In the eight days since we witnessed the quiet, hissing implosion of the free world in about 90 eerily quiet minutes, our greatest minds have grappled with a crucial dilemma: whether to call the first presidential debate a trainwreck, dumpster fire, hot mess, snafu, fiasco, or shitshow.
Hopeful Democrats seem to be going with trainwreck: ugly, damaging, tragic, but technically survivable. Actual party members seem to prefer dumpster fire: gruesome, foul-smelling, relatively easy to contain. More cynical observers are likely to choose snafu, for its acronymic suggestion that this particular fucked-up situation is normal — business as usual in our fallen world of late-capitalist American party politics.
As for the rest of the world…well, we'll get to them in a second.
In a way, I’m unqualified to weigh in because I watched the debate in the same wussy manner I’ve been watching most media spectacles that pose real psychological danger: through the slatted fingers of online-media: clocking "Live Updates" on the digital New York Times app, watching clips the following day, and following post-game analysis on podcasts and columns, offered by braver souls who steeled themselves to watch it live. So while I'm updated on what technically happened, I don't have the poet’s sense of the moment, that embodied knowledge that produces le mot juste.
For a time last week, I was Holly Hunter's character in Broadcast News: the one member of her network news team who missed the disastrous anchor-desk debut of Albert Brooks' news reporter, whose drenching, beetle-browed flop sweats on live TV soared right over the high bar that Richard Nixon set in 1962, and that prompted concerned calls to the studio from viewers across the country.
"It seems like he had sort of a…mishap on the news," Hunter tells a colleague, who responds that this is true, that indeed he witnessed said mishap.
"It wasn't as bad as he thinks, was it?" she asks. "It wasn't…unprecedented or anything."
"Not if you count Singing in the Rain," says her colleague.
For a time, this was more or less how I was processing the debate, a media spectacle that sends the mind casting to other genres, media, or even philosophical parables for some kind of precedent, for a better sense of the phenomenon itself.
If a president stares blankly into space on a soundstage, does he make a sound?
That's the kind of poser that ran through my mind over the week that I spent alone in a New York City apartment, half-following chatter like a lone station agent in some drastically underfunded intelligence bureau. But the shape of the thing, its outline and scale, finally came into clearer focus on Saturday, during a phone call with a friend who's about as far outside the media bubble, electoral politics, and U.S. airspace as anyone I know.
In 2022, this friend, a recovering Berkeley PhD candidate in history, fled the ambient insanity of the States for one of the smaller islands of the Azores — in the actual middle of the Atlantic Ocean. These days, along with sheep, he sees various freewheeling souls, some Portuguese, some expats, one a sometime crew member of sailboats that are at sea for many months at a time. She told him one of her old colleagues didn’t learn about the September 11 attacks until six months after the fact.
While he’s not utterly off-grid, this friend is, mindfully, remote and his media diet seems to be either Mediterranean or European — smaller portions, consumed later than we do, with a more regional focus — and our talks tend to be about books, movies, and theater, in which he sometimes works as producer or critic. We very rarely discuss “the news.”
So when he actually brought up that eerily silent spectacle of the preceding Thursday night, it was clear that the phenomenon I’ve seen variously defined, dismissed, minimized, or explained away, did indeed make a sound. A sound whose echoes made it all the way out to his grassy volcanic rock in Macaronesia.
Whose impression moved this friend, a thoughtful observer of civilization’s ebb and flow, to take a long breath and, in the clipped Mid-Atlantic accent of some post-war American public intellectual — Schlesinger? Trilling? — pronounce Thursday night’s debate, "an historic shitshow."
So this is the term, as modified, I move that we apply to the first event. And given its newly world-historic import, I suggest run through the major lexicons, to see which need amending to suit the new usage.
The generic dictionary.com has a fair primary definition, "a chaotic event or situation, often one that turns out badly," but goes astray with its secondary "a person or thing that is a total mess, failure, or disaster" — which is too close to "hot mess" to be useful.
The redoubtable Merriam-Webster offers "something (such as an event or a situation) that is chaotic, contentious, or unpleasant to an excessive or absurd degree," which is fine but a bit capacious.
Props to Cambridge's "a situation or event that is badly organized, unpleasant, and full of confusion," whose workmanlike definition excels in its example, "Elections are often a shitshow."
Although it's a bit vague, you'll still want to sit a minute with Collins's "a catastrophically disordered state of affairs," — just to let that adverb settle in.
If one detects a certain collegiate orientation in the crowd-sourced Wiktionary’s primary definition — "a messy situation, especially involving drunkenness and partying” — the site excels with its secondary one, "a situation characterized by chaos, confusion, or incompetence" and its handy etymological math problem: "shit + show = shitshow."
Oddly, the word didn't even make it into the OED until 2015, shortly after which — say, oh, November 8, 2016? — it became indispensable (see fig 1.)
The graph fails to track the word’s very earliest recognized appearance, which this piece quotes Oxford's U.S. dictionary czar, Katherine Connor Martin, as tracing to, unsurprisingly, a German utterance: a literal English translation of something a Red Army Faction member shouted at their trial judge in 1973: “We don’t want this shit-show any longer!”
While that hyphen bears the mark of a German import, the term leaps remarkably cleanly across 50 years to the present. Modifier and noun fuse into a single term: not a shit-ty show, nor a fecal demonstration, but a display, exhibition, or performance that’s executed by fools and insults viewer and participant alike, staining everyone with semantic ordure.
Isn’t it exciting to see language evolve to accommodate new realities? Yes, but it’s the kind of exciting that George Orwell probably had in mind when he wrote in 1946 that, in embattled moments, language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” This, from an essay whose spooky imagery found terrifyingly literal expression on CNN:
…when one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases” – carry your own clubs, we beat Medicare – “one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.
…The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.
Hint, fucking, hint.
One of the most powerful skills that today’s demagogues and their operatives have developed is marshaling the non-stop, algorithmic firehose of events and non-events to make a significant number of people unsee and unhear something they just saw and heard. Early adopters in the GOP were on this job by January 7, 2020, and within four years the Supreme Court rewrote the Constitution to accommodate their version.
But you do start to get certain grassy-knoll ideas in your head when the demagogues’ supposed opponents try, however feebly, to do the exact same thing. New York Review of Book’s Fintan O’Toole pursues a fun contagion theory to explain what happened on that podium, that the 81-year-old was forced into joining a 78-year-old’s pissing match in some ghastly macho sundowning pas de deux. Other theories have our current president as a Kremlin-made Manchurian candidate who was just activated, or rather deactivated.
But the cognitive dissonance gets truly intolerable when, as happened this week, the blue team — Gavin Newsom among others — sets about trying to convince us that this debate wasn't that big a deal, that it doesn't matter so much, that we didn’t really see and hear what the whole world did.
That’s a leading-by-10-points argument to make, not a trailing-by-7-points-4-months-before-the-election one. Not when your mob-boss opponent has already managed to insert so many faithful soldiers during his first term and is, like most authoritarians, literal-minded enough to do the worst things he threatens to do.
From what I’m reading, Biden has acknowledged that this weekend is the one that decides whether or not he continues in this race. So maybe a definition of terms will help his decision-making process.
Last night, he told George Stephanopoulos that his blank-faced stares and mad-lib aphasia represented “a bad episode. No indication of any serious condition. I was exhausted. I didn't listen to my instincts in terms of preparing and — and a bad night."
Ok. Since Biden likes to use sports analogies, I suggest we imagine a professional athlete using the phrase “bad night” to explain away a game that his team lost by 60 points, in which he either threw up 16 bricks from the foul line or scored six own-goals. Or a boxer who, in a title fight, allowed his punch-drunk opponent to run circles around him for two rounds then deliver him to canvas with a feather-light tap to the jaw.
I’m no linguist but “bad night” doesn’t seem quite right.
Hm, I wonder what word we all should use.