America: You broke it, you own it.
Garbage in, Garbage out
To all the Monday morning quarterbacks, pointing fingers and playing the blame game: yes, Biden should have stepped aside sooner, which would have given the Democrats more time to conduct their circular firing squad, cancel-fest vetting process where every candidate floated would have been deemed too pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, or too pro-Israel, too shrill or too extreme or not extreme enough, would have appeared weak on crime, not tough enough on immigration, or had made some gaff 10 years ago, misgendered someone or spoke in complete sentences and used too many syllables to resonate with Joe the Plumber.
You forget Republicans played the long game while Democrats alternately played along, pursued appeasement strategies or triaged the mess left behind by the previous Republican administration. It started with Reagan, that soft-spoken, avuncular, aw-shucks empty suit, prattling platitudes that convinced the nation that poor people were the enemy. It was the first salvo of an agenda intended to consolidate wealth and power in the hands of a ruling elite. Cut taxes. Gut the social safety net. In the land of American exceptionalism, people didn’t take issue with granting corporations huge tax breaks but indignant when it came to giving poor people a leg up.
They should pull themselves up by the bootstraps! The original meaning of the expression dates to the early 19th century when it was used to describe a task that was ludicrously impossible to accomplish. The birthplace of more flavors of Christianity than Baskin-Robbins, America embraced the cult of Milton Friedman, whose doctrine of corporate responsibility was defined as maximizing profits and returns for shareholders. Corporations would police themselves and their successes would trickle downstream, flowing into the pockets of the middle class. Friedman was right about one thing: the middle class certainly got trickled on.
Newt Gingrich cultured the new breed of Republican in a conservative petri dish: combative, uncompromising, no more “reaching across the aisle,” just straight-up boning without so much as a cordial reach-around. Clinton ushered in NAFTA and compromised with the uncompromising until he was virtually indistinguishable from Republicans with the tough on crime policies that destroyed communities and unfairly punished black people for minor drug offenses.
24/7, Have-it-Your-Way cable news was the accelerant deployed during the next stage of tenderizing the public to extreme ideas. George W. Bush, elected by a handful of dimpled chads (or was it pregnant chads?), by all accounts a “nice guy” was a vacuous puppet whose strings were pulled by Neocons, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove (some of us still remember Dick Cheney as a villainous, bacteria-oozing, skin necrotizing monitor lizard). And then 9/11 happened, which was a gift to the Bush administration. Never a better time to take a goosestep to the hard right than immediately after a devastating attack on US soil (never mind the fact that the organizations responsible for keeping us safe were too busy engaging in a pissing contest among the various intelligence agencies to heed the warning signs).
Remember WMD’s? The outing of Valerie Plame? The pretext for invading Iraq? Within a couple of years, America managed to squander its international goodwill as it waded further into the morass of two unwinnable wars — one in which lessons learned the hard way by the Russians were ignored and the other one? I mean, have we ever been given a plausible explanation for why we invaded a country that did not attack us?
Obama got handed the keys to the Oval Office, a Great Recession that had gutted the economy and a huge deficit — the lion’s share racked up in military spending and corporate tax cuts. The transition from Bush to Obama must have been like an Airbnb where guests had punched holes in the walls, clogged the toilets and shat in the hot tub, leaving the incoming guests to deal with the mess (sorry! due to the opioid epidemic, the cleaning company can’t find enough workers to pass a piss test). But even that slime-coated amphibian, Newt Gingrich could not have anticipated the wonders of the Internet and social media — the cesspool in which toxic ideas thrive. Along with Facebook and Fox News and Twitter, then later Breitbart, InfoWars, 4Chan, 8Chan, the ideas began germinating, taking root and seeping into the mainstream, spreading like black mold.
During the purportedly post-racial, Yes, We Can! Obama era, the wars ground on and more undocumented immigrants were deported than under any other administration, besides maybe that of Bush the Elder. Mitch McConnell and the GOP nudged the goal posts further to the right, making a blood pact to obstruct and this was before Obama even took office. An increasingly conservative, pro-business Supreme Court ruled in a 5–4 decision that campaign contributions were protected under the First Amendment — a tweak that contributed to the establishment of superPACs and dark money buying candidates cough — influencing political campaigns. The Tea Party was the prototype for MAGA: MAGA beta version. Exit Obama, enter the wildly unpopular Hillary Clinton. Bernie bros pitch a temper tantrum, gather their toys and go home. Trump’s appeal to the lowest common denominator comes as no surprise, but national apathy and an antiquated electoral college hand Trump a win. Liberals gasp, “This is NOT who we are!”
Americans have always been susceptible to snake oil salesmen peddling some cure-all, some magic shortcut that eliminates the need to experience discomfort, either physical, mental or spiritual. That makes them vulnerable to grifters, to both the long and short con, to manipulative charismatic opportunists who promise salvation, acceptance, a sense of belonging and the illusion of security. We invented Mormons, after all!
Americans want simple answers and simple fixes to complex problems. Life is like a Hollywood blockbuster: the villain is easily recognizable; the hero saves the day. They prefer dogma over intellectual flexibility. You can’t blame them for not recognizing fascism or a dictator in the making — a sociopath on multiple levels, a cult leader who spouts nonsense, if he’s not sporting a uniform and a caterpillar mustache.
Then there’s the cultural ethos of individuality taken to an extreme in which self-indulgence is mistaken for freedom, privileges for basic human rights. Choice is for Chik-fil-A. Everything hinges on a mentality of my, my — mine. My rights. My freedoms. There’s never a mention of responsibility. For Americans, freedom is the right to consume as much of anything they can stuff in their gob or gas tank. Having to consider the consequences of conspicuous consumption, they will rage and call you a communist. In that way, Americans are like giant toddlers in sagging diapers and hair in all the wrong places, pitching apoplectic fits when asked to wear a mask or eat less red meat, or be the least bit inconvenienced. Pseudoscience is the new religion.
Trump can’t make America Great Again because America was never all that great in the first place. America experienced periods of prosperity, most notably after the second world war and mostly thanks to Roosevelt’s Depression era New Deal programs that expanded the role of the Federal government and LBJ’s Great Society policies that strengthened the white American middle class — policies Republicans have been dismantling brick by brick, sometimes with the help of Democrats. It’s a time bathed in a hazy, amber, Vaseline-smeared lens of nostalgia that people love to romanticize. Having the luxury of selective amnesia, there’s no need to consider what mid 20th century American society was like for women, blacks, gays, Jews, Asians and even middle America’s white men who trudged off to jobs they hated and smoked and drank their way to an early grave, dead from stroke or heart attack or lung cancer before they reached retirement age.
Two weeks after the 2024 elections, Trump’s packed clown car barrels headlong down the highway, cinderblock duct taped to the gas pedal, radio blaring as it slams into guardrails, veers across the median into oncoming traffic. Inside, the occupants cackle wildly, pass the bulbous meth pipe around. We don’t need no fire, let the mothafucka burn!
There are clear winners: billionaires, Putin, Silicon Valley tech bros, Bibi Netanyahu, to name a few (as a token of its appreciation, the Israeli government will gift every member of Trump’s administration a free download of Pegasus and award the Trump Organization conglomerate development rights in the soon-to-be ethnically cleansed Gaza and West Bank). The rest of us are the Biggest Losers. Whatever bullshit reason you had for pulling the lever to the right — whatever you told the pollsters, the media, or yourselves, I know this to be true: when your communities are inundated by cyclone bombs, wiped out by hurricanes and tornadoes, consumed by wildfires and you got nowhere to go because FEMA’s gone bust, don’t go knocking on Elon’s gate: you and your cavity-riddled offspring will not be admitted onto the compound — the one reserved for his brood and stable of broodmares.
This is who we are, and we just got the government we deserve.
