Hey what’s up, how is your day? What have you been doing? Me, nada, just sitting on my couch listening to the ambient noise of a procession of charisma-deficient mediocre white men making the case for or against impeachment while they sit on very expensive butterscotch-colored chairs that now resemble the color palette in my brain. This shit is like one hundred million hours, bro, and it will continue being millions of hours long over the next two weeks, during which this clown car will unload its animal-balloon party every other weekday. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch is showing up to the party on Friday, which seems like it could get pretty interesting. But overall, I look forward to the further desiccation of my emotional capacity in the coming days, in which functional parts of my brain shrivel into enoki mushrooms every time a sentient toupee with tinea capitis of the soul utters the sentence, “Mr. Ambassador, are you a Never-Trumper?”
I want to say that we are better than this—that it seems wildly clear that Trump has violated the specific tenets of democracy and at the very least is vastly disdainful of the requirements of his job, and that it’s incredibly frustrating that of all the hateful shit ya mans has put on the table, it took a mafia-style phone call with the leader of a desperate country to finally get his ass aired out for all to see. But we got here because many of our elected leaders enacted caution and rationality in the face of chaos, expecting to be met with reason from that which is characteristically incapable of offering it. Since 2016 it’s been time to batten down the hatches, light some fires, and roll deep with middle-fingers extended, but these motherfuckers were too concerned with having philosophical discussions about civility, the decline of discourse, and whether or not it is polite to cancel someone. The kids on the frontlines of the Climate Movement have the right idea: The time is now, the time was yesterday. The house is on fire and establishment Democrats have been picking out wallpaper swatches.
Fine, I guess we have to respect the process, and not doing so is how we got here in the first place. But fuck, this shit is mad long, my dudes.
I’m stuck on the furniture, though. Those luscious butterscotch leather chairs, staples of the Longworth House Office Building on beautiful, scenic Capitol Hill. The décor is “luxurious simplicity,” according to the Chicago Tribune upon its opening in 1933. During future hearings, it would be a good idea for camera operators to offer some variety to the shots, panning away from the men and slowly zooming in to the plaster ceiling ornamentation, the pride of Longworth. Show us the chandeliers, the gentle lay of the carpets, and solve the mystery of whether the leather chairs have wheels or if they are meant to be stationary and authoritative.
Give us something new, because we already know the rest—everything that these hearings will bear out is largely already public, and it’s all too little too late. At the very least, I want décor and architecture porn to get us through it, like a visual Klonopin.