We’ll Get Through This
Donald J. Trump is President of the United States again. And, again, a lot of Americans are handwringing and panicking over what the convicted felon, chaos agent, and general mean-spirited blowhard will do to destroy people’s lives, the economy, America’s status on the global stage, and democracy itself. But this time, compared to eight years ago when he first took the oath of office, it feels different.
It feels different because it is. For many, they’re tired. They’re simply out of energy and fucks to give about Trump or policy or politics as a whole. It feels that way because a different kind of coalition elected Trump back into office. And it feels that way because deep inside of us, we know we’ll get through this.
For Trump’s supporters, though his MAGAites may not admit it, they know his time as the Great Leader is temporary. This is his final four years in the job. Even Trump’s most conservative and Constitutional loyalist pals on the Supreme Court will have a hard time disagreeing with that. His supporters know that there’s a life after Trump because they suffered through it with Joe Biden. And they got through it.
Trump’s detractors should take refuge from their panic because in America, just like in real life, all things pass. We get through things, past things, over things. And that’s a good thing. Case in point: 2011.
Fourteen years ago, when Barack Obama was still in his first term and the American Left was convinced racism was over and the stench of their farts could cure cancer, sexism, and break horses, our culture was saddled with some horrible maladies.
There was Stomp, Clap, Hey music sweeping the nation. This bland, overly produced and earnest genre, with songs and bands almost entirely indistinguishable from one another, dug itself into our brains like an earworm with a music degree from Julliard but not a single friend outside of the orchestra rehearsal space. The men looked like overdressed hipster bartenders with suspenders draped over tucked-in shirts wearing the same big dumb hats wealthy white women would flock to en masse in just a few years. The women looking like real life American Girl dolls. The smug harmonies. And all that stomping and clapping and heying. It was a sonic tsunami of spastic guitar strumming and anthemic Folk ‘n’ Roll that would be the absolute worst hold music for the Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
The Head and The Heart’s “Rivers and Roads” was everywhere. On the radio, in your local CVS, on your favorite TV shows like How I Met Your Mother and Chuck. Into 2012, with The Lumineers’ song “Ho Hey” holding the number one spot on the Billboard Rock chart for eighteen weeks and eight weeks on the Adult Pop chart, and reaching number three on the Hot 100 chart, it felt like this bland, muddling of masculinity and femininity would never die. I’m all for gender fluidity, but it’s nice to know whose fluid is whose. The scene inspired little from its fans beyond allegiance to boredom, and for its detractors with their fingers in their ears, the hopes that Bob Dylan’s electrified Folk ‘n’ Roll anthem “Like a Rolling Stone” would come loose and crush these bands like a Laurel Canyon landslide.
The Lumineers. Or maybe The Head and the Heart.
Mumford & Sons. Or maybe the Lumineers.
Eventually, Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers, The Head and the Heart, and the other forgettable groups faded from the spotlight and the tops of the charts. The scene became a meme. The zeitgeist was replaced with Carly Rae Jepson’s “Call Me Maybe.” And I believe with all my head and my heart, that Jepson did for Stomp, Clap, Hey what Nirvana did for Hair Metal.
We got through it. And now we have Charlie XCX.
2011 was also the year fingerstaches were cool. Like, really cool. For some reason, people—mostly white women—were painting old-timey mustaches on their fingers in Sharpie and finding it HILARIOUS to bring their finger up to their lip when taking photos. Some people went far enough to get it tattooed. Coffee mugs, pint glasses, flasks with the mustache printed on them were available for sale everywhere—even the dank gas station where your mom’s ex-boyfriend would get his boner supplements.
Lucrative commerce at its dumbest.
Cool tat, Kath. Though, an early 2000s tramp stamp would have been cooler.
In Chicago, the beloved venue Joe’s on Weed Street hosted the Stache Bash 2011. I was invited. I declined. It was an event for charity, and while I am all for helping others, I could not get behind the event’s theme. On a piece I wrote on an old and now defunct blog, I quote the event’s description as, “the American Mustache Institute’s (AMI) annual really dumb, costume-heavy music and mustache charitable benefit—where AMI brings together the Mustached American community with our clean shaven brethren.”
What?
The AMI appears to be no more. Its website shaved bare from the Internet. Huzzah! (And wasn’t “huzzah!” a thing people were saying a lot in 2011? Oy…)
Lyft, the ride sharing company that hit the streets in 2012 to rival Uber differentiated itself by having drivers slap gigantic pink mustaches on the grills of the car because… it was funny? Because marketing. Because disruption. Thankfully, the joke didn’t last long so I could feel good about choosing Lyft over Uber when news broke over Uber’s sexual assault problems.
In 2011, a lot of bartenders were calling themselves mix masters. With Stomp, Clap, Hey music blaring out of the speakers, the American bartender was now too busy mix mastering your bourbon and ginger to have a conversation. A key moment in the breakdown of the now troubled American social agreement.
Despite our fractured social structure, we got through the idiocy that was the late 2000s and early 2010s. There are still the scars, but we’ve healed. And, thanks to the pandemic, most of us have beards and mustaches. Facial hair is no longer an unfunny joke, it’s just what we look like. Hit songs aren’t about peaceful rivers and roads, but about wet ass pussies.
We’re Americans. We’re not the always the best and the brightest. We’re not always the good guys. But we’re resilient. Trump is perhaps the most resilient American to date, but rest assured, we’ll get through these next four years. For good and ill, we’ll get through it. And we’ll find something even dumber than MAGA, Woke, mustache tattoos, stomping, clapping, and heying to obsess over.
