If we're shooting people, shoot me next
Bonfire of the subtleties
I need your help.
I need to get in touch with Fox News personality Jesse Watters.
I would like to invite him to consensually fight me at a time and place of his choosing.
In this time of national derangement, I want to believe that sports retain the power to bring people together. And unlicensed pseudo-boxing is technically definitely a sport.
Why Watters?
The other day, Watters went on national television and referred to leftists as "rats."
I would like now to address this—to address him—directly.
Jesse Watters, you are not the first authoritarian nationalist I've wanted to box, but you are the only one who works a block away from my job. You also look approachable, despite everything.
People make fun of you for constantly smirking, but I have to stand up for perma-smirkers, being one of them.
Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Steve Bannon: those faces. Those people look like God put them here to disprove His existence.
You, on the other hand, look like you might not be a demon in every part of the multiverse. Here your life is dedicated, with chthonic good cheer, to destroying Lincoln’s last best hope, the one he died for, the better angels you’re hellbent on deporting illegally—but you look like you could’ve grown up to be a bat mitzvah DJ instead, or a door-to-door solar-panel salesman, or someone’s son-in-law who was hated at first but eventually tolerated and finally welcomed when the other offspring married people who were significantly worse.
Also, I think it could be a fair fight.
Like you, I am not old, and like you, I am no longer so very young. I weigh about 170, maybe 175, and I have no idea how to fight.1 In preparation for writing this I did nine push-ups (in a row) in the bathroom at the bookstore where I work, which is on 48th street in Rockefeller Center, half a block from Fox headquarters.
I'd suggest we fight in the spot where they put the Christmas tree, but Tishman Speyer security is impressively... proactive.
How about your place? We could fight in the Fox storage closet where you keep Herman Cain’s death mask. Or in the subbasement with the Westworld-style labs where blonde anchoresses are grown, trained, and destroyed. Or on the top-secret 13th floor where Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz are trying to think of words that rhyme with “hegemony” but all they can think of is “jihadi.” They’re ignoring the letter on the conference table, the one they’re afraid to open. It’s from their old boss, Dubya. He finally wants to know, so he asked his straight shooters: is it true? Afghanistan—is it really the graveyard of empire?
The point, Jesse Watters, is that we can fight wherever you want. (Consensually!)
Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade also works one block away from my job, and he recently advocated the extermination of homeless people, but he at least apologized, and anyway he looks vaguely old and sickly.
Like it's possible that Brian Kilmeade will eventually look like Cincinnati Bengals owner Mike Brown, which is to say he will look like Snoke.
Snoke, the villain of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, lives to destroy what remains of hope in the universe, making him so behaviorally similar to his dometwin as to nearly redeem phrenology.2
In the annals of understatement, my new champion is the quote from the family of Charlie Kirk’s presumptive assassin. They said he had recently “become more political.”
Like literally everyone alive, I am frenemies with electoral democracy. A demagogue like Trump winning an election and then dismantling democratic institutions is the worst case scenario for our form of government: the nightmare that lowercase-r republicans have been warned about since Plato. The Republican Party is more than ready to dispense with democracy altogether, and Trump looks to be aiming for a high score on Robert Paxton’s stages of fascism.
We must resist peacefully for as long as peaceful protest is possible. Enough people have lost their lives to zealots and madmen; to add to the list erodes our position, rallies our enemies, and darkens our future. Cheering on assassins from our couches is not a resistance movement: it’s the Hunger Games.
A year ago a coworker asked me, “What has nonviolence ever accomplished?” Excluding MLK and Gandhi as low-hanging peaceful fruit, it would be a good time for Americans of conscience to learn about South Korea in 1987, or Portugal in 1974: nonviolent mass movements that toppled dictatorships and established democracies. Portugal’s, true story, was triggered by a signal on the radio, pre-arranged with a sympathetic DJ: the country’s latest entry in the Eurovision song contest.
Murder, meanwhile, is the practical enemy of even the most radical goals, and—guys!—completely morally wrong, even and especially as it is libidinally satisfying. When I get the courage I will write a post about how lionizing Luigi is a catastrophically bad idea, born of the immense and apparently self-annihilating privilege to have been born into a society that was not yet at war with itself; but at the moment I am too afraid of what my friends will think to publish it. In my circles, the range of Luigi sentiment runs from “adoration” to “aspirationally pregnant.”
When my grandfather was growing up, becoming a man and serving in the military were practically synonymous.
When my dad was growing up, that was no longer the case. But even then, no boy escaped adolescence without getting into fights with other boys.
Going to war, hell though it is, cures the delusion that war cures anything. Actual violence is a panacea only for violence’s notional allure.
As for my generation, I know plenty of men who, like me, have never been in a fight. Fighting gets you in serious trouble!
My whole life, I never understood why there used to be duels.
It seems insane—an insult was suffered so now maybe let’s die?
But as nonverbal channels of conflict are closed off, I almost wonder if the inborn hostile energy of masculinity is curdling, for lack of outlet, into something worse.
And at the risk of accidentally rewriting Fight Club from scratch, infinite-monkeys style, I’d like to experiment with this hypothesis as soon as possible.
Just not with guns! Jesus christ. Shooting an unarmed person is cowardly; calling for others to do it for you is doubly so.
No. I’d like to test my hypothesis with sportsmanlike fisticuffs.
One Fox News host at a time.
Consensually.
Ideally, tomorrow.
I think my friend Harold would give me some pointers if I asked him nicely. YES THAT HAROLD, THANK YOU FOR ASKING. Shoutout Harold aka THE ANNALS OF HAROLD.
That said, if anyone knows of any discounts on Jake Browning jerseys, I would like to buy several.
LOL! I got U Alex!!