It’s Time for a Two-State Solution…for America

“If a nation is an ‘imagined community,’ to invoke Benedict Anderson’s metaphor, then how can we live together when the communities we imagine are, at every level, incompatible?”

In Megan Thee Stallion’s brain-dead and repulsive hit single, “Thot Sh-t”—it says a lot when our song titles are too profane to be printable—there is a little couplet that might as well be a diagnosis of the current orientation of our society’s elite classes: “I walk around the house butt-naked [sic]/And I stop at every mirror just to stare at my own posterior.” America’s elites, it seems, have regressed to the anal stage of development. They are stuck in the pose of stripping this nation down and gawking at its own growing rear end, fixating, on the one hand, on our absurdly beatified “marginalized and vulnerable” bottom-dwellers and, on the other hand, on the mounting pile of excrement being extracted from the most unsavory episodes of our history. That obsessive focus on those who are and that which was left behind threatens our collective future or means, rather, as I want to argue in what follows, that we appear to have reached the juncture at which our roads ought to diverge between those whose path lies backward and downward and those who cherish the lessons and legacies of our past and are ready to take us onward and upward toward a still-brighter future.

The “Thot Sh-t” video consists largely of repetitive shots of low-class women proudly thrusting naked cellulite out at the screen and features Megan Thee Stallion mowing down an older white guy purporting to be a United States Senator by ramming into him with a garbage truck and culminates in a shot too repugnant to describe, a particularly perverse spin on what the recently deceased University of Chicago English professor and prominent queer theorist Lauren Berlant has framed as the “desire to enter a senator’s body and to dominate it through an orifice he was incapable of fully closing.” The video, in summary, is devoid of all aesthetic value, bubbles over with hatred and resentment despite its superficial veneer of “sex-positivity,” and is generally demeaning to the entire human race. When I behold such spectacles and consider them in the wider context of a class of coastal corporate elites that make a living hawking and promoting such culture-destroying, child-corrupting filth even as many of these same elites in the entertainment industry and the media lecture us about how irredeemably awful America is, I begin to think, “What is the point?” What is the point of trying to communicate with these people? What is the point of trying to find the middle ground between polar opposites? What is the point of sharing a nation with people who degrade us, resent us, despise us, and are out for blood? What is the point of flailing—in hope, in desperation, in anger—to bridge a gulf that is growing unbridgeable?

I was an English major at Yale. I went to Harvard for law school. I live in the heart of New York City and enjoy its diversity of peoples, cultures, and cuisines. I relish the arts. Driven by a love of learning, I keep my mind open, feel stagnation creeping in if I spend so much as a day without discovering something new and take pleasure in reading dense works of literature, philosophy, and “Theory” with a capital “T.” I am one of those people who actually knows exactly what “critical race theory” is and what it is not (and for that reason, cannot be hoodwinked by the Left media’s desperate disinformation campaign that would have us believe it is an abstruse legal doctrine that has nothing to do with the regressive race hustlers besieging our schools today). I say these things not to brag (I think of Yale and Harvard today not as points of pride but as failed institutions that have abandoned their educational missions in favor of an unsavory mix of profiteering and indoctrination) but, rather, to stress that I am not what might be demeaningly caricatured as a Bible-thumping, science-denying, guns-and-God right-winger; I have all the external hallmarks of one who should feel perfectly at home among America’s elites. Consistent with their general biases, I abhorred President George W. Bush and his disastrous Iraq War and supported then-Senator Barack Obama over the war-mongering Senator John McCain in 2008. And yet, today, I and many like me would probably feel far more comfortable in the company of those right-wing caricatures than in that of my ostensible peers.