has flipped. There were goods that are now bads and there were bads that are now profound goods. Nobody wants to discuss Jeremy Corbyn or Eric Adams—we all know the stakes, we don’t want to talk about the details of the stakes, this is why journalism doesn’t work and makes no money—we want to take psychedelics in both large and recreational doses and describe what we see when we look at our hands. And in the latter there is much more of the meaning-of-life stuff that we needed to discover in order to survive the Big Outward Hah-Humming era that we exited in 2020. (Is it self-preservation or is it self-realization, could it all be that we ought to live in misery until we find the flower caked in shit and wash it off and realize it still smells delicious!) It’s the late 1960s again, except everywhere is the Haight-Ashbury—well, a lot of the Haight-Ashbury is most definitely in Mexico, where oddly enough it was in the late 1960s. This part, too, has been rewound and is being rewatched though this particular episode has far more potential to break out of the old VHS tape metaphor than its politikin prequel ever did. If you’re not onto the ‘drop out’ portion of Leary’s advice, then you have nearly missed the ship despite the fact that it leaves the station (port? ships leave port!) just about every second, or however long a now-moment needs to be digested. 

And we get to both see, and perhaps more adequately hear this truth, in none other than the voices of Chapo Trap House, that seminal thing, that grand money-making, good-for-them, all die hard socialists, further-Left-than-you-and-better-at-it first podcast, changed everything machine. Day one listeners, if they are still listeners, are almost all deluding themselves to believe that they have always listened for Leftist analysis, insight, knowledge and maybe, to some extent, camaraderie. —This is different than what people listened to Red Scare for, i.e. Anna’s being a horrific bitch and Dasha’s incredible jokes and excellent laugh.— What they were really listening for—I was one and not uncommon!—was to hear someone smarter than them be even more angry about the things they too were pissed about, to hear some of the finest articulation of their most furiously held suspicions, indeed to turn those suspicions into granite fact, to be given a reason to be as foot-stomping mad as they wanted to be by and whilst curbing their potential for reactionary opinioneering and god-forbid actioning. 

But even these great scions have become dull knives stored poorly in an overcrowded kitchen drawer. We overpaid the damn vanguard! And though they were already fat, they got fatter, and they never said what they did with all the money! And we carried on listening, pretending that that was their own good socialist business! Meanwhile they got less angry, did—one can suspect—more and more drugs, the kind that freed them from their anger just as nearly as much as their newfound mounds of cash, and we…carried on listening. As they started talking more about movies, aired more live, radio show-esque made-up boardgames, moved quietly to LA, started referring to their show as a comedy podcast — that is the great Chapo Delusion!—we…carried…on…listening. To not recognize the new reason for listening, that it is new, that it is different from the first reason, that there was a change—did you change?—that is the Great Chapo Delusion. To have breathed it in and not exhaled it two years ago is to have missed the Great Inward Turn. 

But let this be not an insult to those fine boys! There is nothing to forgive, not now anyhow—there was a change! Long live apathy, within it lies a radical something—time away! The salve is the salvo…in some ways…a vacation. I challenge all ye who might level the charge of privilege! Indeed, it is my RIGHT to not care! —(Admittedly, I have no fine argument for why certain among us have a harder time with this…it is simply that in a closed system out of which I am and even within which I could not make a dent on the structure of things, who are you to pressure me to exert empathy…I’ve got none to offer!)—This new right a new Uncle Sam gives it to you. It is not even his to give, he is just pointing at it, sitting there, waiting, on the floor there, heaped in a pile, forgotten, just on the floor there!

You say ‘dirtbag left,’ but I, indeed we might, say ‘don’t be the dirtbag left behind’! Refuse the DSA a reference, become hot and sexy the way a marginally increased hourly wage could never make you! The Pranksters won’t be coming back because Obama is still around, but you can still take acid all the way to DisneyLand and arrive feeling like you won the championship game! Let the world heal itself with your own beautiful attrition! Don’t throw that plastic cup in the recycling bin where it hides from us, throw it on the ground where we can all see it! Don’t join the protest, it gives the cops something to do! 

You don’t have to be on this bus—whatever, it’s fine, it doesn’t matter babe—but you should probably get off that one. There’s no good sex on that bus. Not even the Chapo rides on that one anymore.