While searching for an Atlantic article I sort of remember reading (Adam Serwer’s “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong,” Jan 26), I happened across a different one from a week and a half earlier that I somehow missed, a think piece by a writer named Ashley Parker called “Trump Exhaustion Syndrome.” Exhausted, I clicked on it.
I didn’t get to the end. I didn’t get to the end because I, like you, am living through this moment in time and have a brain, eyes, and ears, and they all function well enough together to register what this administration is doing to make the world shittier for everyone not protected from societal collapse by a wall of wealth and privilege. What Parker had to elucidate wasn’t really anything I didn’t already know or feel. I didn’t get to the end of an article called “Trump Exhaustion Syndrome” because there is no end to Trump exhaustion. To pay attention, to try to absorb and respond to his endless litany of crimes, corruption, and norms-breaching is like playing Whack-a-mole, where the moles are actually drops of water and the whacking board is the entirety of the world’s oceans.
Since 2015, the “flood the zone with shit” strategy has been the Trumpian modus operandi. Near the beginning of her story, Parker trots out the old metaphor of the frog that eventually boils in a pot of slowly heated water. She asks former Trump adviser Steve Bannon about the so-called Overton Window, a political theory positing that persistent advocacy and promotion of radical ideas will eventually make them mainstream. Bannon, a man who looks like a pure physical manifestation of “old-person smell,” replied that Trump is “driving deep. … You have to take it however deep you can take it and, quite frankly, until you meet resistance. And we haven’t met any resistance.”
In light of how the end of January turned out, the people of Minneapolis will probably like a word about that. Same for those of us in SD-9 who voted for Taylor Rehmet over his Trumpian opponent. Same for Fort Worth rock singer-songwriter Denver Williams, who did what he does best last week and wrote, performed, recorded, shot a video for, and released a new song that seethes with exhaustion.
In “Now That All of Your Secret Racist Dreams Are Coming True,” Williams crashes out over the inexplicability of MAGA’s cultish devotion, their misinformed Christian Nationalist notions about Jesus, and their general set-it-and-forget-it mentality regarding the cabal of fascists for whom they voted.
Up now on Bandcamp, the song is breezy and DIY, just him and his guitar over a computerized beat, but the urgency — and a deliberately derpy interpolation of the “Star-Spangled Banner” — color his lyrics with the jagged crust of frustration. I won’t spoil them, but here are some heard near the end.
“Now that all of your secret racist dreams are coming true / What will you do? / Will you make some popcorn? / Turn on the news? / Try to shake your bible study blues? / Punch the clock / Then / Kick off your shoes / While the whole world burns?”
Williams, for his part, is not kicking off his shoes while the world burns. Will a single Bandcamp-hosted diss track turn the tide against the fascism fomented by the Trump administration? Probably not by itself. But as the people of the Twin Cities demonstrated last month, there is strength in numbers, and you have more in common with your neighbors than Trump and his ilk would like for you to believe. And if you’re a musician/songwriter as fed up with this shit as Williams is, it’s time for you to make some fucking noise about it.
