America needs to stop cheering for the pickled egg

On madness, cynicism, absurdity, and the event horizon to the end of the republic

I met up with some friends from the before times — from a core group of conservative think tankers that was together in the Iraq war days. Of the original group, many went on to Hill and government jobs, joined various military reserves forces, maybe then on to foundations or corporations, though some are still/back in think tanks — in short, a typical DC policy career cross section, though the DC we “grew up” in is no more. I’m the anomaly in the group.

Early February found a few of us in this wonderful DC dive bar in the middle of nowhere in northeast — it’s somehow under a bridge and next to the railroad tracks, I think it’s an abandoned railway brakemen hall, it has all the right vibes. The lights are pink. The tables and chairs are probably stolen from a church bingo hall. The walls are covered in obliquely pornographic references unique to DC. The only food is hot dogs.

Turns out it’s trivia night, so the place is swarming with gaggles of DC people trying to pretend they are too low key even to be hipsters, when they are all DC adjacent people as it is a company town. One of trivia teams was named “the Chiefs can still win if Mike Pence has the courage” — a reference to the Super Bowl, January 6th, and how deep we all are in the nonsense of living in DC. Another team was probably fired federal workers looking for jobs.

The trivia goes on and on around us. Most of the categories are political or trolling. The host periodically hands out consolation prizes, which means a team gets a run on a homemade “plinko” board — you drop a disc down a pegged board and it bounces into a slot at the bottom to decide the prize, and the prizes are weird things from the weird bar. The worst of which by far is the pickled eggs — they seem to be homemade in assorted flavors, all of which are absolutely vile, and they sit in giant jars behind the bar like collected eyeballs, waiting to be splonked out into a paper tray.

There is something hauntingly thunderdome-esque about packs of anti-hipsters chanting PICKLED EGG and the absurdity of everything relating to trivia night while we blow up our own country for the lulz.

It had just then begun. It’s totally surreal. But this is everything now. Everyone at the table with me is just continuing on in writing books and disbursing grants and what have you.

But the leopards are going to eat all of the faces and then each other and then there will be a nuclear accident (or whatever) and everyone will still be cheering because Americans didn’t elect a government, they elected a carnival of cruelty and sadism and they still believe this makes them good people, because they have been willingly convinced that being good people means taking care only of your own — but mostly only of yourself.

When you’re in it for the show, you keep cheering. It is, after all, a show.

Maybe at first you weren’t cheering for the cruelty but for the “reforms” — but then you realize you were right next to those other people and cheering for the cruelty too and then you’re in it so deep — and this has been Trump since the beginning. He captures better inclinations into the absurdity. Then you’re there already so you want the absurdity to be right. A former ideologue in a cabinet position subverted by the capture. A senator who was probably only ever in it for the power and thus happy to aid the subversion — welcome highly sus people to your new life in US intelligence. Each character arc ends the same but everyone gets to be the hero of their own play.

Everyone is chanting PICKLED EGG because now they want you to get one. This didn’t used to be who we were as a people, but for now we are.

The Trump administration will probably lose every court case and they have already ignored most court orders and they have declared the president alone gets to interpret what the laws really say. He’s already issued questionable orders to the military, which they have followed (on domestic affairs). No one even has time to keep track.

They are making the typical calculation that if you just keep going, rules can’t contain you and doubly true when you are tearing down the system meant to contain and you already have the alternative power structures — the people with the money— on board.

It’s nearing the end of the republic but we’re cheering for the pickled egg.

There’s nothing novel in this realization that this is how a country descends into (hopefully momentary) madness — but we’re further down the pathway than we thought we were. The interruption of the Trump presidencies into two actually made the potential for the damage he can do or that can be done in his name tenfold. It was like giving the Russians time to recover after invading Georgia. There was reflection, planning, network building, and a lot of it was opaque. People simply didn’t have the right targeting to even begin to collect information about these processes — it was all a closed loop into itself. Everyone projecting what the second Trump administration would be was also merely a hero of their own play. And what’s going to happen is some of the fever dreams are going to be made real — by accident or because why not or because the containment has failed — and all around us this show is enabling the others in the world who believe only in the cynicism and transactionalism, and a lot of people are going to die, and that will be on America if we don’t pull out of the dive. But the decade of deep information manipulation has left us a nation of cripples on our own psychological defense, and we literally see nothing as it actually is. And this madness is so terrifying, no one with any real power is willing to intervene. Yet.

Completely reasonable people will tell you the mistake was Wilsonian thinking, America ever intervening abroad, and Trump is the one with the courage to undo a century of American madness and overreach. “The world safe for democracy” was a mass hoax/delusion that always worked against true American interests because [insert revisionist history lesson here — have seen several that are quite specific but it’s like science fiction]. This is not the main point of what the administration is doing — but it’s found a place there to fester. It suits the desire to rewrite the rules. It isn’t really about isolationism either. Because when we go down, absolutely everyone is coming down the gravity well behind us.

You know as well as I do that the thing about the fever dreams — the halls of mirrors — is they can break, dispel, so fast in the end. But they can last for decades. As a nation we don’t have the tools to reckon with what we might have done before that break. So I hope it’s before the point of unthinkability.

What can you do? Be better. Be sane. Outside American shores, guide with rationality and humanity. Remind us who we were and need to be. Tell us the stories we stopped telling ourselves. Don’t believe that participating in the show is going to result in anything to your benefit. Never let the pressure dynamics diminish you into only defending your own. Be better. Be bigger. Show us what strength really is. Be a family we can easily rejoin when we decide the show is over. Be a framework where the pieces that will continue on the right path can still engage. When the test comes, don’t fail it — even though this isn’t fair of us to ask. That you do what we could not.

There is now a lot of discussion about revitalizing the tools we bring against the adversary. But what is the adversary now. What is deterrence now. Where do those tools need to be deployed to prevent future attacks.

Once the event horizon is crossed, escape becomes improbable — we know this from watching the singular heroes of singular plays as they are compressed into the smallest and worst versions of themselves. Past the event horizon, there is only pickled egg.

We’re nearing the end of the republic — and America needs to stop cheering for the pickled egg.

—MM