Hypernormalization Blues or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

Summer Chronicles #3

AK Rockefeller, happy souls in hell [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

We live differently now. Bad history is happening on the daily and it’s overwhelming. However much one tries to stay grounded, there is a growing sense that we have crossed the line into a different and much worse America, even as much of the rest of our social lives stays the same.

The fact that we live enmeshed in a constantly streaming mainstream and social media environment that has become, in our post-truth world, as or more real than our existential experience is clearly a central factor in our growing stew of unease, malaise, alienation, and subterranean, undirected or misdirected rage.

Democracy undermined in Los Angeles. Dodgers take the series. Who will win the Oscars?

War anyone?

Everything is going to shit, and it just keeps rolling. Each sure “tipping point” seems to bleed into yet another, and the horrifying and outrageous, the utterly unacceptable is paired with the banal and absurd or simply buried by the flood of more and more terrible news all the time. We have no filter, no way to adjust and assess. It all keeps coming, but nothing breaks even as everything is broken.

Now that the Big Beautiful Bill has passed, I’ve decided it’s more prudent for me to die before retirement. It’s my own fault for not saving enough for my golden years. I should have gotten my fiscal house in order. Nobody has a right to healthcare after all. What was I thinking? At least my betters will reap the benefits of a well-earned tax cut. Thank the lord for small favors.

AI is being imposed by universities across the country. AI threatens to steal millions of jobs. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk aren’t worried. AI-generated partners are having real romantic relationships with humans and upending the dating world. Some AI creators fear the consequences of their own invention. Go figure.

Man says ChatGPT sparked a “spiritual awakening.” His wife says it threatened their marriage. I love AI and hope it will help me write my next novel, compose my next album, and vacuum my living room like the robots in Disney’s Tomorrowland. If I had an AI chatbot, I’d name him Chad.

New iPhone prices may be impacted by Trump tariffs.

Climate change is fueling catastrophic fires. They have stopped collecting data on climate. All measures to stop or even slow the extraction of fossil fuels or harmful CO2 emissions have been ended by the administration. Black lung is making a comeback. Vaccines are being reevaluated.

Measles anyone?

“What’s wrong with the Democrats?”: A panel discussion tonight on CNN sponsored by the fossil fuel industry. Will this be the hottest summer ever? What’s up with the mysterious deaths of marine mammals? Explore travel deals to exotic destinations.

The latest from NFL training camp.

Awhile ago, the Guardian made an effort to find a historical parallel for our moment and reached back to the former Soviet Union for comparison:

First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.

The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has.” . . .

The same piece went on to note that, “The increasing instability of the US’s democratic norms has prompted these references to hypernormalization.” The rollback of familiar institutions, democratic norms, social safety net protections has led to large protests and sustained outrage and yet the game keeps moving:

Donald Trump is dismantling government checks and balances in an apparent advance toward a “unitary executive” doctrine that would grant him near-unlimited authority, driving the US toward autocracy. Billionaire tech moguls like Elon Musk are helping the government consolidate power and aggressively reduce the federal workforce. Institutions like the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, which help keep Americans healthy and informed, are being haphazardly diminished.

And all this sits atop a historical ground already made fertile by previous and pending multi-crises that represent an unprecedented threat to our ability to cognitively map the world and effectively and imaginatively resist: “Globally, once-in-a-lifetime climate disasters, war and the lingering trauma of Covid continue to unfold, while an explosion of generative AI threatens to destabilize how people think, make a living and relate to each other.”

Thus, like the characters in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, we wander the media-saturated desert of the real, bouncing from actual to simulated disaster, unable to tell the difference, purchasing our identities on the marketplace and worshipping at the altar of the commodity spectacle where the sacred lives on screens, and we willingly surrender all skepticism for the false solace of consumer belonging.

Other times, I feel like we’re heading into a chapter of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower as we wall ourselves off from one another in a world of increasing menace and violence. Compassion, for what it’s worth, has become a dreaded affliction that inhibits us from ably surviving. Gather rain when you can, look out for the homeless, alien others, and the dispossessed.

I wrote a graduate dissertation on this nearly thirty years ago called “Postmodernism and Dystopia.” Now it is what I see when I turn on the news or talk to my neighbors. We swim in an ocean of decontextualized information and systemic violence.

Most Americans believe X but if they know Y then they would believe otherwise. But they don’t know Y. Film at eleven, post-truth.

Here we are now, entertain us. I feel stupid and contagious.

Answer that trivia question correctly and you’ll get a chance to win a new Trump bitcoin.

America are you serious? America, this is the impression I get from watching my television set and scrolling through my socials.

I just wish I could magically get people to put down their phones long enough to listen to silence. What, I ask you, is the problem with boredom? Of not being distracted? Fitness influencer killed by husband while out on a date, police say. 18 things to do in San Diego this summer.

There was a well-known study that illustrated that the majority of subjects preferred taking an electric shock to enduring a few minutes of silence in isolation.

Perhaps there will be another that suggests that a majority of Americans prefer authoritarianism to having even a moment of mild discomfort or cognitive dissonance. The blue screen of death will soon turn black.

We never got to have the “hot vax summer” after the vaccines came out because that buzzkill summer Covid wave harshed our mellow. But now, a few years later, we are getting shitty fascist summer instead.

Alas, it seems that far too many of us would rather be fucked than fuck.

What will you name your comfort animal?

Look out your window—history is happening. Perhaps it’s not too late to notice.

Note on the Summer Chronicles:

Over a decade ago, during my time writing for the OB Rag and SD Free Press, I penned a series of pieces over the summer that moved beyond the blog/column form to something a little looser and more open to improvisation and the poetic turn.

Below is the original preface for the first series of chronicles:

In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil [The Brazilian News ] not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."

What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles." As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word." It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.

More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe. Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector. So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."

Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it—for better or worse. So for a few lazy weeks of summer, I will try my hand at the form.