After the craziest of months, it's time to worry about "sleeper cells"

But first I need to finish Season 3 of "Ginny and Georgia"

As Yogi Berra famously expostulated, “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

And that well-worn quip could certainly apply to the “12-day war” that putatively concluded yesterday.

News media and social media alike tend to be obsessed with the violent, the instantaneous, and the overdramatic.

Personality x said or did y, seizing everybody’s attention. Luminary z responds by making an equally outrageous statement, or behaving brazenly. Then the talking heads go ballistic.

The next day some other Scheiss hits the headlines, and the cycle repeats itself.

In the first three weeks of June alone we were supposedly on the verge of an “insurrection” in Los Angeles, followed by the assassination of two public officials in Minnesota. Then Israel started bombing Iran, and eight days later President Trump ordered the U.S. military to drop bunker busters on every one of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites.

72 hours thereafter the world was suddenly “at peace”, the White House announced.

But wait!

The very next day a “socialist” Muslim with a surname sounding like some baddy character out of a 1940s film noir Flash Gordon movie just won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, causing Trump-depressed millennial and GenZ progressives to acclaim the arrival of the messiah (or the mahdi, if you want to be Shi’a chic), and tout d’un coup the hedge fundies to start massively mobilizing to move Wall Street to Y’all Street deep in the heart of Texas.

Y’all see now how come July it’s going to all play out?

I’m personally betting on the Killer Asteroid to suddenly manifest on the Fourth in the night sky amidst the rockets’ red glare and wipe out the Hamptons.

But please, God, can I have just a one-day respite from the slow-motion culmination of world history to finish watching Season 3 of Ginny and Georgia on Netflix?

I need my screen time.

One of the sure signs of developing psychosis is disorganized perception. Everything seems intense and meaningful all at once, but if all the elements are juxtaposed with each other nothing really appears to add up.

Unhealthy suspicions along with early stage paranoia proliferate. The mind is overrun with magical thinking and fantasms.

The clickbait approach to both news gathering and news reporting, let alone social media doom-scrolling and algorithm generation, that has become normative over the last two decades, according to certain studies, affects brain functioning not at all infrequently in ways analogous to the onset of mental illness.

If, as T.S. Eliot remarked, “April is the cruelest month,” this June without doubt has turned out to be the craziest.

So where are we exactly?

In our ever-expanding litany of daily debacles that simply “do not compute”, as all those AI-driven out-of-work techies used to mumble, I wonder what we might meekly presume retains some slim veneer of reality to it.

Let’s start with the “hyperpolarization” of American politics. As the French Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou reminds us, politics itself is a “truth procedure” based on certain fundamentalism “axioms”.

Axiom #1. As Sly of Sly and the Family Stone once put it in his song “Everyday People,” there’s “a blue one who can’t accept the green one for living with the black one”, etc.

Red states vs. blue states.

Them who love America vs. those who hate America, and yadda, yadda.

Axion #2. If the blue “everyday” people and their green counterparts continue to work up a frothing, frenzied, and fashionable hatred for each other, then naturally there is going to be increasing violence in the land.

That’s reality!

Axiom #3. We need to dip into the oaken barrel of pithy wisdom and quote Eliot again: “human kind cannot bear very much reality”.

It’s true. We can’t.

Thus, it becomes difficult to accept, if you’re a sheltered academic mentally besotted from unstinting faculty lounge groupthink that the evangelical plumber who lives next door and voted for Trump doesn’t secretly slip out after midnight in his brown shirt and stiletto jackboots to shout sieg heil, mein Führer before gargantuan banners of the Mar-al-Lago marvel at secret torchlight rallies.

Or if you happen to be the evangelical plumber per se, it may be equally difficult to acknowledge that your tweedy professorial neighbor hasn’t performatively draped red terrycloth adorned with hammer and sickle over all their Ikea couches and Nebraska Furniture-furnished lounge chairs.

Reality never comes off as exciting as Tik Tok.

Yet reality can be a bitch as well.

I take note of the fact that in the aftermath of the US military’s recent obliteration of Iran’s nuclear sites, the media is suddenly aswarm with articles warning that “sleeper cells” at any time could come out of nowhere and launch terrorist attacks on the American homeland.

The Jerusalem Post, for one, quotes an American security official as follows:

Iran would not strike in the US unless a red line was crossed. That red line was assessed to be direct military engagement, especially targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities. That red line has now been crossed.

The same security official notes that American intelligence has been aware of the existence of these “sleeper cells” for decades.

As a former FBI agent familiar with the threat recently phrased it bluntly in a media interview:

This isn’t new. They’re here. They’ve been here. They are just waiting for the right moment, and the fact that we are curious and questioning as to whether they’re here or not is actually very shocking to me.

I can confirm. Next question.

So per my last musing, I guess the “barrel of Armageddon”, which we are presently staring down, should not be sought among the fleet of B-2s Missouri suburbanites caught sight of only two weekends ago up in the wild blue yonder.

Rather, we should be wondering whether the clean-cut über-nice dude next door to be seen walking out the door the next morning with backpack strapped on his abs is going for a hike in the woods or – well, you get the idea.

One doesn’t even have to run the risk of sounding Islamophobic, because the same sort of guy these day could just as well be a Stanford-educated, white, upper middle-class Unitarian who’s read Robin DiAngelo, vibes with AOC and the guy from Flash Gordon, and desperately wants to “globalize the intifada”.

What’s in the backpack could also be an Iranian flag, which he doesn’t want nosey neighbors to notice. And he’s probably on his way to an anti-Israel rally where until just last week they brandished Palestinian flags.

But.

B-b-b-b-but.

He probably isn’t comfortable yet with the notion of his own personal martyrdom in a colossal, collective, chattering class variant of hara-kari aimed at shaming, shocking, and eventually subverting the Trump-themed planetary empire of capital, condos, and Christian nationalism.

But give it time.

After interminable hours on bsky.app and unrelenting Maoist-style self-criticism, he might finally run to The New Evangelicals website, discover that Christians and Muslims are no different from each other since they both love Jesus, then reason that “from the river to the sea” probably means he should do whatever he can to rid American of Republicans “from the Potomac to the Atlantic”.

Call him the gentrified jihadist.

Unfortunately, that’s the reality we will have to bear in the coming months, if not years.

Give me Netflix, or give me death