Shark? Dark!

America’s best days may be in the rearview

On the evening of September 20, 1977, I had been 15 for exactly 15 days—young enough to assume adults were fairly competent and television couldn’t lie to you.

That night, on Happy Days, Fonzie jumped over a shark. Literally. Leather jacket, water skis, idiotic grin. A moment so nakedly desperate it felt like the show had broken character and started pleading with the audience not to leave. Thirty million people watched it anyway.

Later, someone gave that feeling a name: jumping the shark—the point at which something stops being itself and becomes a parody wearing its own skin. After that, the thing may continue, but everyone knows it’s over. There’s no reset button. No dignity recovery.

Enter the United States.

We have jumped the shark as a nation. Not subtly. Not recently. Clean over it, arms flailing, crowd cheering. What we’re living through now is so often compared to Idiocracy that Mike Judge should be collecting residuals. The movie was meant as satire. Reality has stripped out the jokes and kept the cruelty.

Spend ten minutes reading the comments under any news story—say, the recent murder of Rene Good in Minneapolis—and you’ll see it. I’m no longer the wide-eyed kid I was at 15, but I was still stunned by how many people rush to dehumanize, to sneer, to treat suffering as content. One commenter, helpfully identified as a “former fitness model,” managed to compress an entire moral collapse into a single post, posting a meme showing Rene Good’s face as if it was a mural on a wall, with the words I CAN’T BRAKE! in puffy graffiti style near her head.

What in the high holy hell is wrong with us?

Is it unfair to blame Trump for how low we’ve sunk? No. He didn’t invent the rot, but he commercialized it, franchised it, and taught millions that decency is for suckers. Years ago, during his first term, I wrote a pair of newsletter installments called Trump or Hitler?—lists of quotes, stripped of attribution, asking readers to guess which man said what. People told me to knock it off. Hitler was too much. Hyperbolic. Unhelpful.

Then J.D. Vance said it out loud. Then European publications said it out loud. Then federal agencies started getting compared to secret police and suddenly everyone discovered they’d always been worried.

I wasn’t prophetic. I was just early. And being early doesn’t help when the destination is fascism.

Now we’re here: authoritarians in charge, ten months to the midterms, and a country exhausted by the effort of staying alarmed. Eighty-nine million Americans didn’t vote in 2024. Seventy-seven million looked at four years of chaos and said, Another helping of that shit sandwich, please.

That’s not apathy. That’s consent.

I want to believe in marches. I want to believe in protest. But when demonstrations can be waved away as coastal tantrums—and when half the electorate can’t be bothered to show up—it’s hard not to feel like we’re shouting into a wind tunnel, trading viruses while power checks its watch.

I don’t like the cynicism creeping into my own voice. I’d love to believe we can pull out of this dive. But once you’ve jumped the shark, the problem isn’t the fall.

It’s that everyone saw it happen—and kept watching anyway.

Hey, NIHILISTIC readers:

Check out these publications from friends of mine…

Music To My Ears – Larry Flick

Terrible Swift Sword – Jim Ryan

Weehawken Gazette – Susie Felber

…and subscribe!

Thanks,

Chris T.