Musk and Trump: the BIGGEST FUCKING DISTRACTION IN HISTORY
One of the nice things about being diagnosed as AU-DHD at forty-eight is that it allowed me to have more compassion about characteristics that I previously saw as terrible character flaws but that I now know are rooted in my neurodivergence.
For example, I have a very difficult time concentrating. Social media has been terrible for me in that respect. I’m still addicted to what I will always call Twitter, as well as Facebook.
I’m addicted to my phone. My ADHD causes me to doom-scroll endlessly in search of stories that will angry up my blood and feed my misanthropy.
Hyper-focus is a gift and a curse for the neurodivergent. It allows us to accomplish great things but also blinds us to everything else.
About a year ago, for example, I became hyper-focused on watching every episode of Saturday Night Live so I could write a series of massive books about it in connection with its upcoming 50th anniversary.
I was so obsessed with building a massive backlog that I didn’t stop to think about whether what I was doing made sense or was even possible.
My mania told me that publicly vowing to watch 1000 episodes of a famously uneven, 90-minute episode of a deathless television show was such a fantastic idea that I couldn’t tell anyone about it, or they’d steal it.
Boy, was I wrong! For the last three months, my hyper-focus has been devoted to finalizing The Fractured Mirror, a massive exploration of the history of American moviemaking that I plan to have out by March or April.
It’s good to have big projects like this, which I’m super excited about because the malevolent machinations of Donald Trump and Elon Musk have proven a constant distraction since Trump’s reelection.
Think of it this way: Donald Trump is arguably the most powerful person in the world. He has been elected to our highest office twice despite next to nothing in the way of qualifications.
Trump’s need for attention, validation, and adoration is so great that merely being the world’s most powerful person and the president of the last remaining super-power is not enough for him.
As the President of the United States, Trump receives probably more attention than anyone else. It’s not enough. He’s like a bratty child who constantly throws tantrums to ensure everyone’s focus remains on him.
For Trump, all press is good press. He professes to hate the media, yet he angrily demands their attention. On a similar note, Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world. The piece of shit has a decent chance of becoming the first trillionaire. That reflects terribly on capitalism, our country, and humanity as a whole.
That similarly wasn’t enough for Musk. It wasn’t enough to be the wealthiest person in the world and own the most prominent social media site in the world as a way to force his juvenile bigotry on the world.
Being the wealthiest man in the world wasn’t enough for Musk: he had also to be an unelected shadow co-president with seemingly unlimited power to change the government however he saw fit, Constitution and separation of powers be damned.
These assholes are a constant distraction. They’re using up all of the oxygen in the world in their crazed quest for attention.
I’ll be working on The Fractured Mirror and checking the spelling of Sid Caesar’s last name, and I will fall down a long, dark rabbit hole of terrifying stories about all of the horrible things that Musk and Trump are doing.
Musk and Trump are flooding the zone with shit. They’re overwhelming the political system. I don’t want to have to think about Trump and/or Musk or see them or read about them. That’s not, unfortunately, a possibility. They made sure of that.
It’s intentionally distracting. The whole point of this Dresden bombing of executive orders and mindless chaos is to make his cultists feel like they’re in total control, and his detractors feel like the odds are stacked against them to such a degree that there’s no point even trying because there’s no way we win.
I’d love to say that the angry demands for attention will diminish after a few months, but if history is any indication, that will not happen. Trump may be a senile old man who lives on fast food and thinks exercise is unhealthy, but he won’t stop screaming for the world to worship him until his dying breath.
They want us distracted. They want us dispirited. They want us to feel defeated. They want us to think that the country no longer belongs to us. They want us to feel like a Fascist takeover of the government is inevitable or has already taken place, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
That’s why we can’t let the bastards win. I am going to do everything in my part to stay focussed on what matters—my family, my work, and my obligation as an American citizen to fight our country’s slide into fascism—and if an ADHD-addled flake like me can stay focused and avoid what honestly feels to me like the BIGGEST FUCKING DISTRACTION IN HUMAN HISTORY then you can too!
At least, that’s the plan. Being human and a fuck-up, I’ll probably screw that up as well, but I am going to make an intense effort to remain focused and avoid distractions. Will the Adderall I’ve just been prescribed aid me in that quest? God, I hope so. Sometimes, the spirit is willing, but you need a little pharmaceutical help to get you past the finish line.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can! It’s Christmas, after all, the most