Now This is How You Summarize a Moment in History

I’ve been reading Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare, which is a novel of absolute haters. Every character is basically a version of awful liberals, mostly college professors which of course is an easy target but also a pretty good one. Everyone is full of themselves, is in terrible and hypocritical relationships, thinks they are god’s gift to the world, are doing nothing interesting at all, and talk a bunch of bullshit about the latest language inside universities that makes absolutely no sense to anyone outside the university but which makes the professors feel righteous about themselves. Personal confession–I loathe talking about the university and its politics with other professors. Who gives a shit about any of it? You want to talk about ideas or bands or food or your favorite color or the fate of the Earth or whether the Blazers will ever have a winning record again? Sure. You want to talk about the dean’s office? Jesus christ, shut up.

The protagonist, Moddie, is also awful, but in a different way. She’s getting over a breakup and also has absolutely no social filter and also likes to cut through the bullshit of what she’s hearing, even though she ends up hating herself everytime since no one wants to hear these uncomfortable truths and then no one wants to hang out with her.

You can see why this novel would appeal to me.

Anyway, this set up is at a dinner party where an old friend who maybe isn’t a friend anymore is talking about the Kavanaugh hearings and how horrible it all was and Moddie responds with this long paragraph and…..yep, this pretty much sums up the whole fucking thing.

Now that’s a mic drop.