Here are the stories I no longer want to hear about in 2018. I'm dead serious about this. I am quite willing to round up a posse or Kickstarter an Uber or whatever it is the kids are going on about these days, if we cannot agree to these terms. There will be consequences.
No more of this nonsense.
• Trump supporters who are still Trump supporters. We get it, they're dumb. They're very, very dumb, they live in places in which all their friends are dumb, and their jobs are dumb, and their dogs are dumb, and if Donald Trump Jr. came through town trophy-shooting their children and fashioning himself a necklace of their baby teeth ol' Bob and Nancy and Possum Joe down at the diner would still say that well, at least Trump isn't a secret Muslim or Kenyan or socialist or all of those other words that the dumbest news channel on the airwaves has been using as not-at-all-rabid synonyms for black.
We get it. They're racists. The fact that nearly every one of these interviewed Trump supporters just happens to be, what are the odds, a casual racist is usually gotten around to in a one-sentence quote three-quarters down the story. The same casual racist is also almost always a dumb-as-dirt conspiracy theorist who, in a quote four-fifths through the same story, mentions some asinine theory about Muslims digging secret Muslim tunnels into our nation's department stores to replace all our fresh store-bought socks with new versions that turn the wearer Muslim from the toes up, a bit of sheer dumb lunacy that will be met with a nonjudgemental reminder from Jimmy the Reporter to the reader that it isn't actually true while still treating everything else Bob and Nancy and Possum Joe say as deep wisdom from the American heartland, where the American heartland is defined by our nation's news reporters as any town in which you can still hear casual racists opine their casual racist thoughts in the middle of an otherwise-abandoned diner.
Live in a place where people aren't quite so ready to pipe up with casual racist thoughts the first time a man with a notepad and tape recorder wanders into their Tuesday lunch hangout? Screw you, you aren't the heartland. In 2017 only dumb-as-posts racist conspiracy lunatics counted as heartland, and the length our journalistic elites went to explain this to the rest of us bordered on obsessive-compulsive.
• Dapper Nazis. Dapper Nazis are so un-newsworthy that they don't even deserve an explanation about how un-newsworthy they are. So just take everything I said above about Trump supporters, apply it here, and we are all done. Nobody gives a shit that you have found a racist capable of dressing themselves in the morning. The world is full of bad people capable of dressing themselves.
It used to be that in order to get into the paper you would have to have a compelling life story. You would have had do to something heroic, in your hometown, like saving three children from a fire, or founding a new charity that now feeds thousands, or be an exceptionally bright kid who figured out how to recycle a specific sort of garbage into a new skin patch that could tell you if your dog had cancer. Now all you have to do to get in the papers is shout racist slogans in public without accidentally puncturing your trachea with your clip-on tie. Screw you—in 2018, how about we just get a follow-up on that kid genius instead and call it done.
• Anything Sarah Huckabee Sanders says, ever. After Sean Spicer drove his own career so deep into the ground that the resulting hole became a new artesian well, the Donald Trump White House had to conduct a long search to find anyone who would lie as readily, as frequently, and as implausibly as Sean Sp—just kidding. Actually, they immediately shoved Sarah Huckabee Sanders in front of the podium and, lo and behold, Sanders was able to match and double every lie Sean Spicer told as if she had finally, at long last, found her place in the world.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders is the daughter of thoroughly fake preacher Mike Huckabee, who has spent his post-anyone-giving-a-shit-about-him career doing things like hosting a radio show in which he pretends to Jesus at anyone he doesn't like, and making snide off-the-radio comments about anyone he doesn't like, and plotting how to convert this new, deep reserve of faux-pious but omnipresent venom into a second round of somebody, somewhere, giving a shit about him. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in turn, is the only necessary evidence that Mike Huckabee is completely full of crap when it comes to telling anyone else about either (1) Jesus or (2) how to raise their kids up. Sarah Huckabee Sanders grew up to be a propaganda minister for a lying, addled twit, and spends each daily session in sneering contempt for anyone, amongst the assembled crowd, who suggests she confine her marks to the reality inhabited by the rest of us.
In short, she is a liar. Not merely as personality, but as hired profession. She gets paychecks to lie, on camera, and the day that she stops lying will be the day that Donald Trump fires her on the spot. You know it, I know it, she knows it, he knows it. There is not a damn thing she says that a reporter should be reporting because not a word of it is ever, ever true. If she declares that the president believes this or that, it is not true; she talks to the president approximately never and has no more insight into his mind than any of the other people who ask him simple questions only to get a half-dozen or more contradictory non-responses. If she says the White House is considering this, they almost certainly have never even heard of it; if she says the White House is not contemplating that, they are in fact having staff meetings about it on a daily basis.
Stop. Just stop.
• Stories about millennials ruining things. Here is a tip: Millennials have no money. Millennials could not ruin something if they tried. They are not spending all their income on avocado toast, and if they are it is because they can hold down three half-time jobs at once and still be financially ruined for daring to put fruit on bread. Here is another tip: The people ruining whatever industry you are declaring newly ruined due to shifty millennial non-spenders are, universally, either the industry experts who have spent the last thirty years shoving their own industry through the wood chipper in an attempt to extract every last penny from employees, manufacturers and the buildings themselves.
People do not go to malls anymore because malls are depressing experiments in post-capitalism that make even soviet architecture look innovative. People avoid airline trips these days because the airlines and government alike have gone to great lengths to make the experience a living hell from curb to flying claustrophobic death box to distant curb. People are abandoning their land lines and their cable television companies because those companies have spent decades—decades—cheating, torturing and belittling their own customers. Capitalism’s new strains are not because fresh-out-of-college Chad Twentysomething lives his entire life as an exercise in sticking it to the man; Chad Twentysomething has student loans he will still be paying off long after the captains of industry have scraped the last tattered remnants of his dreamed American profession into a Cayman Islands post office box.
• The Deficit Monster. I presume, after Republicans shoved through a business tax cut that will cost the nation one and a halfish trillion dollars in exchange for a wheelbarrow full of nothing, that when Paul Ryan calls everyone up asking to appear on the Sunday shows because he has just discovered that we need to cut medical care for the poor, food aid to children, and every other good thing America has ever done for anyone by one and a halfish trillion dollars—I presume, when he phones up the nice television bookers and studiously serious journalists of the world to peddle this theory, that every last one of them will laugh at him, then hang up on him. Or hang up on him first, then laugh at him.
Tell me, oh news providers of America, that you are not so effervescently stupid as to go along with the hoary ploy again. Nobody is that stupid, after all, unless it is on purpose. And we are all a bit too old and too world-weary to be stupid on purpose.
• Religious conservatives. No. Just no. Not just no, but fuck no. We're done.
If your religion, and I do not care what it is or what you call it or what symbols you paint on the sign in front of the building, posits that Donald J. Trump is anything less than a lout representing all of the worst traits of humanity, your religion is a fraud. It is a fiction. I feel perfectly comfortable saying this, and I will needlepoint it onto something you can hang on your wall if you really want me to—Kickstarter me, if desired. Any religion that features somebody in a position of authority laying hands on Donald J. Trump, sexual assaulter, organized-crime-friendly, greed-monster and compulsive liar, and praying that Donald J. DevilHimself find success in his earthly endeavors can go right to whichever version of hell you folks keep shouting about. If you are willing to stand up in front of a podium and argue that the Alabama child molester may have molested a child or two, in his time, but he is still the goddamned best your religion can muster than oh my goodness you can wall yourself up in a sepulcher right now, please, and make sure to plug the air holes. If you are a member of such a congregation, and say nothing, do not even presume you can say a damned word about your "faith" to the rest of us. It means nothing. It is nothing.
So 2017 is the year it was finally proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that conservative "religion" does not exist. There is no Republican Jesus, no matter what the cartoon pages say. There is no Republican moral majority, not even if chain mails and cheap online grifts shout it in three fonts at once. There's a child molester in Alabama, there's a dangerous and malevolent narcissist in the White House, and there's a phalanx of cross-wavers in the House of Representatives who spend their each waking day figuring out how best to cut food aid to children, and all of them are being backed by “religious leaders” who vow that yes indeed, this is the government they were waiting for all along.
Guess what! We don't have to play the game anymore! We don't have to pretend you are privy to a secret, profoundly stingy and perverted deity that trumps everybody else's because some loud, amoral expensive-suit-wearing shit who hands out university degrees in Advanced Jesus says Donald J. Fucking Trump is the leader his own private god has been waiting for. Screw you! Get bent! Go to hell! Shut, at long last, up!
I am of necessity omitting many other stories that I would strongly prefer we ban from the 2018 journalistic tool chest. This is too bad, as we could go on for some length, but perhaps we will add more entries in the coming weeks. As I mentioned, I am dead serious about this. We have just gone through a living hell in the last twelve months: we deserve a treat, even if the treat is spending 5 percent less time elevating the deep thoughts of crooks, racists and sociopaths as if they have something to teach the spited elites. Think of it as a New Year's resolution, journalists. Bring back the genius recycler and the hometown heroes, and enough with the folksy racists and official national liars and fake-as-a-three-dollar-bill religious grifts. Give it up already.