frozen empire
On my way past the station a few weeks ago, I noticed one of the LinkNYC kiosksinstalled on the sidewalk, those gray monoliths with screens that display fun facts and rotating advertisements. On this particular screen was an ad with an ordinary photograph of a handsome man and his dog, superimposed with white text in a familiar hotel-keycard font: Pride how you pride. The photograph looked like a premium stock photo, so unrelated it was to anything, let alone Pride. I get that you can be gay and proud without festooning yourself with rainbows, but this had clearly been recycled from a previous ad campaign.
You might remember it too. I wrote about it a year and a half ago: the ad campaign for an IHG Hotels & Resorts rewards program, whose “banners present iterations of increasing incoherence: Work how you work, Morning how you morning, Extra how you extra. All words made verbs. Permission for nothing, an empty slot for whatever identity you’ve already adopted.” Almost a year later, the ads were still irritating enough for Steven Phillips-Horst to write about the same campaign, in an article in the Whitney Review: “Verbing a noun is now a common way to sassify ad copy, and the result is almost always cloying.” This Pride how you pride iteration, however, was neither sassy nor cloying, just inert. The hollow antithesis of rainbow-washing, where rather than overindulging in the signifiers of Pride, it emptied the concept entirely—of meaning, politics, history.
Meaning! Politics! History! It’s just an ad. Who cares. It soon cycles away into TikTok influencer videos, amateur artist Instagram accounts, Johnnie Walker ads, weather reports, and a series of text cards called Daring Dogs, which suggests different ways to prepare hotdogs. One recent recipe was “Breakfast Dog: Fire up the grill and crown your hot dog with a sizzling fried egg, crispy crumbled bacon, and a drizzle of maple syrup.”
Nevertheless, seeing that ad nearly two years on, in an even more meaningless form, encapsulated the kind of déjà vu I’ve felt this summer. Or, uh, déjà écrit? Whatever—it’s the feeling that I am repeating myself, coupled with an insecurity about why I had anything to say in the first place. Something between futility and embarrassment, like the feeling of being gulled by someone you despise.
I already wrote, for instance, about Jim Justice and his bulldog, who recently appeared at the RNC (“A frumpled, tortoiselike coal baron praying about Babydog and the power of smiles”). I already wrote about Rudy Giuliani, the “farting, sweating mascot of national humiliation” who stumbled into a row of folding chairs at the same convention. I already wrote (and wrote and wrote) about the march into a hotter future, which continues apace. In June, the 13th consecutive month to break global heat records, tech companies abandoned climate pledges due to the energy demands of AI, and the Supreme Court hobbled environmental regulations by ending Chevron deference. I already wrote (and wrote and wrote) about Biden’s incoherence, which after the disastrous debate finally and belatedly become intolerable.
In the weeks after that debate, it felt like we kept being dragged to the crossroad of History, only to stay on the path in which nothing really changes, in which the present just intensifies. Two years ago, I wrote of Biden: “Embalmed in old charm, mumbling his way through this timid interregnum, doing things slowly as if reverent at his own demise, the President appears.” I was right about the mumbling and the interregnum, but I was wrong to think his demise would have a decayed reverence rather than a Trumpian edge, a defiant clinging that sounded more and more like the man he had always claimed as his foil. In an ABC interview that lasted a mere 22 minutes, George Stephanopoulos asked the President how he would feel if he ran and Trump won. The President replied, “I’ll feel, as long as I gave it my all, and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” Four days later, Stephanopoulos was surreptitiously filmed by TMZ pacing the sidewalk in over-ear headphones and shorts, looking phone-addicted and lost like the rest of us. When asked about the President, Stephanopoulos replied, “I don’t think he can serve four more years.”
And in the end he wouldn’t, he won’t, you know the rest. But for days the present kept hobbling forward into the future. History glimpsed at different paths but didn’t fork, not even when Trump’s head almost exploded on a stage in Pennsylvania. I first learned about the assassination attempt when my friend Sam jokingly texted me one of those profane-pun-filled, emoji-studded chain texts. You know: “‼️CUM-VICTED 💦 FELON 🚨 DONALD TRUMP 🍊 HAD AN ASS 🍑 ASS 🍑 INATION ATTEMPT 🤔 IN BUTT-LER 🍑 PENISYLVANIA 🍆.” It was a more fitting response to the moment than anything Biden had to say, pursuing as he did the same unconvincing line from the wake of January 6, that this is “not who we are as a nation.” I already wrote about that too.
In the office where I work, I watch helicopters fly up and down the Hudson. All day, without ceasing, buzzing back and forth. The wealthy going out to the Hamptons, news and police choppers patrolling the City, even Chinooks floating high above the office buildings, their dual rotors like something out of the future or the past. In the July heatwave, the sky went gray and yellow and the bluish towers across the river looked silver and black, like hard drives overheating in the smog.
During the Trump trial in Manhattan in May, small planes had flown along the same route, dragging banners with phrases like WHEN U INDICT HIM, U UNITE US MAGA and TRUMP DID NOTHING WRONG. There were anti-Trump ones too, but they were limp and confusing—something about “Sleepy Don,” befitting the semantic wilderness of the opposition. Never to be left out, another plane pulled a yellow and red banner that read, in English and Chinese, FALUN DAFA IS GOOD.
History finally did fork, or at least it stumbled into some folding chairs, when Biden ceded the nomination to Vice President Harris on July 21, via an announcement on X/Twitter. I reactivated Twitter right after the presidential debate, and have been borne along on brat riffs, Coconut tree emojis, JD Vance couch-fucking jokes, and clips of Trump fuming that no one seems to care about the attempt on his life. I have been reminded that social media is addicting not just because it’s free (wink, wink) and endless and fulfills the Pavlovian need to check our phones, but because it proffers a world in which our moods can be suddenly changed just by the news, by mere commentary and event. History just some reboot breathing life into an old, forgotten past.
One of the Instagram art accounts on the LinkNYC screens is joaniaconettiwatercolor, who paints watercolors of the subway system, rendering it dripping and cavernous and unrecognizable. They’re almost kitsch, paintings of subway cars and pipes and platforms splotched with paint and water like grime. The passengers all look like ghosts, white and glowing or dark and blue, descending like water spirits into some deep cistern beneath the City. In one painting, a support column by the turnstiles is ringed with blue, a ripple in a flooded station. A strange bit of foreboding before the screen blinks back to taglines and advertisements. Today the Daring Dog is “Potato Chip Dog,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Who knows, who cares what tomorrow’s will be.
ben tapeworm