Remembering Chez

Chez died on February 25th, 2017 in circumstances that still bother me.

Note: Below this is a piece published by Chez titled “Welcome To The Idiocracy” in January of 2017.

by Ben Cohen

For those of you who have followed the Banter over the years, you are probably aware that today marks the second anniversary of Chez Pazienza’s passing. Chez died on February 25th, 2017 in circumstances that still bother me. He was too young, too in love with his fiancee Taryn and his daughters Inara and Madison, and too important a voice to go so soon.

(Picture above: Chez holding the ID we made him before going to Ferguson, MO, where he was pepper sprayed on live television)

There’s rarely a day that goes by I do not think about my friend, the loyalty he had for the site we built, the searing insight he displayed in his writing, and the extraordinary passion he had for his craft. As the society we live in becomes ever more complex, I have lost count of the amount of times I find myself wondering what Chez would have thought. What would he have made of the #MeToo movement, the Mueller probe, Brett Kavanaugh, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jussie Smollett? What would he say about American society two years into Trump’s presidency? I would give anything to know.

When we closed The Daily Banter earlier this month and moved onto the new email publishing platform, I texted Bob Cesca telling him it felt strange doing it without him. “He’d be a total wreck,” replied Bob. And I’m sure he would have been. Chez was always totally resistant to change. He screamed at me when we launched the paywall in 2014, attacked new writers whenever they came onto the site (sometimes in public), and was inconsolable when we came close to closing down in late 2015. But every time he warmed up to the changes and came back fighting. I think he would have done the same this time around.

There are thousands and thousands of words Chez published still swimming in the ether, still provoking, still inspiring, and still finding people attracted to his unique voice. His personal site remains live, and his work on the Banter will live on for as long as the internet exists. I find it comforting to know that.

I wanted to publish something today to remember him by, and after digging through Banter M, I found this blistering piece he published in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Gone but never forgotten my friend.

Welcome To the Idiocracy

by Chez Pazienza

It's a strange thing to genuinely despise the President of the United States. There's a pretty good chance that by the time you read this Donald Trump will either be that -- the leader of the free world -- or be very close to becoming that. I don't like being this ashamed, this angry, this depressed, this outraged, this thoroughly hateful, but then again Trump is by no means your average president. He's an existential threat to the republic, a walking state of emergency, a man who simply by virtue of his existence and temperament is a threat to the stability of the globe, someone who for the first time in history enters the office as almost certainly the worst ever at the job. He's an unqualified disaster. His cabinet is filled with idiots who don't know how to do their respective jobs, hold worldviews that are violently opposed to the missions of the agencies they're being asked to lead, or simply have zero experience in those fields. (This, despite Trump predictably crowing, "We have by far the highest I.Q. of any cabinet ever assembled.") And his plans for the country involve reversing decades of social progress.

But the truly unnerving thing about what's to come over the next however-many years -- since it's safe to assume Trump will be impeached at some point -- is what Trump represents. It's been said many times before but it bears repeating, over and over again if necessary: Donald Trump's ascendance to the White House marks the official beginning of the Idiocracy. We're talking about a buffoonish reality show clown, a self-promotion machine with no actual leadership skills to speak of, becoming the most powerful person in America, the figurehead who allegedly acts as an avatar for us on the global stage. Trump has no business being president and yet he is, and none of us knows what kind of catastrophe that's going to herald for us as a nation. As of Friday at noon, Donald fucking Trump will have access to the codes to our vast nuclear arsenal and the authority to unilaterally use them as he sees fit. That's nothing short of terrifying. This ignorant toddler who can be baited into self-destructive overreaction with the tiniest of insults will have the power to destroy the world several times over.

Another of the more daunting aspects of the Trump era is the notion of its dropping the bar into a permanent new low. We've seen it so many times before: When a new norm is established, it tends to remain. In the case of our national politics, once an incurious fool like George W. Bush was elected twice via the absurd metric that he was "the kind of guy you could have a beer with," it paved the way for the rise of Sarah Palin. And once Sarah Palin, a screechy, blithering idiot "hockey mom" who sold willful ignorance as folksy "real American" charm, was allowed a place in the discourse, that paved the way for the good, infinitely stupid people of this country to look at Donald Trump and say, "Yeah, there's our president." So what comes after Trump? What follows a man who for the first time in our history has shown Republicans, people who seem to these days lack a moral center to begin with, that the truth just doesn't matter? That things like shame and guilt are for suckers and they can be shrugged off without much effort?   

So the question then is, what do we do? How do we get through this? How does the decent, intelligent demographic within this country survive the era of Donald Trump, whatever nightmare might come next, and the general threat of Idiot America? The truth is I have no idea and that's always what's been so difficult about all of this: the sense of helplessness. Yes, more people voted for Hillary Clinton than for Trump and there's some comfort in that, in the knowledge that those with decency and humanity within our nation don't have to change a damn thing. It's true that despite what we've been scolded for, we don't have to "understand" jack shit about the morons who put Trump in office because there were and are, in fact, more of us than there are of them. But whether it was the fault of an electoral college technicality or not, Trump took the White House and now we all get to suffer accordingly. Ignorance and arrogance now have a seat at the highest level of our government. Trump, a man who's spent his entire life staying as far away from the Middle American rabble as possible, is now its hero. 

In spite of all the whining we heard throughout the Obama years from angry, resentful white people -- those who bemoaned the loss of their America -- we always knew that we had as much if not more claim to the nation as those desperate to hold back progress. We believed in the future, while they clamored for the past and that's why, if we survive the Trump era -- if he doesn't do so much damage that it's irredeemable -- we'll eventually come out on top. But that doesn't help us now. The knowledge that the Idiocracy has engulfed the once-great United States of America and turned us into a global punchline is depressing enough as to be paralyzing. So, again, what do we do? How the hell do we get through this? How do we survive? I think the only real advice I can give is to under no circumstances become inured or immune to the madness, the chaos, the corruption, the sheer lunacy of this clown and his idea of governance. It's tough to imagine, given what we've seen just in the lead-up to his presidency -- the daily gangbang of incompetency and scandal -- that it'll be tough to normalize this kind of awfulness. But it's amazing what you can get used to. And we cannot get used to this. 

It's going to be difficult. So incredibly difficult. Because we've had it good for eight long years. For eight years we've had a president so hyper-competent, so stable and calm, so scandal-free that it seemed like a given that it would go on forever. Barack Obama was such a powerful force for good that some of us began to actually take the progress he represented for granted. Now all of us know that it was always a tenuous situation, because there are far too many fucking stupid people in this country, people who believe nonsense and who are threatened by progress, people who vote for the regression they want to see. They've won that. A fifth of the population of this country put Trump in office. He's historically unpopular. He'll be loathed as a president, as long as we keep the pressure up. But for now he is the president. President Obama gave us a nation so promising that it sometimes felt like we didn't have to fight, since he was doing it for us. Now we have to fight. Human beings, Americans especially, are creatures of convenience, but we need to accept that nothing will be convenient in the coming years. Fighting day after day for your rights, for progress, to somehow stop the march of idiocy -- that's tough work.

It's work we need to do, though. Our lives depend on it. Our children depend on it. Our nation, and all it was meant to stand for, depends on it. We're in the Idiocracy now. But it doesn't have to last forever.