"Dead Mitch" - The Evangelical/Tech/Eugenic Embodiment of Salvation

Some people have been claiming that Mitch McConnell ought to be removed from office - not because he is corrupt, owned by corporate interests, morally deformed or disinterested in human rights, but because he is dead. No one has ever argued that Mitch McConnell should step down because he lacked a conscience, but now multitudes scream that Mitch should abandon his senate seat merely because he lacks a pulse, brainwave activity, metabolism, sentience, consciousness or that beguiling, sociopathic twinkle in his ancient eyes. The Republican Party ought to be lauded for defending a group that has traditionally been overlooked in terms of human rights - the deceased.

Dead people are not really a minority group, they comprise an overwhelming majority, for whether you live for less than a decade, or for a lot of decades, you will be dead for an infinite number of years, and the eye-blink of life that fortune grants you will be eclipsed by an endless, unimaginably long succession of centuries of nothing. Yet the living allow no voice at all to the dead. The moldy remains stretched in neat rows under crosses or the missing victims sporting cement overshoes, tossed off of bridges by shadowy forms never get to weigh in on the issues. The silence of the dead might become a thing of the past with Mitch McConnell breaking new ground as the first openly dead senator. Who better than Donald Trump, a man who inhabits a unique twilight (zone?) between banality and eternity, might pioneer “corpse rights?” Trump can swing at golf balls, swig diet coke, threaten to vaporize tens of millions of dark skinned people and stare into the void with eyes as blank as those of a possum stretched out on the side of the interstate. Is he dead or alive? Or simultaneously both? Is that the mysterious, magnetic quality that inspires MAGAhats - the ability to hover like a helicopter between the nether-world and Wall Street?

There is, so I am told, a gathering movement of futurists and billionaires who imagine an imminent high priced immortality - human mentation downloaded on software - a commodified marriage of conscious tissues and electronic circuitry. Perhaps such eternal life might be physically preserved with spare parts off of an assembly line overseen by an amalgam of god, Amazon and Microsoft. For those truly blessed with imagination, there exists an immortal Mitch McConnell able to block progressive legislation, to shill for AIPAC and to dunk a basketball with bionic arms and legs. And yet many of us reject progress and want to see Mitch McConnell laid out on a long white table with formaldehyde injected into his hardened veins. Recall that McConnell, who suffered from childhood polio and walked with a stiff gait reminiscent of crypt-lurching villains from “Night of the Living Dead” seems like an unlikely athlete to supplant once-upon-a-time fellow Kentuckian, Ja Morant, as the all-time highest flying “Blue Grass State” sky-walking phenom. Such are the wonders of an emerging tech enhanced race of supermen, morphing from mortality to circuitry, from flesh and blood to accumulated information, from bone to titanium.

It should be recognized that McConnell has already been videoed dunking a basketball. Okay, it is TJ McConnell not Mitch, but why quibble over small differences now that AI can improvise eugenics on the fly. With the right technological enhancements Mitch McConnell, the all-time servant of Israel, corporate interests, war and imperialism will be able to out-motor TJ, and stifle justice for the remaining time allotted to “human” flourishing. Once we eliminate the inconvenience of death, we are almost there to a hybrid synthesis of TJ and Mitch. For both TJ and Mitch McConnell are uniquely tireless and predictable specimens. Mitch, of course, for blocking progress and serving corporate donors and TJ for coming off the bench and straining with all of his being to dive after loose balls and maximize his undersized potential to spark a rally in a game dominated by larger, darker, more athletically blessed practitioners of inner-city playground arts.

The AI/Eugenic combo platter has been promoted by such fabulous thinkers as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Perhaps some tech bro made Mitch McConnell into the prototype of the hybrid elites to follow. Thiel has argued that death should neither be denied or accepted (in a nod to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stages of grief) but opposed altogether - a techno fantastic rendering of Dylan Thomas’ exhortation to “rage against the dying of the light.”

The Democrats had an opportunity a few years back to improvise corpse hiding. They could have concealed Ruth Bader Ginsburg for a few months and brought her back to life as a tribute to the power of AI. We could have had a Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a Cryonic experiment, hidden in death and everlastingly regenerated with some Thielian infusion of Silicon Valley software. The Democratic Party - itself full of corpses, terminally comatose extensions of corporate happiness - lacks the imagination and Hegsethian testosterone needed to pull back the curtain separating the living from the dead. Only the Evangelical/Tech/Apocalyptic end-times movement has created the conceptual space to develop “Dead Mitch.” The “tech bros” have wedged their collective foot into the door that once restrained reality. The illusions that formerly animated psychosis and religion exclusively have now been mobilized to reincarnate the heroes of eugenics.

Really, what use is a living Mitch? An AI Mitch, a synthetic being with fabulous agility and a mind lasered upon legislative obstruction, war and deregulation would surely be more lifelike than the turtle chinned cornerstone of Republicanism that we have endured for too long. In fact, while Peter Thiel imagines his uploaded, chatgpt-like brain affixed to some sort of immortal physical body, there are those in the “Tech Fantasy Sphere” who foresee future perfected humankind with no physical baggage whatsoever - a post sexual, post disease, post suffering world decoupled from the biosphere. This would be a Platonic world of pure thought, a concentrated homogenized essence of eugenics in which genes no longer have the ability to sabotage any portion of the master race.

Émile P. Torres writes about a Tech-Bro hallucinatory wet dream - a digital world immune to extinction, unbothered by fires, floods and planetary death - a post human world in which our mechanical, post-cyborg creations carry out the human legacy with no remorse regarding the smoldering, sterilized remnants of an irrelevant biosphere:

“these pro-extinctionists promote their ideology by claiming that, in fact, they oppose human extinction. This relies on two linguistic tricks: first, many define “humanity” in an idiosyncratic way that diverges from the definition that most of us intuitively accept. We tend to equate humanity with Homo sapiens, our species, whereas these people define “humanity” as including whatever posthuman descendants we might have. Hence, as I’ve highlighted elsewhere, our species could die out next year without “human extinction” having happened—so long as we’re replaced by posthumans, then “humanity” will live on. When they talk about avoiding “human extinction,” they aren’t talking about the extinction of our species. To the contrary, our extinction wouldn’t matter one bit once posthumanity arrives.”

And that is how we might view the tale of Dead Mitch - as the first post-human creation of the Tech Apocalypse. He lives, unlike the rest of us, forever.