Let’s start with a question for President Biden. Mr. President, the biggest political story of the past four years was Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade and gave final decision-making power on abortion back to the states. How would a second Biden administration treat this issue? Do you think states should be setting policy on abortion?
Biden: I’m not even sure states exist.
Alexander: You’re . . . not sure states exist?
Biden: The Pledge of Allegiance says that America is “one nation, indivisible.” Taken seriously, we have pledged to regard America as not being composed of parts. It is, like God, a perfectly simple entity, not requiring further explanation. How, then, could it have states? I realize this position may seem strange. But I pledged to believe it, and I am a man of my word.
Alexander: I see. Mr. Trump, your response?
Alexander: I see. Mr. Trump, your response?
Alexander: President Biden, your position?
Biden: Yes, I think it is permissible to believe in states in the way that Mr. Trump thinks of them. There’s no difference between us on this issue.
Alexander: All right, thank you. I wasn’t really intending to get sidetracked by this. I mostly wanted to know your policy on abortion.
Biden: I’m pro-choice. That’s all there is to it. I think women have a fundamental right to decide what happens to their own body, and I think life begins at birth. And not one of these hokey Caesarian “births” either - a normal, natural childbirth.
Alexander: Can you clarify that last part?
Biden: Have you read Shakespeare? Being “from your mother’s womb untimely ripp’d” doesn’t count as being born. I think the anti-choice side is covertly trying to restrict abortion rights by expanding the definition of “born” until basically any method of separating a fetus from its mother would count.
Alexander: So if someone does get delivered by Caesarian section, what happens?
Biden: Legally they’re still part of their mother.
Alexander: And the mother can terminate them at any time?
Biden: Uh-huh.
Trump: Wait, what if they’re an evangelical Christian who’s born again?
Biden: Well, they can’t be born again. That would be their first birth.
Trump: But if they had that experience - if the Spirit came down and gave them the baptism of fire - would that count as a birth, end their status as a fetus, and prevent their mother from terminating them?
Biden: I suppose it would.
Trump: Great. Then there’s no difference between me and the President on this matter. Let’s keep going.
Alexander: Wow, I’m having a hard time finding any real points of disagreement tonight. Let’s stay on cultural issues, where I know the two of you have clashed before. President Biden, a lot of conservatives are worried that your administration promotes “wokeness” and “cancel culture”. What do you have to say to them?
Biden: Scott, I think about these things through the lens of Sir James Frazier’s seminal work on anthropology, The Golden Bough. Frazier writes that all rituals descend from the same ur-ritual: sacrificing the king to restore the fertility of the soil. As time went on, instead of sacrificing the literal king, societies changed this ritual into more and more figurative forms. In one common instantiation, typified by the Roman festival of Saturnalia, a commoner was chosen as the “mock king” or “king of fools”. He would be feted for a time, given the finest goods and the most delicate foods, and then sacrificed to the gods in place of the true king. I think of cancel culture as an outgrowth of this phenomenon. We take undeserving commoners and promote them to celebrities. For a time they bask in limitless wealth and the adoration of all. Then we destroy them. This may seem harsh to the uninitiated. But without it, the corn would fail in Iowa, the grapes would wilt on the vine in California, and the apple trees of New England would wither and die. Our celebrities know by what bargain they have gained their ephemeral reign. Let none mourn the inevitable consequences.
Alexander: Mr. Trump, your response? What’s your position on wokeness and cancel culture?
Trump: I’m against wokeness. I believe in Western values. I believe in the heritage of Greece and Rome - but Rome more than Greece, because it was further west. But most of all, I believe in the values of the Aztecs, because they were most western of all. I believe that in 959 AD Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, insulted Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of water, who cried blood for the next fifty-two years. Her tears extinguished the sun and killed everyone on Earth. In his mercy, Quetzalcoatl the Winged Serpent descended to the Underworld, where he stole the bones of the last men, and dipped them in his blood to create a new human race, and Huitzilopochtli, the Left-Handed Hummingbird, ascended into heaven to became the new sun. But his sisters the moon and stars grew jealous of his light, and they launched attacks upon him nightly. Only the nourishing blood of men gives Huitzilopochtli the strength to resist their assaults and shine anew each morn. Should the fountain of sacrifice ever go dry, the sun will go black, and the stars will fall upon the world and consume it. Callouts on social media are a form of flower war, and its losers are therefore set aside for sacrifice. In this, I agree with Joe Biden. But we cannot merely consign fallen celebrities to shame and penury. We must give them to the Sun. We must place them atop the mounds of Cahokia, atop the Luxor in Las Vegas, yea, even atop the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid in Memphis, and plunge obsidian daggers into their still-beating hearts, that the dawn may come anew.
Biden: I agree that sacrificing celebrities to the Sun God is a reasonable fertility ritual. I don’t think my administration would do anything differently from Donald’s here either.
Alexander: Hmmm, this is tough. Let’s keep going on the cultural topics. Mr. Biden, some people say our country is overrun with misinformation and conspiracy theories. Do you think these are dangerous, and what do you plan to do about them?
Biden: Yes, I find conspiracy theories noxious. Every time I mention I’m from Delaware, people give me the side-eye. They say awful things like “Isn’t it weird that every major corporation is based in the same state? Isn’t it weird that the President also comes from this state? Isn’t it weird that it was supposedly the first state in the union, the nucleus around which all the rest of America coalesced? Isn’t it weird that it has all these firsts and mosts and bests, but nobody knows anyone who lives there? Isn’t it weird that nobody’s ever been there, even though it’s supposed to be right smack between NYC and DC?” I think questions like these should be banned. I think the people who ask them should be put in jail.
Alexander: Thank you President Biden, that’s consistent with the strong stance against misinformation that you’ve taken in the past. But Mr. Trump, you’ve been accused of being one of the chief spreaders of misinformation, both personally and through your website Truth Social. What do you have to say for yourself?
Trump: GK Chesterton said that fairy tales were more than true, not because they tell us that dragons are real, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. In the same way, I think misinformation is more than true - not because it tells us there are pedophiles in pizza parlors, but because it tells us that pizza parlor pedophiles can be discovered and dragged into the light.
The COVID vaccine might not literally contain a microchip that lets Bill Gates control your mind. But we really do grant unaccountable tech billionaires root access to our culture - and seemingly pro-social requests really can be a vector for establishing control. I, Donald Trump, might not literally lead a euconspiracy of patriotic Americans who are about to blow the lid off the corrupt Biden administration and liberal establishment. But it really is true that even in the darkest night, when all seems lost, thereand are seeds of hope visible to those who search for them, and that even the most invincible-seeming tyranny can fall in an instant if enough people push at it.
So who cares about the literal truths? The average American lives in a dull apartment building in a decaying city, his subsistence dependent on the whims of macroeconomic forces he cannot comprehend, let alone control. You want to tell him to spend his tiny sliver of time on Earth thinking about interest rates and carbon credits? We need to re-mythologize the world! We need to re-weave the rainbow, re-haunt the air, re-gnome the mine! If the scientists have robbed us of trolls under bridges, we will replace them with Satanic cults in state capitols. If they take our soma, we will invent adrenochrome.
If I’m elected president, I plan to double down on this. I will spread rumors of griffons in the Rocky Mountains, allude to unspeakable things beneath the deserts of Nevada, and question whether the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a mystical portal to dream-realms beyond the setting sun. Not because any of these things are true. But because they are more than true. They’re what makes this country great.
by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Image: King 5; Seattle
