NOTES FROM AN EMPTY TABLE
ESSAYS, POEMS, AND STORIES (BUT MOSTLY ESSAYS)
ON CULTURE, CALAMITY, AND CREATING
BY TOM GUZZIO
ON CULTURE, CALAMITY, AND CREATING
BY TOM GUZZIO
No god, no king
Saahil Desai, a senior editor at The Atlantic, recently documented his day getting flipped off and cursed out as he drove a rented Tesla Cybertruck – “America’s Most Hated Car” – around Washington D.C.
Even before Tesla CEO Elon Musk became our DOGE-Lord and took chainsaws across the CPAC stage and to federal agencies, the Cybertruck was gonna be a tough sell in America. Here, consumers prefer trucks that are “Ford Tough,” or at least body on frame. NARTs like the Rivian R1T, my own Honda Ridgeline, and the Cybertruck are suspect because, while they can do a lot of truck stuff and have cup holders big enough to hold a Coors Banquet beer, nobody’s writing country songs about them. 
The last thing I "hauled" in my "truck" was a beanbag chair. You can just make out my "Bird Nerd" sticker. The only people I know who own a Cybertruck validate their vehicle's incongruity: they mostly use it to haul around their kids. Unlike Kid Rock, or Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ex-husband, and others who have bought Cybertrucks to “own the libs,” my friends got their truck well before Musk “took” office so they could meet the needs of their growing family while lowering their carbon footprint. They appreciate their truck’s innovative safety features, and how it can do things other trucks simply can’t. Once their electricity went out in a storm and they used the truck as a generator to power their home. For them, the Cybertruck is practical, eco-friendly, and just plain cool.
But since America has collectively entered the find out stage after fucking around with Trump again, this decidedly progressive family has been followed by dangerously aggressive drivers. They’ve had their vehicle vandalized, probably by people they have a lot in common with politically. The fact that some feel emboldened to criminally target people because they drive an electric truck while so many others see such harassment as sweet, sweet schadenfreude is completely on point in Trump’s America, where up is down and we’re at war with Canada over Greenland. Or is it Greenland over Panama?
This bizarro administration pardoned the people who smeared human shit on the walls of the U.S. Capitol, then deported someone because she wrote an editorial damning genocide. A man who bragged about grabbing pussies with impunity; who has been found civilly liable for sexual assault, is attacking transgender people under the pretense of protecting women. An administration that thinks diversity initiatives elevate people to unearned positions of power has given cabinet positions to under-qualified sycophants who use nonsecure messaging apps to share sensitive war plans with reporters – then blame the reporters for reporting on it. Meanwhile, Musk and his posse of DOGE-bros have been treating federal agencies like piñatas, hitting out so indiscriminately that they compromised the safety of our nuclear arsenal and have planes falling from the sky, while Trump is fulfilling his promise to lower the price of groceries by using tariffs to raise the price of everything. MAGA conservatives are buying electric cars, while liberals are being ridiculed for owning them. When it became clear that Trump would not only reclaim the presidency, but that there would be no checks to balance his hateful agenda – Republicans held the House, took the Senate, and already owned the Supreme Court thanks to Trump 1.0 – I listened to IDLES. A lot. I found my footing in their music, and embraced it as part of the soundtrack of the dystopian film we’re now living in. For example, I know that so many on the right, if they heard the views and beliefs spilling out of my race-traitorous, trans-supporting, NART driving white mouth, would see me as “dirty, rotten, filthy scum.” I was probably listening to “Never Fight a Man with a Perm” when I read Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about businesses needing more masculine energy. “Danny Nedelko” plainly states how I feel about people who are coming to America for a better life: “my blood brother is an immigrant, a beautiful immigrant.” But IDLES is to punk what my Ridgeline is to trucks. They have an aggressive presence and sound, and their live shows come complete with mosh pits, crowd surfing, and frontman Joe Talbot’s spitting and strutting on stage. Yet they describe their music as “hard rock for pussies,” and if you were to only take them at first listen, it’d be easy to confuse the band for something they’re not. In “Clampdown” The Clash told us how “anger can be power,” and IDLES does make angry music. But anger isn’t what centers IDLES. Instead “LOVE IS THE FING!”
The love that’s weaponized in IDLES’ music flows from the same spring that fed MLK’s Beloved Community. It’s the love that Che Guevara identified as the compass of any true revolutionary. It’s why IDLES songs are class conscious and queer affirming. They challenge the toxically masculine and embrace femininity as a force and source of strength. These songs and their overtly socio-political themes would be flatly inauthentic, maybe even cartoonish, if they didn’t share space with deeply personal songs about struggle and loss, like “June” which is about Talbot’s stillborn daughter. Both Talbot and guitarist Lee Kiernan have struggled with addiction, which is reflected in songs like “Meds” and “Crawl.” They're a band that somehow manages to be powerful and political and sensitive and infinitely relatable all at once. As Carolina Permuy wrote in 2021, “(IDLES’) music holds the intensity that punches a listener in the face but emotionally helps them find and reflect on their own identity.” That’s what makes “Grace” the first of my “Songs that Meet the Moment.”
“Grace” is the seventh track on TANGK, IDLES’ fifth and latest full-length release. On the surface, “Grace” could be mistaken for the Ridgeline of IDLES’ catalogue to date. It’s a bit softer, maybe more obviously “pop” than any of the other downbeat songs that the band have recorded. Mark Bowen – the band’s “guitarist and sound architect” – told Brooklyn Vegan that “Grace,” “was probably the song that there was the most debate about in the studio. It was the hardest one to write because I think we weren’t too sure about it… That stuff is so hard to write without it sounding super cheesy. I have so much deference for your Coldplay, your The National, people that write that kind of music.” Sensing how “that kind of music” required “that kind of video,” the band recruited Coldplay’s Chris Martin to help them realize an idea that Talbot says came to him in a dream. With Martin’s blessing and assistance, IDLES recreated the iconic clip for Coldplay’s “Yellow,” with Martin walking along a rainswept beach “singing” the words to “Grace.”
IDLES being incongruous on stage. Photo by Brittany Queen via New England Sounds
As incongruous – there’s that word again – as “Grace” seems to be when measured against the rest of IDLES’ output, as Callum MacHattie noted in Far Out Magazine, TANGK – and by extension, “Grace” – is a logical continuation of what’s come before: “(IDLES) have always been a band that encouraged a sense of community, and in their early works, they established that by creating the soundtrack to a cultural revolution. But now, on ‘Grace’, their fearless leader looks over at the congregation, asking them to extend their arms and accept him as one of their own.” In other words, “Grace” is a real mother-fucking truck of an IDLES song.
Give me grace, make me pure
In “Danny Nedelko” IDLES tells us how “Fear leads to panic / Panic leads to pain / Pain leads to anger / Anger leads to hate.” Turning fear into panic into pain into anger into hate into votes was part of Trump’s motivational playbook from the beginning of his political career, but he didn’t invent it. Today’s cat-eating Haitian immigrant and the trans woman lurking in the bathroom waiting to pounce on your daughter are just recycled versions of the lecherous Jew and the leering, lustful Negro. They’re made up jump-scare material designed to keep us looking for monsters in closets and under beds and in classrooms while the people who conjured them abuse our trust and take our social security. Now, in our anger at Trump and his cronies or handlers or millenarian cultists turning America into a Christian Nationalist Kleptocracy, we’re using the same playbook to hit back.
We’re casting yesterday’s environmentalists as today’s Nazis because of the cars they bought back before Elon did his Sieg Heil at the inauguration. We want to force buyers' remorse on Trump voters, too - especially now that they’re learning how, for Trump, there’s no difference between them and the people he made them afraid of. There’s Skylar Holden, the Montana cattle rancher who went viral on TikTok after he described how the administration he voted for abruptly froze key grant funds Holden needed to keep his farm alive. Robert McCabe lost his job with the IRS after he voted for Trump. His position was one of 7,000 DOGE eliminated in February. He’s joined in the deepening pool of regret by recovering self-described “MAGA Junkie” Jennifer Piggott, whose job with the Bureau of Fiscal Service also fell under DOGE’s chainsaw. If the Trump Administration winds up deporting Bradley Bartell’s wife, who is currently in an ICE detention center, back to Peru, Bartell says he’s likely to join her. If he does, he may not be able to vote for Trump again, should the president figure out a way to run in 2028. These people, and others whose similar stories come to light with each move this administration makes against their best interests, are met with the kind of derision and ridicule Desai got when he drove that rented Cybertruck to the D.C. Farmer’s Market. Give me grace, give me light
Trump is able to do what he’s doing because he stoked people’s fear and anger and then capitalized on it. Before his victory left me tongue tied and flat footed, I thought Biden and then Harris needed to step off the high road and get a little dirty, and I still feel that way to some degree. I’m just not sure what dirty should look like under the glaring light of this administration’s hubris. Are 25 hour speeches from the senate floor effective? Do mass marches move needles? We did these things before, and they couldn’t keep the sun from setting on the MAGA movement.
I'll be your hands, I'll be your spine
Right now, there are two kinds of Trump voters: they’re those who are gonna keep blindly hoping for that invite to Mar-a-Lago and those who are gonna find out the hard way that it’s never coming. And when they do; when they join those Trump voters who’ve realized that not only was it never raining, but that the man who loves talking about windmills and water pressure was pissing on their backs the whole time, we can’t celebrate their soiling. We have to hold our noses and hand them some towels.
Given that Trump is pushing policies that will make it difficult to vote our way out of this fucking mess, I can see why someone might take strength from tailgating a Tesla, and telling its driver to “fuck off,” or from shouting “I TOLD YOU SO” in the comments section of a story about disillusioned Venezualan Trump supporters. But at the end of the day, there really is a fine line between “us” and “them” – particularly in the eyes of those in charge of us and them. We’ve seen what fear and panic and pain and anger lead to. I think, like so many people who came before me who were smarter and had to fight harder, I want to see where grace, forgiveness, freudenfreude, and love goes. Because whatever making a difference for Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk and Abrego Garcia and Marcy Rheintgen looks like, we’re going to need Holden and McCabe and Piggott and Bartell next to us to do it. There’s a very real chance they may not want to be there, but the stakes are too high not to offer them space; the margins are too slim. No god, no king
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