Read this over at Yastreblyansky's place today. It's from a New York Times Cletus safari (so it's paywalled, hence the secondhand source) where one of the Cletuses explains why he's yearning so hard for The Return of Tubby:
"Just start putting things back on the right track. It makes me scratch my head that the country never did better than when Trump was president — never. You know what I mean? The gas prices were low. The border was under control. Everything was just great. And he got run out of town just because he sends mean tweets and has a big mouth. They’d rather elect a nice guy and have the country in the toilet"
I read that and my first (last, and only) thought was "Whatchoo talkin' about, Willis?"
I've been an adult civilian under a total of seven Presidents since I ETS'd back in '87; Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Cheney (okay, okay....Bush 2), Obama, Tubby, and now Biden.
During that time I'd call out three "big" events that shook the world, including my world:
2001 - the beginning of the Wars of Choice against the world's various political movements,
2008 - the Great Recession, and
2020 - The Plague Years.
And here's the thing about all that:
It made
No
More
Than
The
Slightest
Scintilla
Of
Difference
In my life.
I'm a middle-class straight white guy with a college education and a decent professional career. All that stuff? War, recession, disease?
Meh.
I was still in the Army Reserve in 2001, so I was a bit closer than 99.9% of the U.S. public to the wars, but I never deployed so I was never close enough. I don't have any war stories to tell.
My company was rocked a bit by the Recession, but stayed upright, so other than a bit of nervousness looking at my 401K I was fine. I don't have a horrific lost-my-house story to tell.
And I ran and hid from the Plague like everyone but the wingiest of the nuts, but successfully (so far), so I don't have any horrible 'Rona stories to tell.
Looking past the individual and local drama, ranging from divorce to hip replacements to job changes, overall?
"Everything was just great"?
"The country in the toilet"?
Get the fuck out, Cletus.
The United States in my adult life has rolled along - steadily growing meaner and harder, steadily less open, more plutocratic and unequal. Yes.
But somehow flipping wildly between "just great" and "the toilet"?
Fucking pull the other one, Cletus.
That this goober can even think, let alone say that, tells me that he's fucking delusional to the point of "beyond electroshock therapy".
Nothing has changed between 2016 and 2023 except we've lost a million or so - mostly of other Cletuses (Cletii?) - to the Plague. The rich are still rich or a bit richer. The poor are still poor. The U.S. is still a massive industrial nation where the vast bulk of us are desperately scrounging to make a fucking buck. The sun rises and sets. The smoke rises. The rain falls.
Obama. Trump. Biden.
The details of policy changed, sure. Obama helped some people get health insurance. Tubby handed stacks of cash to the fatcats. Biden got the fuck out of Afghanistan.
Us cis het middle-class white guys?
We just rolled on.
And the fact that this clueless dingus thinks anything else?
Just reminds us that these people are the fucking boat anchor of the Republic. They believe nonsense, they're convinced of a bunch of idiocy that's not just untrue but monstrously, demonstrably untrue and in a crudely, stupidly, destructive way.
When chucklefucks like this can believe that the reason the majority of the voters in 2020 wanted to shitcan his Orange Julius Caesar because "he has a big mouth" and not because he was the worst Chief Executive since James Buchanan (at least) who helped kill hundreds of thousands of his own people?
There's no penetrating that degree of stupid.
Yet here we are, stuck with this mouthbreather and millions of his kin.
I know I'm banging this drum and I'm sure you're tired of the noise.
But these people are the problem.
We've got lots of problems; climate change, vulture capitalism (and those two are twins - I'll circle back to that in a bit), political dysfunction (see above), nonalcoholic beer, MILF Manor...
The problem is these people.
If they really think that us straight middle class white guys have gone from "great" to "the toilet" in two years?
That means they're locked down tight into their darkness of lies and nonsense.
You can't run a democratic republic with that many people believing bullshit that stupid who will fight you rather than give that up.
But I'm not sure what else you can do.
No comments:
Post a Comment