This man, and his party, will over the next four years attempt to destroy the America I grew up in. They will attempt to reverse, repeal, and destroy the liberal and progressive and egalitarian and regulatory acts that have changed the face of this nation since 1929.
I've been Chief Executive-d by knaves and bastards before. I despised Dubya, had little but personal contempt for Bill Clinton and his wandering penis, thought Ronnie Reagan was a bloviating idiot. In a sense I tolerated them and the people who elected them because their elections owed more to We the People's ridiculous optimism and poor education and, sometimes, their venality and greed. They promised us "stuff" and we gave them power. That's how people are and that's how "leadership" has always been since the days of bread and circuses.
I'm not pissed off that my nation has elected this con man because he promised change in the form of doing the awful things to the sorts of people and things they hated, and people responded to that with unfounded optimism and poor education (and some venality, greed, a smidgen of racism and sexism and hate).
No, what irks the shit out of me is the fucking stupid of it. Bone-stupid. Thermonuclear stupid.
It was such a...cheap, obvious, lame-ass con. From the fucking idiotic Wall to the impossible promises of those millions of beautiful jobs it was a con so visible and so clearly ridiculous that only a real simpleton would have believed it. But millions of simpletons fucking did. I hate to think that so many of my fellow Americans are Just That Stupid that they'd buy a Gilded Age thinking they were getting a raise and a week's vacation at Sandals. But, apparently, they are.
Goddamn it but I wish I had their e-mail addresses so I could run one of those Nigerian oil-minister scams on them. I'd be a fucking millionaire.
I remain stubbornly proud of my service and the ideals of my country that led me to that service.
But of the country itself, its "leaders", and many of its people, I am today less proud than ever.
14 comments:
My own emotions about this are so hard to describe. I feel like I am simultaneously witnessing and experiencing my nation going over Niagara Falls in a nail-studded barrel.
I'm so angry I feel it like a bodily hum. I didn't sleep for about 30 hours starting Tuesday morning. I couldn't eat for a while and then I couldn't quit eating crap that was bad for me. I couldn't drink alcohol -- in light of an alcoholic father I formed the habit of only drinking when happy. It may never touch my lips again?
I'm snarly (and what an online friend described in a "gentle" seemingly critical way as "cranky" to explain to me why my blog stats are falling ) Well, fuck it. I'm worse than cranky and not the least apologetic anymore. They can read me or not and they can fuck the fuck off if an angry woman is too hard to take.
I am in an odd sort of place.
Once a friend of mine talked about how he had been in a place where he was utterly certain that he would die. Convinced that there was no escape, no redemption, not the tiniest sliver of a hope.
He described his sensation as a sort of a floating, bitter lassitude. A calm of despair, beyond fear AND hope.
That's how I feel.
I am completely convinced that the next four years will be worse for this nation than any of us dread. We will become smaller, and meaner, poorer, and more vicious. And that's those of us who are white, and male, and "not-poor". For those who aren't, well...
I Facebook friend talked about how the next four years would be okay "because we survived eight years under Obama" and my reply was "And that was so difficult because we had to press 2 for English and watch the homos throw their wedding reception at the Eagles aerie?"
Now we will have blood.
This morning Don came by for his bicycle. He appears to be in his 50s -- it's hard to say, he is so malnourished -- and has just failed a course in driving semi-trailer trucks. Don trembles, maybe Parkingson's, I don't know. Now he sleeps in a Salvation Army facility,a bunkhouse he calls it. His feet are giving him pain and he hopes the newly repaired bike will give some relief. And he's happy that the SA provides him two meals a day.
I bring this up to remind readers and myself of the depths of human resilience. Trump will create many victims, that is certain. But he and other dictators will not extinguish the human spirit. We will endure.
Lemons, lemonade,
getting off asses,
engagement,
Optimism.
Chief,
what do you mean by= now we will have blood?
jim hruska
I mean, Jim, that just as in the first Gilded Age, the poor, the sick, the outcast and the outsider will pay with their health, and some with their lives, to appease Mammon the God of Wealth that Trump and the GOP worship.
And that assumes we will NOT see a return to the sort of Klannish violence that the new President has, if not encouraged, done nothing forceful to reject. When the poisons that lurk in our nation seep out the most vulnerable of us will die of them.
To put it more bluntly Trump appealed directly to white "pride", heterosexual rigidity, and male cock-strong force. You vote for someone who grabs 'em by the pussy it ain't cause you're fretting about the TPP
Drumpf is a cartoon "strongman" but there will be a critical minority of his followers who won't and don't want to get that it's a cartoon. These people will go after those they perceive as unprotected now - since Il Douche has said, for example, that he wants those beaners deported why not jumpstart the process with a patriotic beatdown? - and predictably some on both sides will die.
That's what happens under strongmen, right?
So, this...
Chief,
i always thought that the first rule of combat was to let the situation develop before you issue a frago or jump thru your ass.
aren't you jumping the gun just a wee bit?
you are over reacting a bit which is a feminine trait and opposed to hetero rigidity.
on the last sentence i'm just pullin' your chain. lighten up til you see concrete examples to attack. you are attacking nothing but campaign rhetoric which is just punching at air. i for one do not see that the hbo show was any better for the middle class.
the democratic party is now the party of wealth and privelege and .....
you covered all the buggaboos, now what?
whats your solution?
jim hruska
I'll have a post up this week discussing this in depth, but the gist of it will be that this IS a good time to begin organizing to fight Trumpism because Trumpism now owns the federal government and we know, from the man's own tangerine lips, what he wants to do with it...and we also know from their less-colorful lips what people like Paul Ryan and Newt Gingrich will try and get him to do.
This is not Dubya who had Osama on his heels, or Bush 41 and Ronnie who had Democratic Congresses and a party much less willing to rip out the New Deal root and branch.
We are in a place no U.S.citizen has seen since...well, never. And we're there with a Chief Executive who thinks Vladimir Putin is a role model.
If we're not treating that like we've found Order 131...
I am not a trump supporter, as i do not like any one who was a draft dodger when the hot ones were flying.
this is about reason.
we play the cards we were dealt.
if some one in your platoon proposed organizing to oppose the next new platoon leader because(fill in the blanks) you'd give him a blanket party.
we've known and been friendly , or at least professional with one another and this should continue, but as a friend i'd like you to answer this question. Only to yourself. are you a happy person?
where does all the vitriol come from?
pls do not answer, its a thought question.
jim hruska
Ranger:
Maybe Chief is a bit tweaked about the national disgrace of electing a prick like Trump. Or maybe he has a sentimental regard for the victims of that electoral decision. Or maybe he worried about his kids, growing up in a world of white spite and arrogance. But you seen happy, military hero that you are, so I guess things are okay.
Rangeragainstwar: "if some one in your platoon proposed organizing to oppose the next new platoon leader because(fill in the blanks) you'd give him a blanket party."
Please note that organizing civilians to politically oppose a president and his party is a rather different thing.
Ranger againstwar: "where does all the vitriol come from?"
While you are rehabilitating your s lf from your 16-year coma, I have some bad news about the 21st century.......
I will answer Jim's question about my "happiness" because I think it's important in closing out this thread.
I am not fundamentally a "happy" man. "Happiness" as an outlook on life pretty much requires a deep confidence in the essential goodness of human nature, and the ultimate justice of Life and the world around you. It requires, to a great extent, the confidence that doing the just and right and decent thing will bring a deservedly good and "happy" result; that there is a promise of a "happy ending" for those who do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.
I don't believe that, at all. I think the World and Life are utterly random. While I love and live each day as best I can I have no hope or faith that tomorrow will bring anything, much less anything hopeful. Tomorrow may be a bore, or a nightmare, or may never come at all, and being a good person and living a good life will change that not one whit.
And while I have fairly low expectations of human behavior I won't pretend to be "happy" when I see my fellow humans, let alone my fellow citizens, acting like fools and vicious ones, at that.
Sixteen years ago those in love with plutocratic economics and feudalism placed a similar crew of greedy fools in charge. The result was disastrous at home and war abroad and as anyone who read this blog then remembers - or who recalls the old "Intel Dump" before that - I was not remotely "happy" during that time.
We the People seem to have shoved that fucking shitshow down our memory holes...because we've now elected a goddamn egotistic cowardly blowhard who will bring us back all the Dubya plutocracy and more only with a level of administrative corruption and incompetence that would have embarrassed U.S. Grant.
And, no. I am not "happy" about that.
I am now too old to really hope or fear for my country. But I have hope, and fear, for my children's country. And if, having listened to the foolish ranting of this president-elect, having seen the parade of grifters, unhinged racist loons, incompetents, and Bush-era retreads he has threatened to employ, you are "happy" about that, Jim, then I'm afraid I will have to sadly lower my opinion of the pre-VOLAR SF officer selection process.
Had I lived in 1896 or 1916 I would hope that I would have been attacking the Pinkertons or the troops suppressing the striking workers. I hope I would have been writing flaming rants in the pages of the Socialist press, and excoriating the bosses and the corrupt politicians like Trump who suckle off them. I hope I would have been unhappy - hell, I hope I would have been furious! - that millions lived and died in poverty and misery so that a handful enjoyed luxury in the "land of the free".
And in 2016 I see that we have been handed over to those who would love to return to those Gilded Age days. I am unhappy and furious about that, and if it shows through the screen from this place, well...then I have done good work here.
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