Fry, Naomi

When We Think About the Pee Tape [from The New Yorker]

April 18, 2018

"In an interview with ABC on Sunday, Comey painted a suggestive picture of his own psychic crawl space."

In an interview with ABC on Sunday, Comey painted a suggestive picture of his own psychic crawl space. "I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth," he said, "but I don't know whether the current President of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It's possible, but I don't know." Even if the tape were to be proved real and released, it's too easy by now to imagine the depressing fallout: the outright denials, the claims of doctoring, the blame that would fall to the Democrats and to Clinton. It's often seemed to me that living through the Trump era is not unlike sitting through a nineteen-nineties introduction to postmodern theory class. Did you know that there's no one single truth anymore? That we're living in a simulation? That late capitalism has turned savage and dystopian? In such an environment, hearing the former F.B.I. director speaking in plain terms about the pee tape reminds us of the deep hunger for something analogue—for the straightforward physicality of reliable evidence that would offer, if only for a moment, some measure of relief.

Architecture::Crawl Space

Reading

Naomi Fry, "When We Think About the Pee Tape," The New Yorker (April 18, 2018). <Link to www.newyorker.com>

04/20/2018