Cheap Signals

Empty rhetoric, real crises, and staying afloat.

I was headed to The Devil’s Elbow when the lady across from me said: “You know how it is on the river, you gotta wear shit you don’t care about getting dirty.”

We were on a bus to our put-in on the Big Piney. She was wearing a T-shirt that said, “Let’s Go Brandon.”

Her friend laughed, and that was the end of it.

I didn’t say anything. Why would I? I didn’t know her. It was an off-hand remark, not my business. You don’t talk politics with strangers on a Missouri float trip bus. First, because it’s rude, and second, because Missouri state law requires everyone present to be drunk.

But I still wondered. Did she buy the shirt, or was it a gift? Was it something she wanted or an inside joke? Was it Biden she didn’t care about dirtying up, or Trump, or the whole corrupt enterprise — the relentless rerun that makes you spend summer days drifting downstream in a sun-soaked stupor?

The Devil’s Elbow is a small town off Route 66. It is one of scores of Missouri places named for the Devil: Devil’s Honeycomb, Devil’s Backbone, Devil’s Icebox. You live in Missouri, you spend a lot of time navigating the Devil: his ins and outs, his tricks and trades. You get to know him real well.

Missourians don’t dwell on our demonic toponyms. The Devil is a background player, infernal and ineffective, like the government. “Tell the truth and shame the devil,” the saying goes, but there was a short-sell on shame back when they mortgaged our future.

You tell the truth because it is right to do so, not because it accomplishes anything. There’s a sanctity to insisting your words be your own in a time of groupthink and propaganda and AI. Their cheap signals, your free rebuke. It is better to be free than to be cheap, as a matter of character.

But every now and then, you spot a saying that’s got no truth to it and no lie either. A worn-out relic, not even rising to the level of cliché.

“Let’s Go Brandon” was a phrase that Trump fans popularized in 2021 so that they could say “Fuck Joe Biden” without getting in trouble with people whose opinions they pretend to disregard. It was inane and instantly commodified. “Let’s Go Brandon” shirts and signs and stickers made MAGA profiteers a fortune, until Brandon went and ruined it with his inflation, or so their story goes.

Now it’s faded like other mantras of 2021: “Build back better”, “Pandemic of the unvaccinated”, “Justice is coming”, “Trust the plan”. Words strung together like nooses for a nation being conditioned to accept its own murder.

According to the cruel standards of online convention, I should have photographed the “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt lady, plastered the images on social media, and weaponized her privacy for profit. That’s what the Devil would have wanted.

But I’m in revolt against the Devil. We’re in a new dark era, and in the summer of 2023, I felt it coming around the bend.

They call it The Devil’s Elbow because the sharp turn in the river once blocked shipping traffic, causing people to crash. Now The Devil’s Elbow is where Missourians go to float the world away, rewarded by nature for our refusal to ruin it.

I approach fellow river people in good faith. I don’t know a stranger’s heart and I’m not stealing their peace.

My husband and kids and I drifted past the bluffs. Vultures soared, encircling a lone bald eagle perched on a boulder in the water. We saw cattle escape from a corral and take an impromptu swim. The Big Piney River is big enough for anything to happen.

At one point the “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt lady passed us in a canoe.

“Hell of a nice day!” she said, her clothes soaked with dirty water, like our own.

We could see a century-old truss bridge in the distance, telling us our time was almost up. We slowed down, not wanting the hell of a nice day to end.

*          *          *

I am engaging in float trip semiotics because I cling to float trip memories like a raft in a bloodbath. Maybe that’s not what you’re here for. But I wasn’t here for the plague or the genocide or the vast political betrayal, and I got them anyway.

I go to the river because it drowns out cheap signals. I can’t get cell service and I can’t get betrayed. Clear skies and fresh air and my family by my side — that’s all I want. It should not be so hard to hold onto simple dreams, but it is.

Float trip season starts in April. It will end in November, along with America, or so pundits claim.

At least, I think that’s what they claim. Every day writers complain that Americans are poorly informed about the danger to democracy Trump poses. Every day I click on their articles to read the details of the danger and find myself blocked by a paywall.

I know what the danger entails — I wrote three books about it; Trump is a mobster turned proto-autocrat backed by transnational fanatics and plutocrats who want to strip the US down and sell it for parts — but I can’t blame people for not taking the end of democracy seriously when they’re expected to pay to learn of its demise.

Serious warnings are free. A paywalled warning of peril is like a phone sex hotline dressed up as a 911 call.

It is also hard to get people to believe that Trump is an existential threat when the Biden-appointed head of the DOJ refuses to contain Trump or any of the wealthy elites in his crime cult, despite the many offenses to which they have confessed.

The conclusions Trump voters tend to draw about Trump’s legal situation are incorrect but logical. They assume that Trump could not have committed a serious crime — even the attempted coup that they watched on TV in January 2021 — because serious crimes are urgently prosecuted and severely punished.

Some take it further: despite what they witnessed, Trump must be innocent, and Biden did steal the election. Otherwise, Trump would be in prison with the randos rounded up by the DOJ. Certain people were arrested for 1/6: small-timers, first offenders, people Trump fans see as average citizens similar to themselves. These are the people a scot-free Trump gets to portray as martyrs on the campaign trail.

What kind of message was that meant to send, DOJ?

Right-wing pundits claim that the DOJ does not have evidence of Trump’s guilt, instead of admitting the truth: the DOJ has had evidence on Trump crime for half a century. But they don’t want to use it, for they are in a mutually beneficial corrupt relationship. Over decades, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and corporate corruption merged, solidifying their anti-American agenda in the 21st century. 2016 was not a rupture, but an acceleration of the plans of a dark transnational alliance and the institutions that protect it.

Trump, protected by the FBI and DOJ for a half century, is the deep state he pretends to fight. And Biden, who entered Congress in 1973, the same year the DOJ started investigating Trump, is a career silent witness.

Contrary to popular belief, bipartisanship is alive and well. You need a both-sides approach if you’re not only going to kill us all but make us root for our own demise.

*          *          *

While Trump plays the demagogue showman, Biden acts as his institutionalist enabler. This is the more important role when it comes to streamlining autocracy to a broad audience.

Biden is a placeholder president whose tenure allows liberals to accept atrocities they would have protested under Trump, including the elimination of a functional public health system, cop cities, vicious border policies, and genocide in Gaza.

These policies have been branded as “Biden” or “Trump” instead of as “right” or “wrong”.

They are all wrong.

Often, they are the same policies marketed to different audiences under different pretexts. Powerbrokers want Americans to respond to policies with the instinctual loyalty of a sports fan, instead of the discerning conscience of a citizen.

The past four years have set the stage for Trump’s political resurrection through a combination of policy, propaganda, and passivity. 2024 feels less like an election than a reinstallation.

It’s mighty convenient that the massive 2020 protest movement was deflated by Biden’s broken promises of accountability, combined with the attacks of a sophisticated right-wing apparatus that demonizes marginalized communities and scores victories in packed courts.

It’s awful helpful that during Biden’s term, what remained of the mainstream media was gutted or paywalled, affecting people’s ability to remember the rampant criminality of the Trump years. Or, for that matter, access documentation of recent history in general.

It sure is auspicious that social media is being purchased by right-wing plutocrats who censor and manipulate algorithms so that you see what they want you to see.

Most obstacles Trump faced in his term — back when you could solve Trump crimes based on evidence in the public domain and a robust, digitally dependent protest movement helped fend off the GOP’s worst plans — were removed during Biden’s term.

To the extent that Biden could control this state of affairs, his administration contributed the most through inaction. They refused to tear up the destructive groundwork laid by the Trump administration, even though they admit our country’s life is on the line.

Is that any way to treat an existential threat? Only if you want it to succeed.

*          *          *

What do you do in a situation like this? What do you do with an unpunished coup attempt and a never-ending plague and Jared Kushner proposing to build waterfront properties in Gaza over the corpses of Palestinian children whose murder the Biden administration funds?

What do you do when the Biden administration continues the Trump administration’s “let it spread” covid policy and blocks public health information to the point that we have to get it from analyzing wastewater? Our public health guidance is, literally, shit.

What do you do when Biden scoffs at being called “Genocide Joe” while millions of Palestinians face imminent starvation and extermination? What do you do when Trump acts offended by people thinking his talk of a bloodbath is really about a bloodbath, even though Trump spent decades threatening to kill people with henchmen like Roger Stone? In 2016, Stone said there would be a “bloodbath” if Trump doesn’t become president, using that very word.

These are cheap signals with real body counts.

America is a real country with a counterfeit government. One run by lobbyists and mobsters and frequently subservient to foreign states. But a real country, nonetheless.

With real people, who feel real pain.

I will never be ashamed that I am an American, but I will always be ashamed that Donald Trump and Joe Biden are.

For those complaining I’m “both-sides”-ing it: that’s what happens when we only get two sides and they are doing many of the same awful things, including the worst possible thing: abetting the mass murder of children.

It is normal to be shocked by genocide and devastated by dead babies and gutted by silence from people you thought had integrity. It is a struggle to function in the midst of many overlapping crises, but particularly with Israel’s ongoing mass murder of Palestinian children, which the murderers celebrate with gleeful impunity.

*          *          *

So, if my mind slips back to sunny days floating to the Devil’s Elbow, don’t hold it against me. I’m holding on to what’s real and good.

I’m thinking of how easily simple family days were torn away from families in Gaza, and before that, families in Sudan and Ukraine and Syria and other conflict zones. The difference, of course, being that US officials cheer Israel’s slaughter instead of condemning it.

If they cheer on that, what else might they approve? For what are all those militarized cop cities intended? When US officials act like sovereignty is fungible and people are disposable — what should we believe is coming?

I will spend 2024 floating into the future, not knowing where the river ends.

Our officials float like Pennywise, float like they’re on the River Styx. I float like an American, through spring-fed waters so clear you can see the bottom, and gentle rapids you learn to ride, and scenery so beautiful the mind reels in gratitude.

This summer I’ll float alongside people who know me only from the water and pray to God they are not falling for dead-soul plots, that they know the Devil when they see him, and offer to him no sacrifice — not of their neighbor, and not of themselves.

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The Devil’s Elbow, photographed August 2023

The Devil’s Elbow, photographed July 2016

Cows refusing to be cattle!

Paddling the Big Piney, August 2023