Chip SomodevillaGetty Images

This is what I learned on the first night of the Republican National Convention. I learned that Joe Biden is a Communist, a Socialist, the next Castro, and a puppet controlled by cosmopolitan elites, Hollywood moguls, the Chinese government, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I learned that the streets of California are paved with heroin needles, that MS-13 will be moving in next door, and that HUMAN SEX DRUG TRAFFICKERS!!!!!!!!!!! I learned that the Democrat Party plans to abolish the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, Jesus, and the suburbs. I learned that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is the last bodyguard of Western Civilization, and that is an actual thing that actually was said.

And, throughout the first night of the Republican National Infomercial, I kept repeating to myself as a mantra, over and over again.

This is not for you. You are not the political cosmos. An audience has been carefully built for this over the past 40 years, and that audience believes this stuff down to the last dipthong. This is not for you.

OK, so it's a lousy mantra.

Without my constantly reminding myself that I am not the audience here, I might have felt like I was stuck on a shuttle bus at the Greater Neptune International Airport. Four years ago, in Cleveland, there at least was the mad, crackling energy of the unbridled Caucasian political ID to put a charge in the proceedings. You felt alive in the world anyway. Now, after nearly four years of this presidency*, and knowing what we know and seeing what has been plainly obvious, to be stuck in what circumstances have dictated as a bell jar of alternate reality is to feel like you've been unwittingly dosed with STP and sent off to regions of the mind best left unexplored.

It is impossible to engage the arguments mustered on the television Monday night. I don't speak the language. I am unfamiliar with the syntax. The vocabulary eludes me. And it all eludes even my considerable gift for mimicry. (I know Senator Tim Scott doesn't really believe Joe Biden is the socialist tool of cosmopolitan elites, but his ability to fake it caused his soul to ascend visibly from his body.) The only way I know what they're saying is by understanding as best I can the specific set of my fellow citizens to whom they're saying it. And by reminding myself, constantly, that I am not part of that group.

OLIVIER DOULIERYGetty Images

What is left, then, except mockery and derision? When Kimberly Guilfoyle goes full Evita, arm-waving and all, in an empty function room, am I supposed to engage her arguments? When Junior cracks that Biden is "the Loch Ness monster of The Swamp," am I not obligated to point out that Loch Ness isn't a swamp? Or when Scott warns us against a "socialist utopia," should there not be a clarification that any kind of "utopia" is a really good thing? When words stop meaning what they mean, we're all reduced, again, to grunts and squeaks and hand signals.

And when Charlie Kirk kicks things off, in a speech promoting this particular president*, by noting that "churches can't open, but casinos can," how am I not supposed to dissolve into helpless laughter and heckling? What's left for me to do? Point out, politely, the self-evident fact that the president* is the most thoroughgoing heathen ever to occupy that office? And that he once owned casinos, but that he doesn't anymore, because he was a terrible businessman who stiffed his contractors and then hid in the thickets of the bankruptcy laws until the next scam revealed itself to him?

If I say that, then the audience to whom Kirk was talking will look at me as though I've suddenly taken to talking in Klingon. And that audience is too big to fit into any comfort zone, although I think it may be smaller than it was four years ago, because we're all livingor not livingthrough the consequences of the gamble that audience took in 2016.

Night Two coming right up.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

Read the original post:

The First Night of the Republican Convention Was Like Getting Stuck in a Bell Jar of Alternate Reality - Esquire