Well, we did it. We got Trump out of office. One of the darkest moments in our nation’s history is finally over. Unfortunately, that darkness now resides within us, in the memory of that vile sex tape we were all more or less forced to watch. Like David, we brought down the giant – but unlike David, we had to see a disgusting old man ding-dong to make it happen.
I think we can all agree that the period of time in which our now-former president sat in the Oval Office was one of the most shameful of our lives, but nothing will haunt me like the visions of that sex tape. I know I’m not the only one who thinks so either.
No single 22-minute video has ever been so widely watched by the American people. (Ratings-wise it did better than the Super Bowl. I no longer trust ratings. In fact, if something has good ratings, I now tend to stay away from it.)
Furthermore, no single 22-minute video has ever contained so much egg play. Most of us didn’t even know what egg play was before the video came out.
Now most of us will never forget.
Was it worth it? I know it sounds blasphemous, but I don’t know. On the one hand, every single day he was in office was a reminder that we had failed each other in a profound way. On the other hand, we had to watch a seventy-year-old man do that thing with the Vaseline and the balloon animal. How many people were cleaning vomit out of their carpets the day that video came out? How many of us learned what bile was that day? How many of us cried when we realized that a crime as egregious as electing this awful man as president had to be paid for with something equally horrific in nature?
That day, the concept of karma revealed itself to be not a precarious, abstract theory, but a literal truth, a fundamental law of some infinitely complex and infinitely merciless science. That day, we learned that the universe was indifferent to our suffering.
A new era of sexual suppression is upon us now, as conservatives, moderates, and even some liberals are afraid that all fetishes eventually lead to the Potted Fern. This isn’t true, but can you blame anyone for thinking so? My concern is that we may continue to regress in regards to sexual expression and education as a direct consequence of the contents of the tape. “Don’t bring that plant in the house. I know what you kids intend to do with it,” you might hear a neighbor say. This brings me great sadness for the future of our society, but great sadness is a part of my life now. I’ve learned to live with it.
Sometimes I wish we could go back to the times when the biggest scandal was the possibility of a pee tape. Sometimes I wish we could make our innocence great again.
But then we wouldn’t have known about Paul Ryan. God knows we’re better off without him. But we’ll never really be “without him,” after seeing what he did in those final few minutes of the video. Paul Ryan will always be with us – seven words I never thought I’d hear myself say.
Ultimately, what’s done is done. There’s no taking it back. At the very least, I guess we’re all in this together. But then again, we were all in this together before, too. “After a while, all silver linings turn grey,” as that one philosopher said before gouging out his own eyes following the televised 60 Minutes reenactment of the tape.
As a nation, we’re between a rock and a hard place, and that may never change – which hurts to say, because it brings to mind that moment in the video, around 9 minutes and 43 seconds in, when Trump had her literally in between a rock and a hard place. I’ve never seen anything so repulsive in my life.
