Breadlines are brat. Are you cuckoo for Coconut? Are you brat? Does the joy of a kind-hearted wine aunt running for president, or her folksy grandpa running mate who once read to a class of kindergartners for a photo op, make you “happy”? Early last week, this was the cheerful internet glop America was drowning in when famed, welfare-queening European bureaucrat Thierry Breton threatened Elon Musk, an American businessman, for interviewing Donald Trump, an American president, on X, an American social media platform. Explicitly, Breton threatened to destroy X with crippling fines for disseminating “misinformation,” but implicitly, via clever reference to the rise of despotism in the UK — an odd topic to raise for a man with no jurisdiction over the region — the threat was something darker. Such hostility from a union of our most important global allies should have been a major controversy. In response, however, our government said nothing. In part, this is likely because our sitting president appears to have dementia. Does he even know this happened? Probably not. But there’s also been a deeper change in the way we all communicate, which has blinded us to almost anything of meaning.

The last important event that really penetrated our frivolous discourse was the near assassination of Donald Trump. That lived in the news for about a week before the coconut eclipse, and we’ve been vibing ever since. How did Kamala become our nominee? Does she even have a platform? Don’t be a “substance demander,” I was told the other day. It was an incredible piece of dystopian language. It was also honest. It was also correct. You can cry about it all you want, but we no longer talk about reality in concrete terms, and concrete language is certainly no way to win an election.

It’s 2024, we vibe or we die.