Zero Day
By: Matthew Broyles
Tags: Trumpocalypse Now, World War I, Society, Late Stage Capitalism, Politics

On this day, with images of unmarked vans and faceless mercenaries radiating across my screen, it feels like some zero-day moment is coming. A BC/AD transition that historians will mark ever after.

Maybe it already happened. Maybe that’s what I felt on November 8, 2016. That seismic shift under my feet, the sickening lurch into an alternate universe. The wrong timeline. The abyss.

The workings of history do not operate so simply, of course. The wave that broke that day had built for decades. The pardoning of Nixon, the rise of Friedman and Rand, the Chicago School experiments in Latin America, Newt Gingrich’s realization of the power of cable news, Reagan’s annexation of the Falwell contingent into the GOP ranks, the blinkered centrism of Bill Clinton passing the 1996 Telecommunications Act and repealing Glass-Steagall, the PATRIOT Act, Obama’s refusal to prosecute the war criminals of the Bush administration, the steady expatriating of U.S. jobs and capital under multiple administrations of both parties, the flaccid DNC, and of course the cumulative effects of underfunding education for two generations. Trump was not only inevitable, but in retrospect, so blindingly obvious that Matt Groening predicted his presidency ages ago.

Yet I can’t help but feel that even these dark four years have been but a prelude. The curtains in the shop are still up. We can’t see what’s happening in the back room. What horrific construct lies in wait just on the other side of our ability to accept that it is real, and that it is happening here.

There are hints in history. Echoes from textbooks, but history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. The new fascism will not be exactly the same as the old. Although when your logo is the spitting image of an SS pin, maybe the beast’s visage will stir memory. By then it will be too late. Like the orcs tending the Uruk-Hai, Republican footsoldiers will get their heads snapped off as well, collateral damage for the greater good.

Writing this, I see how language mocks me. Apocalyptic imagery has been the domain of the right for so long, when it comes from the left it appears a hysterical mirror. Conventional wisdom extols the virtues of centrism, but when the enemy pulls up in the Econoline and throws the bag over your head, the intellectual pursuit of common ground is out of place.

Here in Texas, I have been surrounded by the palpable itch for a defining conflict for years. Some call it a second civil war, others a race war, others a more general south’s-gonna-rise-again, but in the end, it’s all the same thing. An assertion that one type of person is inherently better than another, and that this distinction should be legally enforceable. Oddly, it’s what they accuse the left of promoting, peddling tired tropes like Schrodinger’s Immigrant, simultaneously stealing your job while being granted immediate welfare benefits upon arrival. Projection works. Ask the Bloviator-In-Chief.

Back during the Cheney administration, I began to draw parallels from that time to the period before World War I. As Modris Eksteins brilliantly writes in Rites of Spring, there was an undercurrent of destruction in those pre-war years. A sense that the staid old world needed to be torn down and a new one brought into fiery being. I hear these sentiments from young people on all sides of the political spectrum today. Burn it down, they chant, leave nothing standing.

Maybe, then, this looming cataclysm is as inevitable as the events that preceded it. Perhaps my unwillingness to accept it is an indictment of my privileged status as a child of high empire. The Xers, last to ride the wave, first to fall off.

Yesterday, I went gun shopping for the first time in my life. I had the browser open for less than five minutes before I recoiled in horror. I am an artist. A creator, not a destroyer. But I am also a father, a son, a boyfriend. What must I do to protect those I care about if others see them as targets? What would I twist myself into to ensure their safety? Is it in me? My youthful desire was to wage a war in words and notes, not blood and bone. Even now, four decades on, my heart can’t cross the line.

Do good times create weak men? Perhaps. It depends on your definition of weakness. The strength to continue living in a world that rejects your reality is not insubstantial. Ask the dead.

Change or die, the Sandman said. And perhaps that is the zero day I fear the most. The day I transform into something I cannot recognize. The day this broken society makes me finally do it. I feel it coming. I have already contorted so much, already been someone I am not too many times to count. But this…can one ever come back from war? Someone can. Whether or not it is me remains to be seen.

“And in his eyes

The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,

In different skies.”

-Wilfred Owen