He yelled to the rafters for nearly 45 minutes, sneered his way into bawling. He contorted his face into pitiable, kabuki-like expressions to show he could not possibly have sexually assaulted any woman because he has known so many who were “awesome.” He argued that he wasn’t an alcoholic by repeatedly professing his love for beer. He spent ten minutes rambling about his boyhood practice of keeping calendars, arguing that this showed he could never have assaulted a woman. He arrogantly interrupted the Democratic senators and rarely attempted to answer their questions. He sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee with his arms crossed, like the boy in the backseat not getting his way.

The confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh initially showed us a man widely described as the guy from college everybody knew or knew of—the fraternity bro who seemed sanguine and academically mediocre when sober and a red-faced, jacked-up maniac when drunk. Oh, how well we knew this type—preppie from a well-to-do family who might go to law school or for an MBA and be passed along on a current of hereditary privilege and connections. But then Christine Blasey Ford came before the Senate Judiciary Committee to allege that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her during a college party, and Kavanaugh’s own testimony later in the day was nothing like what we’d expect from that guy we knew in college.

For any rational witness to this performance, the disqualifying factor was not the veracity of the allegations against him but the performance itself, delivered in a chamber of Congress. Here was a weak, cowardly mess of a man losing it in front of the world, contradicting every attribute of temperament required of a Supreme Court justice. We saw it with our own eyes, and everyone saw it together—the desperate baring of his teeth like a cornered animal.

And yet Brett Kavanaugh is all set to be confirmed as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. This development owes much to ongoing Republican manipulation of the undemocratic quirks of our political system but also to Kavanaugh’s own shrewdness, for his complete loss of control provided precisely the kind of gripping reality television to please the boss, Donald Trump.

The media spoke of the hearings as being riveting, but the riveted viewers constitute a relative minority when you consider all the Americans who might share these views about the importance of having rational, fair, and calm judges but do not get personal feelings involved until something makes a direct hit on their wallet. A recent C-Span survey of likely voters found that 52% could not name one member of the Supreme Court. The “we” who were riveted viewers to this an other spectacles of judicial diminishment are in a sense designated mourners for Americans who have no particular desire to lose their right to an abortion, to collective bargaining, or to remain on the voting rolls but also don’t worry about rights they’d have to think about to understand.

One of the most unnerving images from the confirmation circus was of silent female protesters dressed as characters in the television series based on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. None of them was yelling or crying or talking about beer. They just wanted Americans, and especially women, to understand the possibility of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and putting women’s lives in jeopardy. The eerie sight of these puritanical-looking figures in blood-red robes made me think of this sad irony: that what a lot of women across America were doing instead of watching the Senate hearings was posting Instagram pics of themselves and their families living their best lives while being #blessed.

The trend of labeling any brag-worthy aspect of life as #blessed peaked just ahead of Trump’s ascendence, but it seems a perfect hashtag for the MAGA era. It brazenly breaks one of the fundamental rules of Christianity—presuming to know God’s intentions—and reverse-engineers the entire process to claim God’s bestowal of grace by virtue of profane acquisitions and achievements. That I have a lot of money means God has blessed me. Those Catholic schoolgirls sitting behind Kavanaugh at the hearings constituted his own #blessed middle finger to the Democratic senators.

Donald Trump has ample opportunities to get himself blessed by the evangelical pastors that buzz around him like flies. They call it the “holy huddle” when they surround him in the Oval Office for the placing of hands. (The wearer of the red tie always seems to close his eyes like he’s getting a massage.) You usually see Paula White, his celebrity televangelist adviser and head of the Faith and Opportunity Initiative that the White House created in May. White made her millions from preaching the prosperity gospel to primarily low-income Pentecostals and charismatics, most of them Black and Latino women who are encouraged to donate “sacrificially” (i.e., more than they think they can afford). When she’s not speaking in tongues, waving both arms, faith healing, shouting prophecies, and collapsing in the pews, White lives a lavish Trump lifestyle, complete with a $3.5 million condo in Trump Tower.

What, I wonder, do all the #blessed inhabitants of Trumpworld think that it means nowadays to be “unblessed”? I was surprised that Merriam-Webster’s first listed definition is “evil, accursed” rather than simply “not blessed.” Does that mean that anyone who hasn’t identified as #blessed is evil? Or does it mean that everyone is blessed to some degree but only the very special ones are #blessed?

“We Are Unhappy,” a song by Will Oldham from the 2011 album Wolfroy Goes to Town, is a despairing ballad about the antithesis of #blessed. With Oldham’s signature aching-breaking voice and Angel Olsen’s disembodied crooning, the song could apply to any aspect of humanity, but its release date pegs it to post-recession America:

Nothing is better
Nothing is best
We are unhappy
We are unblessed

You might even consider it an anti-hymn, since Oldham uses the Puritan language of the good Christian. All I know is that after the 2016 election, I’ve thought of its lyrics whenever I cannot believe these bad things are happening to us right now, this very moment—those times you need to look quickly at your palm to make sure that the familiar lines for life and head and heart are still crisscrossing in that indecipherable gravure of existence:

We are unfound
We are unseen
Nothing is coming
Nothing is clean

Although the gawking cameras at the Senate hearings showed those Catholic girls looking virginal and clean in their plaid uniforms, before them sat a 53-year-old dad willing to unleash the devastating effects of climate change on the future lives of these assembled children, all for the sake of corporate interests and a few more bucks.

Earth it is shaking, people have fled
And lord she is taking the eyes from the dead

After the hearings wrapped, all Republican members of the Judiciary Committee embraced their MAGA obligation to deliver up the wishes of Donald Trump, a perfect fait accompli.

Lovers have left
Friends close their eyes
Children bereft
We all are unwise

“We Are Unhappy” is a song about a very bad state of affairs: we can’t lie to ourselves; we can’t comfort our children when they see other children torn apart from their parents. But it’s not a declaration of surrender, nor an invitation to feel sorry for ourselves. Sometimes the only thing you can do with despair is live through it.

When I searched for a link to “We Are Unhappy,” I learned that Oldham reworked that and other songs from Wolfroy Goes to Town for the 2014 album Singer’s Grave: A Sea of Tongues, with the uplifting spiritual thrust of the McCrary sisters and lots of snappy banjo work. The new version gets belted out in half the time, like an anthem. My guess is that Oldham realized that the 2011 version was too much of a downer even for a misanthrope. Cognitive dissonance was the only way forward for us—the “we” who are America’s designated mourners, “we,” the unblessed. §