Haley on Jason Pargin’s Newsletter

I enjoy your perspective. You’re right about a lot, too much, actually, and that makes me a bit uncomfy. This is America, the land of rugged individualism. The biggest existential threat to our country isn’t the Mountain People or Orcs or some alien invasion (though wouldn’t it be nice if it were? We could finally bust out those $700 billion a year we spend on the military). No, our true “villain” is much closer…the guy down the street with the opposing yard sign, your cousin who won’t shut up about ivermectin at Thanksgiving dinner… We don’t need an “Other” to hate when we’ve got each other. Every holiday meal in this country is basically Civil War II, only instead of Avengers trading blows, it’s your uncle versus your niece arguing over who ruined the economy. And instead of vibranium shields, we’re armed with bad faith tweets and Facebook memes. But maybe that’s the story our culture is struggling to tell. If you squint through the CGI carnage of D&W, what you’re left with is a group of messy, broken people, squabbling over who gets to define the meaning of their existence. Sound familiar? America doesn’t lack a cause, we just can’t agree on which cause to believe in. Climate change should unite us all, but instead we’re over here splitting into factions like we’re on Survivor (or the Apprentice…). So, D&W, yes, it’s mind numbing and ridiculous, but there’s something reassuring in the way it shrugs at the chaos and keeps going. The nostalgic Green Day montage? It’s not an elegant cultural statement it’s an admission that this is all absurd. And sometimes, when you’re staring down the barrel of existential dread, absurdity is the only reasonable response. So yeah, I laughed at the dick jokes. I let my brain switch off for two hours and enjoyed watching Hugh Jackman beat the living hell out of an army of Deadpools (honestly I was in it for the Wolverine bod *drool). And maybe, just maybe, that’s what we need right now…a little gallows humor while we all sit around the campfire of our crumbling culture, roasting marshmallows over the ashes of the very franchises that brought us here. Fuck it. PS Love your work.