Thus Spoke Lazarustra

Reports of Democrats’ death, Samuel Clemens telegraphs in Innocents at Home (his Substack), have been greatly exaggerated. But let’s not turn Tuesday’s Democratic sweep into a greatly exaggerated victory just yet. This was Lexington, not Yorktown. And Zohran Mamdani has a distance to go yet for his Hattin: those Christian nationalists have a stranglehold on this unholied America. Templars like their blood, even in, especially in, defeat, the more so when it is the shitholies handing it to them.

But we might as well enjoy the moment. It’s the first time since 2008 that the country feels a bit less like a Russian novel and a bit more like when Larry David gets the girl. The French daily Le Monde is calling Mamdani a “political UFO” (“un ovni politique). “New York has just witnessed one of the most incredible electoral victories in American political history,” the paper writes, not mentioning Trump’s victory a year ago, itself as incredible, in an antihero sense–in a 1933 sense–as Obama’s, its own 2008 (no comparisons necessary, or rather: no comparisons available).

Le Monde mentions Trump in the third paragraph, only to note how Republicans have lost electoral ground in every one of their elections. That’s what I do after what we still insist on calling elections in this country: I read the European press, as I much prefer my political coverage not to sound like Kevin Harlan-decibelled NFL commentary. I have not looked at the effluents from the christofascists’ wastewater treatment plants and don’t intend to. Too derivative, compared to the moment, which seems to have nothing of the eternally recurrent to it.

So while I may be tempted to pun on Thus Spoke Lazarustra, it would be anachronistic, assuming Mamdani’s win is as original as it looks. But is it? American history tells us it could just as demonstrably be a symptom of something larger, the something larger being very much America’s eternal recurrence of idealism following folly following hope following repression following reconstruction following fascism, and so on in that infernally eternal loop Nietzsche’s infernal mind imagined for us. We have never gotten out of that seesaw since the republic’s first days, even well before: the Pilgrims were both blight and light wrapped in moleskin wrapped in stones, to better brain the natives, or dissenters, with. Every summit a Sisyphean prelude to another fall. Thus, after all, spoke Zarathustra.

–Pierre Tristam