Words

This is a political rant. Not well edited and wee bit cynical.

Somewhere between the last post and this post, a season and a half passed. An election happened.

Things I did since we last saw each other:

• Made some drawings.

• Learned how to do monotype printmaking.

• Became an activist for housing owners’ rights in my HOA.

• Climbed the Grand Teton.

• Read lots of books from the library cover to cover.

• Learned to play chess.

• Voted for Kamala Harris.

Now it’s well into Fall. I feel better-ish; it’s my season. It’s back to the season of doing, thinking, making, layering.

Work was on my mind because of several different books I read last summer, including Ambition Monster (2024) by Jennifer Romolini, Uncanny Valley (2020) by Anna Weiner, Private Equity (2024) by Carrie Sun, and Liars (2024) by Sarah Manguso. My summer reading books were all concerned with women, individuation, art, and work explicitly and implicitly. The first three are memoirs, and the last is a novel. I am obsessed with the genre—mostly because I think it’s an incredibly underexplored topic. Or maybe it’s unexplored within myself as I figure out what I want to do when I grow up. In October, I started reading What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandell.

Then, the election happened.

First, I think it’s worth stepping back and thinking about women in the corporate workplace, including the executive branch of government. It’s brand new, culturally speaking. Like working professional women at scale is maaaaaaaybe a few decades old at best. And it’s fucking brutal. Once women start playing in the big leagues, the knives are out. Did you watch the “Martha” Netflix documentary? Right, we all know the story. (Fun fact: James Comey was the lead prosecutor in Stewart's case. James Comey was also central to Hilary’s loss in 2016.)

I digress. On November 5, Kamala Harris got punished by an electorate who LITERALLY could not even hear what she was saying. She’s centrist politically and not beloved at all by progressives; she campaigned with Liz Cheney for chrissakes. Yet the referendum on the right was that a woman, a woman of color, would inevitably be radical left and be worse than convicted felon Donald Trump had already sunk into the provincial brains of 70+ million Americans.

My favorite meme because it’s true:

What does this bring me to? One of the realizations I have had this week is that words no longer seem to matter. When Obama rose to national prominence in 2008, his rhetoric swept me up with him. It was political poetry. And since then, my long delusional hangover from the Obama years was I thought if we (Democrats) said things eloquently, with polish, grace, truth, facts, and good oratory, it could persuade even the biggest disbelievers. I believed that intelligent, rational thought, expressed by words strung together, would prevail, and the Trump era was the aberration.

Wrong. Vibe shift. I’ve come to believe that all anyone cares about is money. Dumb, blunt money led by a dumb, blunt, and crass criminal money man. Egg prices today matter more than the prospect of a nuclear World War III and total climate collapse. The people have spoken.

Money is the national religion. Fuck any other value. I deeply appreciate that Robert Reich keeps banging his righteous drum (and I love him!), but who can hear him? So, how do I feel post-election? Like it’s fucking over.

From Sandell’s book (from 2012): “The commodification of everything has sharpened the sting of inequality, making money matter more. … Markets don’t only allocate goods; they also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged….Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about.”

We are nothing but markets. I learn a word in DuoLingo and I get an XP coin. I post a Bruno pic, I earn a heart. Of course the “coin” of our attention dollars is not a new topic, but this election marked how complete this transformation of the American psyche is.

Now, I have come to the conclusion that words have stopped having any meaning because the assumption is that the receiver of the words has enough context or enough care to filter those words into reasonable meaning. (I mean, you might, dear reader, but let’s face it, if you’re following this Substack, you’re an elite twat.)

No more nice words. (See what I did there?)

For me, the outcome of this election is that we must make art. Pictures, metaphors, movement, music, and intangible and ephemeral expressions are the new currency that is worth anything. Some of the most powerful movements in the world have been rooted in symbolism because symbols work.

In the end, here’s the true irony: Words were always a masculine game. Language represents a way to bring order to chaos. Now, it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s the chaos that is going to reign. Chaos is ultimately a woman’s space. And markets? No one understands better the nature of transactions better than women. We hold the receipts in our bodies, in our souls, in our collective consciousness.

We have always been the keeper of the ultimate markets—and let us never forget that.

Touché.