Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why

by Alexandra Petri

  NOTHING

  IS WRONG

  AND

  HERE IS

  WHY

  Essays

  ALEXANDRA

  PETRI

  To Steve

  You are a good man and I like you

  (sorry, I panicked)

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PROLOGUE: Welcome to the New Physics!

  Part I

  THE BRIGHTEST TIMELINE

  Chris Christie’s Wordless Screaming

  Waiting for Pivot: A GOP Tragicomedy

  Nasty Women

  Donald Trump and His Sons Will Never Talk Business Again

  The True, Correct Story of What Happened at Donald Trump’s Inauguration

  Trump’s Budget Makes Perfect Sense and Will Fix America, and I Will Tell You Why

  Every Story I Have Read About Trump Supporters in the Past Week

  This Is Not a Crisis, Republicans Say, as a Large Spider Slowly Devours Them

  What the Ethics Chief Really Wanted to Say in His Resignation Letter

  A Moderate Speaks: By God, Won’t Someone Else Take a Stand?

  How Paul Manafort Came by $934,350 in Antique Carpets

  Melania Trump Wants to Spend Christmas on a Deserted Island (With Her Family)

  The Day Donald Trump First Became a Stable Genius

  Welcome to the Normal, Low-End Furniture Store for Trump Cabinet Members

  Keep Scott Pruitt Moist

  I’m Beginning to Suspect These Were Not, in Fact, the Best People

  HOW DARE YOU DO THIS TO BRETT KAVANAUGH?

  The FBI Has Been Very Easy to Reach about Brett Kavanaugh, and Of Course the Report Has Been Quite Easy to Read

  You Are in Melania Trump’s Nightmare Forest of Cursed Red Trees. Keep to the Path.

  Lock Her Up?

  My Book Report on The Mueller Report

  You Think Trump’s Getting Impeached? I Defy You to Convince Anyone at This Cursed Truck Stop.

  Part II

  ROUTINE NIGHTMARES AND SOOTHING FABLES

  It Is Very Difficult to Get the Train to Stop

  A Humanizing Profile of Your Local Neo-Nazi

  Now Michelle and Ivanka Are Neighbors

  Why Won’t This Career Die?

  Raising Baby Hitler

  You May Already Be Running

  The Privilege Tree

  Part III

  THIS FOLLOWS

  Excuse Me, Director, I Have Some Questions About My Role in the Spring Play as a Crisis Actor

  Everything You Wanted to Know About Deep State But Were Too Scared to Ask

  Some Classic Episodes of Trump’s Space Force

  Welcome to AP U.S. History! Everyone Say Hi to the Tank and the 150 Heavily Armed Men.

  Part IV

  MODEST PROPOSALS AND OTHER COMMENTARY

  A Good Time to Talk About Gun Laws

  I Am Sick of These Children Demanding Safe Spaces

  This Magic Is Too Strong to Stop

  How to Sleep at Night When Families Are Being Separated at the Border

  Play the “Woman Card” and Reap These Rewards

  That Five-Year-Old Refugee Has Diabolical Plans

  I Will Not Take My Husband’s Name

  Part V

  HOW NOT TO DO THINGS WRONG

  Famous Quotes, the Way a Woman Ought to Say Them in a Meeting

  Some Interpersonal Verbs, Conjugated by Gender

  How to Fact-Check

  How to Speak Woman

  How to Parent Wrong

  What to Call Racist Remarks Instead of Calling Them Racist Remarks

  So, You Must Speak to the Woman Who Is Wearing Headphones

  Part VI

  FINALLY, WE HEAR FROM MEN, MEASLES, AND A PIGEON

  Please Stop Vaccinating Your Children. I Want to Go to Disneyland.

  Sorry, I Obey the Billy Graham Rule

  I Am a State Legislator, and I Am Here to Substitute-Teach Your Biology Class

  Male Authors Describe Men in Literature Right

  Surprise! I’m Back, and I Atoned

  Without the Swimsuit Part of Miss America, When Will I Be Able to Judge Women’s Appearances?

  I’m Fine with Women in Power, Just Not This One Specific Woman Currently in Power

  I Am in Favor of Confederate Statues. I Am Definitely Not a Pigeon.

  Coda

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  RELAX. NOTHING IS WRONG.

  There are cretins and goofs who will tell you that this is a bad time to be alive. Or, worse, an “interesting” time to be alive. They want to fill your head with lies—for instance, that outdated horrors are still occurring, and, in addition, new bad things are happening, and if it were not for the ability to order pizza on your phone without speaking to another human being, there would be no good arguments for the present at all. This is simply not true.

  Actually, this is a wonderful time to be alive.

  We live in an age when anything is possible. Those aforementioned cretins would phrase this another way: Things that once seemed unthinkable are now commonplace. Maybe that sounds bad to you. If it does, you are wrong. Also, you are a coward. Coward! I will explain to you all the wonderful things about being alive today very slowly and carefully so that even a child could comprehend them, keeping in mind that I despise children.

  Things that humankind feared for millennia—certain sorts of bears, very big clouds, the weather more generally, large insects, snakes, the creatures who live in the oceans’ plumbless depths—now fear us. We are putting the final nail in the tiny coffin of the poisonous frog; next we will tackle the ocelot. The dark, deep rainforests full of things that go hrrrr hrrrrr bumpkawwww shhshhshh cooooee in the night—they fall before us, acres a day, and their secrets vanish with them. Do not heed the scientists who say that these secrets could save us, could cure diseases. That is only the forest’s vile whispering to save its own life, and soon we shall be rid of it for good.

  For too many years, we bent the knee to the climate. We let it be hot in some places and cold in other places. We went around meekly putting up umbrellas and donning thick parkas and sleeping next to blocks of ice, because we (fools that we were) thought that we could do nothing to change it. We were forced to get out of the ocean and walk on the dry land and build cities on the dry land. Now see what we have done! Soon there will be water where there was land, and we will have gotten vengeance on the ice for the horrors it inflicted on our most titanic boat (the Titanic). The climate bows before us. We are not under the weather any longer. Now we soar above it in our magnificent jet airplanes, trailing carbon behind! The atmosphere will have carbon in it until we say otherwise, and the atmosphere will thank us.

  Generations of parents once told their children not to be afraid to go to school—“What is the worst thing that could happen?” Now they see the possibilities. Now we all see them everywhere! Things we never thought could happen at places of worship, at concerts, at shopping malls, at movie theaters, at schools, at schools, at offices, at places of worship, at schools, in parking lots, at places of worship—they happen, and keep happening. Perhaps it once seemed unthinkable that people would fail to take action if such things did indeed occur—but that is the glory of the present time! People are doing the unthinkable every day!

  And that is not the only good news! Things we feared lost decades ago are back and thriving. The Nazi, the Confederate, and the measle are all being tenderly reintroduced to their former habitats, where they seem to be flourishing, with a little periodic encouragement from above. Pollutants are being joyfully reunited with their ancestral rivers. Even the dread wide-leg pant is now freque
ntly sighted in the wild.

  And it is not only the reintroduction of these treasures to the landscape that has so gladdened our hearts and spread out such wide and tempting vistas before us. Also to the realm of government do these great gains extend.

  Before, if someone had told you that they wanted to be put in charge of a large section of the government even though they knew nothing about it and perhaps wanted to co-opt it for personal profit, you would have told them to dream a different dream. You would have told them that this simply could not happen. People would not permit it. Well, you were wrong.

  And that was not all. Before, for instance, there were certain things that we could not imagine a president would say. There were certain things, for instance, that we could not imagine a president would do. There were certain people, for instance, that we could not imagine would be placed in charge of anything, let alone the government of the United States of America. But no longer!

  Indeed, we have much less need of imagination than we did before. Once people could make whole careers conjuring up outlandish things that were not happening. No longer! Now—we need simply watch. Caricaturists are out of business, joining the ranks of travel agents and most (but not all) of the people who scan and bag purchases at the drugstore. We have become our own parodies, eliminating waste and redundancy. This kind of efficiency is what has allowed us to thrive at home and drop jaws abroad. We have killed off satire once and for all. It is dead. Long live reality!

  Which is to say, that it is a wonderful time to be alive. Yes, wonderful! How marvelous to be stepping out of the thick mists of confusing facts and up toward the light of perfect clarity. How glorious to live in an age when things that once were fairy tales are now seen, daily, to be completely real—children sticking their slim fingers through the bars of cages, emperors with no clothes, women with their voices ripped out. Galileo would probably love to be alive now. So would Jesus, who, I believe, is scheduled to arrive shortly.

  Yes, now is the best time. Nothing is off limits. Perhaps it was a brief folly to think that anything was ever off limits. Perhaps the so-called unthinkable has always been commonplace and it was only that a few lucky people did not notice. Well, we know better now. No one has any idea what the next day will bring! Time itself seems to have taken on previously unimagined dimensions! The unthinkable is happening every day! We have emerged from the close darkness of Before, shedding old scientific precautions and pushing aside all the warnings of the past, to stand bravely, to gaze unblinkingly directly into the sun!

  NOTHING IS WRONG

  AND HERE IS WHY

  Prologue

  Welcome to the New Physics!

  YOU MAY EXPERIENCE some temporal discomfort.

  It has been sixty years and you have barely crossed the span from Monday until Tuesday.

  You entered the week comparatively young and spry and now you are a withered and wretched crone, demanding ointment, and things that you could swear happened yesterday were simultaneously three hundred years ago and never.

  This is normal. This is how time works now.

  Friday is both twice a week and not at all.

  Each Friday lasts six years.

  Tuesdays are only sometimes.

  If you pause to look down at your phone in the middle of a routine activity, you will look up and see a barren, unfamiliar landscape and your hands will be covered in cobwebs. You are now three hundred years older than you were and you remember things no one else does and speak in a language that has been all but forgotten.

  Do not panic. This is quite common.

  Sometimes you will find yourself describing an event from the remote past and find that, in fact, it happened yesterday.

  Sometimes you will find yourself describing an event from the recent past and find that, in fact, it happened never.

  This mistake is common. Be sure to check your news with the news that has been Approved!

  You may also notice that events happen and then unhappen. This, again, is normal. This is a sign that you are in this timeline with the rest of us.

  Something may be very wise and smart and good to do and then it may never have occurred. Then all evidence of it may be buried. People may be very close to power and then they may vanish like ghosts. Things flicker in and out of existence. This is because only some of these things are being observed, although it is also possible that someone is meddling with the timeline and you should not mind it. Better, with these timelines, to leave well enough alone.

  Q: Given all this confusion about time, should you be moisturizing?

  A: Oh god, you should.

  A: Moisturize, moisturize quickly. Absolutely you should moisturize. Oh, moisturize, without a doubt!

  And do not panic. It does no one any good to panic.

  You may think: Am I being sucked into a black hole? Is this not how time works when you are being sucked into a black hole?

  The good news about approaching a black hole is that you will live a very long time.

  The bad news about approaching a black hole is that you will never die.

  The best news is that as you are sucked into this hole, you get to relive some critical moments of the recent past!

  Relax and surrender to the new physics!

  Part I

  THE BRIGHTEST TIMELINE

  YOU MAY FEEL THAT YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT has been happening for the past four years, but I assure you, you do not. Probably at some point you have imbibed a Bad Fact by mistake, instead of a True Fact. A Bad Fact makes you uneasy when you contemplate it. A Bad Fact has a seasick feeling about it. You may feel that things are going wrong, and that you are powerless to stop them. I pity you! It is time to expel such Bad Facts from your system! Embrace True Facts. Don’t you want to see the world as it is, in all its shining glory and magnificence?! I want you to see it that way, as I see it. I am much happier now that I see things correctly. Are you not sick of seeing only failures and hobgoblins? Hold still, I am going to show you everything that is beautiful and true. Hold still, and listen.

  © 2016, Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post

  Chris Christie’s Wordless Screaming

  It was March of 2016. Donald J. Trump was securing his party’s nomination. And behind him stood Chris Christie, who made a face of such absolute horror that it filled the minds of all who beheld it with Bad Facts. A description of it follows, which you must certainly purge from your memory as quickly as you can.

  IS CHRIS CHRISTIE OKAY?

  I believe that Donald Trump was talking, tonight, and that he, in fact, held an entire press conference. But it was impossible to hear him over Chris Christie’s eyes.

  Chris Christie spent the entire speech screaming wordlessly. I have never seen someone scream so loudly without using his mouth before. It would have been remarkable if it had not been so terrifying.

  Sometimes, at night, do you still hear them, Clarice? The screaming of the Christies?

  His were the eyes of a man who has gazed into the abyss, and the abyss gazed back, and then he endorsed the abyss.

  It was not a thousand-yard stare. That would understate the vast and impenetrable distance it encompassed.

  He looked as if he had seen a ghost and the ghost had made him watch Mufasa die again.

  He had the eyes of a man who has looked into the heart of light, the silence. A man who had seen the moment of his greatness flicker, and seen the eternal footman hold his coat, and snicker.

  And, in short, he looked afraid.

  He had the face of a man who has used his third wish and realized too late that “may my family never starve” could be twisted to mean that the genie should murder his entire family.

  He had the face of a man who has just realized his own mortality.

  Look into those eyes and try to deny that Chris Christie has seen something.

  Someone just told Chris Christie that there is no God. Or Chris Christie has just discovered that God does exist but She is an enormous snake who hate
s or is indifferent to mankind. Or Chris Christie has just discovered that there is no God but that Hell is real.

  “When are they coming to airlift me out?” Chris Christie’s eyes are pleading. “Please tell me that they are coming and that it is soon.” But then his expression hardens. Chris Christie knows that they are not coming back for him.

  This is his life now.

  Soon he must return to the plane onto which Trump humiliatingly sent him before. Soon he must return to the small cupboard under the stairs where he is kept and occasionally thrown small slivers of metaphorical raw meat. When he asked to be part of Trump’s cabinet he never thought to specify “presidential cabinet, of course, not a literal cabinet underground where the ventilation is poor and there is no light.” It just did not occur to him. Why would it?

  And now it is too late.

  Nobody is coming for you, Chris Christie. Nobody is coming to save you.

  Chris Christie has seen things. Things you wouldn’t believe. Things that would make your hair fall out and turn gray all at once. But he cannot speak of them. He can only stand there. Chris Christie is the bearer of a hideous knowledge that hangs on him like a horrible weight. But he has no way to say it.

  He is embroidering this hideous truth very slowly onto a handkerchief, but it will not be ready in time.

  Chris Christie must stand and watch as his city is overrun with Imperial troops and his friends are frozen in carbonite.

  Chris Christie has the glazed and terrified look of someone who has traded his inheritance for no pottage at all, who has watched his credibility dry up and is about to be led back to his basement cage, having lost Winterfell for good.

  Chris Christie is realizing that the steak he gets to eat inside the Matrix is not worth this.

  Chris Christie has made a yuge mistake.

  Donald Trump won at least seven states on Super Tuesday. His path to the nomination is clear.