We are tired. I want to be precise about the species of tired, because it is a new one, a tired no earlier American generation was issued the equipment to feel. We are not tired the way you are tired after a long day at work. We are tired the way a sock is tired after its forty-first wash, gray and shapeless and no longer fully convinced it qualifies as a sock. We have rolled our eyes so continuously, for so many consecutive years, that the muscles have hypertrophied, and somewhere a sports medicine clinic is treating its first competitive eye-roller for a torn something.
The clown car pulled up in 2015 and has not once stopped disgorging clowns. This is the part that violates the known physics. A reasonable clown car holds eleven clowns, maybe fourteen if they are slim and fond of one another. This one has produced a Secretary of Clowns, a Department of Clowns, an entire cabinet-level clown apparatus with its own budget line, and it is still going, the little door still flapping, another red nose squeezing out into the floodlights to announce that the last clown was secretly a deep-state impostor and that the true clowns, all along, were the institutions we were foolish enough to trust.
We have watched a grown man redraw a hurricane with a marker. We have watched him doze off during a briefing on the collapse of teenage sperm. We have watched him sell sneakers and Bibles and a commemorative mattress, and we have watched other grown men buy them, in their sizes, and arrange them on shelves. We have watched a Vice President who once filed the man under Hitler come back to clarify, with a straight and beautifully moisturized face, that the Hitler thing had been a simple misunderstanding between friends. We are not even shocked anymore. Shock costs energy, and we have none in reserve. The account is overdrawn.
The fatigue is, at this point, the only thing in America that polls bipartisan. Somewhere in a diner in Ohio a man in a flag shirt and a woman in a protest hat sit two booths apart, loathing each other with the last of their available strength, quietly united by the single fact that neither of them can survive another decade of this. The eggs go cold on both tables. The television bolted to the corner shows the car. The door flaps. A fresh nose appears.
I used to assume the show would end the moment the country finally got bored of it. I had the machine backwards. The boredom was never the audience losing interest. The boredom was the product, manufactured to spec and pumped in at volume until the will to object quietly lay down for a nap. So take this as your gentle reminder, fellow exhausted citizen, that the most tired you have ever been in your life is precisely how tired they need you to be.
The car is not empty. Stop waiting for it to be.
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