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State of

Unreality

In this year of plague and quarantine
and monumental disruption,
a COLLECTIVE SENSE OF DISSOCIATION
is settling in. Just in time for the election.

by CHARLES P. PIERCE

THIS ISN’T THE 2020 I ANTICIPATED IN DECEMBER. AS ONE my hospital bed, doped to the gills and wondering whether Con-
decade prepared to lap over into another, I planned to split time gressman Louie Gohmert was a hallucinatory event. I sat through
between Washington, where the president was being impeached, much of the run-up to the Iowa caucuses and didn’t return to
and Iowa, where the Democratic candidates seeking to pry his actual reporting until I went to Washington to cover the impeach-
hands off the national executive would face their first real con- ment trial in the Senate, gimping around the Capitol at the con-
test. I would have some happy holidays—I was a new grandfather— clusion of an exercise that was as fixed and foregone as any
and get right into another campaign, with the third impeachment professional-wrestling match.
of a U. S. president as a kind of constitutional lagniappe. Then it was on to Iowa for the last weekend before the cau-
Then I got hit by a car. cuses. This got me there just in time for the entire process to eat ISTOCKPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES
I cracked two lumbar vertebrae and got twenty staples in my its own entrails. The whole operation was so badly designed and
head and spent Christmas and New Year’s flat on my back. I poorly run that it never was clear whether Pete Buttigieg or
watched the deliberations of the House Judiciary Committee from Bernie Sanders had won the damn thing. But one bit was certain:

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