Remembering Chez, Three Years On
Banter writer Chez Pazienza died three years ago today. Here is one of his best articles.
by Ben Cohen
On February 25th 2017, I found out that my friend and colleague Chez Pazienza had died of an accidental overdose in his car in Los Angeles. Bob Cesca and I spent much of the night chatting via phone or text trying to figure out what the hell had happened. Neither of us could wrap our heads around the tragedy. We had both spoken to him during the week and nothing had seemed awry. He had written an excellent piece on Bill Maher and had gone back and forth with me about how to clarify a particular point he was trying to make. Bob had done a podcast with him and all had appeared well.
Yet now he was gone, leaving his fiancée Taryn, two daughters, two parents and countless friends to pick up the pieces. It was shocking, to say the least, then numbing as the reality set in. I still can’t quite come to terms with him not being here.
Chez also left a devoted army of readers who read his work daily and waited eagerly for his blistering take on politics, current affairs or whatever he woke up that morning thinking about. From his experiences as a high functioning heroin addict to day trips with his daughter Inara, Chez could write about anything and make it exciting. He absolutely refused to censor himself or filter his opinions and just wrote how he felt. He was a huge pain to work with, but also tremendously fun and interesting. He was, in my opinion, the best columnist in America, and anyone familiar with his work would find it hard to disagree.
There is nothing I wouldn’t give to hear his thoughts about the current state of affairs. When I write, I often ask myself what Chez would have said about the subject matter, then go from there. I miss him dearly and there isn’t a day I don’t think about my friend.
In his memory, I’m posting a Members Only piece he wrote on the day Trump was inaugurated. It is, like all of Chez’s pieces on Trump, savage and uncompromising. But it is also hopeful, and a reminder of what bubbled beneath his often gloomy exterior.
Take care my friend, wherever you are.
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.
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