I was sitting at the kitchen table in the pre-dawn dark - as I do more often than not; my workday starts early and I can't reset my body clock on the weekend - when I realized that I was not just in the dark but in the Dark. My thoughts were unrelentingly grim.
I am living in the Plague Year, and there is literally nothing I can do about that except hide and hope to survive until a vaccine.
I also realized that my work is, frankly, a dreary grind of shitty development projects and doesn't look to be any different anytime soon...assuming that we're not decimated by the coming depression and I am jobless.
And I am living under the rule of greedy, stupid fools who are determined to ensure that the notional rules of the republic we are supposed to be living in don't allow me to defenestrate them, who are bound and determined to deal with this Plague Year in the worst, most dangerous and risky way possible. They will kill me if they can, and the political structures of my country don't let me give them the fucking conge' they deserve.
That's just...well, grim. I cannot sweeten it and I cannot lighten it. All I can do is grind on, doing what I can to make things better around me.
But what I want...well, that's another thing entirely. I'm furiously, incandescently angry at the way that 40 years of Republican malfeasance and liberal cringing have brought us to this. I want to lead the mob up the capitol steps, break down the doors to the congressional chambers and hang Moscow Mitch and Tom Cotton and every other treacherous Republican fuckstick from the Visitors' Gallery, and then on down Pennsylvania Avenue to drag the orange shitgibbon and his slimy pal Miller out into the Rose Garden for a picnic and auto-de-fe, with the two guests of dishonor as the barbecued main course.
But how can that help. We all can see what these bastards are doing. But it's not them. It's that four out of ten other Americans love it, and that just makes me loathe and despise THEM, too. And hating 40% of my "fellow Americans"? That's...not healthy.
So here we are.
Sometimes we just have to bend into the shitstorm and slog on forward. It sucks. It always has. But we just have to hope for better days ahead, and the chance to lay our burden down.
Update 4/14: And here's the really infuriating part.
It SO didn't have to be this way.
What's most appalling is that in this horrific disease Donald Trump and his GOP pals were effectively gifted the chance to be fucking heroes.
I mean that sincerely. They could have gone down in American history with the pantheon of men (and, unfortunately, they ARE all men...) who have saved the Republic. Washington. Lincoln. FDR.
All Trump had to do was what any sane, decent person would have done. Shut his piehole. Listened to people who knew better. Taken their advice to act quickly and competently. Spoken the words of comfort and care. Acted as Lincoln did in 1861 and FDR did in 1941. Mobilized the nation. Produced the tests, provided the ventilators, coordinated the response.
I know I keep saying this, but this was a fucking no-brainer. We've done this before, only it was Japanese, not viruses; we kick the federal money machine into action, start paying people to stay home instead of build bombers, businesses to stay shut instead of make tanks and helmets.
Freeze the nation in place until treatment, and then vaccine, came on-line.
That's it.
That's ALL.
He does that, and he's flying up there with the Greats. Twenty years after his enormous orange ass gets kicked into the hole his meatface is up there on Rushmore right next to Teddy.
But this goddamn fuckstick and his worthless fucking GOP pals couldn't do that to save their (and our) lives.
HE couldn't do it because he's a fucking rodent, and all his pizza-rat brain can manage is his own cravings; his craving for money, for power, to sate his ginormous ego.
THEY couldn't do it because they're fucking slaves, slaves to their bloated ideology where it's a Hobbesean war of all against all, where cash is king, C.R.E.A.M., baby, and it's all about punishing the darks and the bitches and the libs. They could no more act heroically than a dog could resist licking its ass.
That's just...sad.
Here these sorry bastards like to fap to their image of themselves as the latter-day Three Percent, the heroic fighting rebels who would be the first to jump to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the nation in time of trial.
And yet...when the trial arrived, all they could do was snivel, whine, try and grift the pandemic, punish the libs, and then celebrate by dipping their balls in the chocolate to enjoy the creamy texture.
And so here we are, ruled by the very worst among us, without any hope for reprieve.
6 comments:
I echo a lot of that Chief from across the other side of the Atlantic. I used to think that the UK had built-in protections from the extremes seen in US politics, I'm not confident of this now.
I had the privilege of studying modern politics and history in the late 90's, where the future looked (with retrospect) naively optimistic and rosy. Back then the political conversations (in class anyway) were growing the economy, the right shape of social democracy etc. It's hilarious when I look back, and clear since that a lot of very bad people were working extremely hard to royally screw everyone except their awful oligarch employers.
It's not even that clever, but people are so ignorant and lazy the bastards get away with it. So today for example, 1000 people died of COVID-19 in the UK, a scandal and a tragedy and should demand answers to questions about govt policy. But the front page story in the right wing press in the UK is get well messages for the PM.
Why are these outlets allowed to call themselves news? But is it really much to expect the public to ignore absolute sh*te and just instead find an source of information that isn't wall to wall lies?
I don't know how or if things will get better. I try to keep open minded, but there's little sign of green shoots.
Chief, as we discussed before, I am unconvinced that Republicans are the sole reason for American governance issues. I would regard both the Democrats and the Republicans as two sides of the same oligarchic coin.
As to how to get out of this hole, watching Bernie, I see that we need to convince ordinary Americans to donate to their desired politicians. It doesn't have to be much, cause it all adds up.
Furthermore, buying our local politicians is extremely cheap.
Just like drinking and driving has gone out of style, simply talking politics and voting once every couple of years is no longer enough. Now people have to kick in a sawbuck or two. If *you* fund the politicos that you want, you have a lot more leverage over them.
Further, you can donate dollars anytime you want (rather than wait for an election).
Ael: Just no.
The Democratic mess (it's hard to call it a "party" in the political sense...) is a fractious jumble of everything not autocratic and racist and xenophobic in American society today. Yes, there's a bought-and-paid-for faction - let's call it the "DLC Wing" of the group - that's terrified of being called "reds" and wants to suck up to rich donors.
But there's also the Berniecrat wing, and the immigrant wing, and the people-of-color wing, and the GLBTQ wing, and the pro-choice wing, and the anti-gun-nut wing, and the climate change wing and...
And that's kind of the problem.
Because the GOP?
They're just fucking nuts.
They want their Gilded Age/guns/Jesus/nativist whackaloon agenda and refuse to accept anything less than total victory. They'll wreck the joint to try and get it by hook or by crook, and if they don't then they'll STILL try and wreck the joint.
So on one side you have a fractious mob trying to herd cats - including, yes, some oligarch-friendly/RTP/liberal hawks - and on the other a mob of CHUDs driven by the lash of FOX and Limbaugh and hate radio and bible-banging wingnut preachers.
The Right has been at war with New Deal America since at least the Forties, and wild with fury since the Eighties. They're fine with destruction; they don't care if the system works, so long as the Left doesn't get anything nice.
The Left is still trying to make the system work. So they can't fight fire with fire.
And in the middle, there's a huge lump of people who have no fucking clue. You're not going to get them to kick down a buck to a politician they have no idea about, and you can't get them off their dead ass long enough for them to learn. You'd need to be pounding on doors 24/7 to do that, and you'd have to be willing to weaponize the Right's total nihilism and hammer it into their foreheads with a fucking nail.
And that takes 1) a huge amount of time and energy, and 2) a total unitary commitment from the party who wants that. And see above - the Democratic coalition is a total circus.
Don't forget, too, that the structural background is incredibly favorable towards the Right. The playing surface isn't level; the Left has to work twice as hard to get just as far. The incredible unwillingness of the "mainstream media" to tell the truth about the GOP is murderous. Look at how many people think that Orange Foolius is doing a brilliant job "fighting" the Plague!
That's what's so depressing; the understanding that I may have to give up everything else to fight these bastards...and the deck is stacked against me.
We will have to disagree on the complicity of the Democrats in the new gilded age.
However, the important point I wanted to raise, is that we need to get ordinary people to start funding the politicians of their choice. Bernie's was the richest campaign ever in the primaries. If we can get people used to coughing up the price of a pack of cigarettes for their chosen pol every season or so, then you can really mess up the natural stranglehold the elites have on the political discussion. People fund far different candidates than hedge fund billionaires do.
Ael: And that kind of makes my point, doesn't it? Sanders raised a crap-ton of money and couldn't change the dynamic.
It's not about money - or, rather, it IS...but it's about "fund-raising" and how toxic it is to politics.
The solution isn't getting the couch potatoes to kick in a buck.
It's getting the money - ALL the money - out.
Political campaigns should be publicly funded.
Period.
And I didn't say the Dems weren't complicit. Their cringing before the GOP has helped enable the sonsofbitches.
But it's the passive enabling of a coward, not the active drive towards oligarchy. THAT's the GOP, and only the GOP. They own it...because they WANT to.
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