The Proper Distance

Here’s a trivia question for you:

What’s the opposite of myopia?

Yes, it’s hyperopia. You have heard of the former because it’s more common, but hyperopia (i.e., farsightedness) is a real thing. People with either of these conditions just don’t see very well.

These terms are a nifty metaphor for our political situation, which is somewhere between authoritarian-leaning and full-blast oligarchy. We can’t be sure because we are living it, and people are notoriously bad at identifying the eras in which they exist. We need the perspective of time.

For example, baby boomers weren’t nostalgic for the 1950s while they were kids. It was only when they hit middle age that they proclaimed that those were the days and insisted on dragging the country back to this mythical decade that was vastly overrated, never mind the consequences.

So while it is perfectly obvious that the America of 2025 is a shitshow, it is unclear how much of a catastrophe we are enduring. We will have a better answer circa 2050, if the nation survives until then.

The effects of myopia and hyperopia exist on a political scale. People who are too close or too far from a situation often have a skewed perspective.

Consider the Y2K bug, that wacky relic of the Clinton years. I’m old enough to remember computer scientists who insisted civilization would collapse. They knew all the risks and potential for disaster, so they focused on that. At the other end of the spectrum, people who thought the fledgling internet was a fad and didn’t know the first thing about technology were busy stockpiling canned goods for their underground bunker. They didn’t understand how any of this worked, so they freaked out.

One set was myopic, and the other was hyperopic.

You can see the same results with the Iraq War, when experts smugly asserted that Saddam Hussien had weapons of mass destruction, while people who couldn’t identify Canada on a map yelled, “Invade somebody now.” Yeah, they were both wrong.

There are other examples throughout human history, and in our current maelstrom of misery, it is difficult to figure out who is overreacting and who is way too chill about all this.

Experts on fascism are fleeing the country. Are they too close to the situation or spot on in their analysis?

People who have no idea how tariffs work are saying everything will all be ok. Could this blasé attitude possibly be correct, or is their ignorance not just reprehensible but dangerous?

Is the right path somewhere in between, a concoction of justified anxiety mixed with Zen-like hope?

Again, we don’t know.

I will say, however, that my theory is not perfect. You know all those experts who said Covid-19 would kill a million Americans? They were criticized and ridiculed, but yeah, they were right.

Sometimes, the alarmists are absolutely correct.

Warning Shots

Everything is a distraction, but nothing is a distraction.

The president receiving a $400 million jet from a foreign nation in an overt display of greed, corruption, and potential bribery? That’s a distraction. Also the motherfucker really wants that jet.

Once again, everything that Trump says is true — in his mind at that moment. 

For example, that whole Gulf of America imbroglio wasn’t on anyone’s radar until it popped into the Dear Leader’s head, ex nihilo, after which it suddenly became a top priority. The guy wanted to do it, and the process was surprisingly easy. So now we have a cartographic catastrophe.

In contrast, taking over Gaza and building Trump hotels on the land is substantially more difficult. That means it isn’t going to happen. Again, our butterfly-brained chief executive meant it when he said it. But when the endeavor turned out to be a chore, he forgot about this particular desire and moved on to some other scattered, ill-conceived project.

This brings us to the most troubling aspect of the Trump administration’s constant flinging of bizarre ideas and psychotic master plans.

You see, even though this bloviating sack of lies “never mentioned taking over Greenland—or Canada, or Panama, or Mexico—during the 2024 campaign, he has made such takeovers a key objective of his administration.” The reason these absurd threats keep surfacing is because of “a historical truism: when one country invades another, it usually reflects the problems of the invader’s domestic politics, no matter what the justification for the invasion is.”

So if Trump’s poll numbers keep falling, and there is every reason to assume they will, the warmongers and lunatics who surround him will no doubt realize that “war seduces entire societies, creating fictions that the public believes and relies on to continue to support conflicts.”

It worked for George W. Bush, who likely would have lost reelection if not for the argument that he was a “wartime president.” Yeah, and that war, which he started, turned out great — didn’t it? And his second term was a raving success — right? 

But I digress. Let’s get back to our current Republican incompetent.

Now, we certainly aren’t going to pick a military fight with China. We can’t even win a trade war against them. 

But we can shoot it out with a smaller nation. Hey, didn’t you ever wonder why the Reagan administration invaded tiny Granada? 

The drive to dominate a smaller country is even stronger among conservatives than it was during Ronnie’s time. This is because “the reactionary patriotism we’re so familiar with is now infected with an apocalyptic mindset.” The Republican Party has morphed into “a toxic system of belief, capable of overriding material self-interest and logic because the main offering is revenge.” This goes way beyond “the shallow emotional fix of winning elections or sticking it to the libs.” At its core, Trumpism is “not so much a hatred for any one group … but a hatred of civilization itself.”

There’s a whole lot of civilization in the world that right-wingers want to vanquish. The hope is that we can white-knuckle it out for three years without bombs dropping. But it all depends on how easily we get distracted.

What Was the Point Again?

I’m not a sentimental guy.

But it’s good to look back from time to time, just to see how far you’ve come and how you’ve grown as a person. Even better, it’s good to meet up with your old college roommates, get drunk, and reminisce about the time you stole that guy’s bed and stuffed it in the dorm elevator at midnight.

Did I mention that I’ve grown as a person?

But if it’s fine to look back on one’s life, it’s not such an uplifting experience to look back on our country’s past. 

By this, I mean you shouldn’t look at clips of Obama speaking circa 2010. You are likely to burst out weeping with the realization of how far we have plummeted, while pining away for a president who could speak in full, coherent sentences.

I don’t say this often, but damn, those were the days.

However, when we shorten our gaze at the past, narrowing it down to 2017 or so, we realize that the nation hasn’t moved at all in the past few years. Seriously, it’s like Biden never happened.

Remember that assertion that the cruelty is the point? Yeah, it’s still true.

Witness the fact that even conservatives are stating that the GOP is waging a war on empathy.

The conservative movement has always had a core of right-wing sociopaths who express disdain for any life other than fetuses and abhor the very idea of sympathy. But today, it is at the forefront of the Republican Party’s agenda.

For example, there is no logical reason to deport immigrants, even undocumented ones, en masse. Acres of studies show that immigrants have lower crime rates, contribute more to the economy than they cost, and fuel economic and cultural developments.

This is why any discussion of immigration eventually turns into a conservative bitching about hearing Spanish in the grocery store. It’s an emotional argument. We have prioritized the hypersensitivity of white Americans and said it’s perfectly normal to want to crush people who have done nothing to you.

This has created an America that grabs people off the street and sends them to a gulag in another country. But Trump’s xenophobic agenda — evident in all those “mass deportations now” posters waved around at his rallies — will never really come to fruition. Among other issues, it is impossible to deport 10 million people in any kind of efficient, humane manner, and doing so would destroy the economy.

There are also those pesky legal arguments. All you conservatives out there should note that none other than that famous bleeding-heart liberal Antonin Scalia said, “It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”

That’s just in case you don’t know if you have to follow the Constitution.

The whole premise of mass deportation rests on the idea that “some people are better than others” and therefore “some people have special insight based only upon their superiority,” which means they can do pretty much whatever they want, especially to those who oppose them.

People are scared in America today. I’m not just talking about undocumented immigrants, progressive leaders, or ethnic minorities. I’m talking about Republican senators.

Experts are warning that the “fear of government retribution is now spreading through society,” and that Trump's style of governance "involves a desire for total dominance and an increasingly unhinged delusion of omnipotence” that aligns nicely with Mussolini.

But if you think “quietly yielding in small, seemingly temporary ways will mitigate long-term harm,” you are sadly mistaken. The truth is that “acquiescence will probably embolden the administration, encouraging it to intensify and broaden its attacks.”

This is a movement based on an “ideological architecture to excuse violence and suffering on a mass scale.”

It’s not just the cruelty anymore. It’s also the anger, the fear, and the unchecked power — all that is the point.

Undue Process

If you voted for Trump because you wanted egg prices to go down, you are no doubt disappointed (which is just as well, because this was an idiotic reason).

But if you voted for Trump because you wanted to live in a police state where power-drunk government officials can grab somebody off the street at their whim, whisk him out of the country without allowing him to plead his case, throw him into a hellhole to rot, refuse to explain what crime he broke, and refuse to bring him back even after the US Supreme Court tells them to do so, then your wildest dreams have come true.

Also, you are a fascist.

Only an authoritarian could love the following developments (this list comes courtesy of NextDraft’s Dave Pell):

The sending of potentially innocent people to a gulag-like prison in El Salvador. 

The disappearing of people and due process. 

The glad-handing, jubilant Oval Office meeting with a leader who has referred to himself as “the coolest dictator” by an American president who said he'd love to send American “homegrown criminals” to a similar prison abroad. 

The ignoring of a series of court orders and the wanton flouting of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling. 

The presidential displaying of a clearly doctored photo that makes it seem like a man sent to the CECOT terrorism confinement center by mistake was a member of a dangerous gang. 

The firing of the Justice Department lawyer who made it clear that the man’s fate was due to a clerical error. 

The sadistic photo ops from the US head of Homeland Security posing in front of CECOT prisoners.

The ceding of America's high ground when it comes to due process and the rule of law. 

The refusal to apologize for any mistakes. 

The refusal to rectify any of those mistakes.

The celebration of cruelty.

All of this makes for a disturbingly lengthy list.

In addition, there is also the fact that government agencies are now acting like snitches, federal officials are suggesting rounding up immigrants like Amazon Prime handles packages, scientists working on life-saving breakthroughs are being detained, and people just trying to become patriotic American citizens are being arrested.

Plus, we have a president who falls for painfully obvious internet hoaxes like he’s a damn nine-year-old child.

Until recently, I thought right-wingers were against jackbooted government thugs. Clearly, their principled stance against government oppression was just as strong as their principled beliefs in freedom of speech, the US Constitution, and Jesus Christ, which is to say, all that talk was bullshit, and they believe in nothing except power.

Someone should tell those freedom-loving warriors that “if government officials can say anything, true or not, to justify their actions… what stops them from doing that to an American citizen?” In such a country, the government “can claim anything and act with impunity against anyone.”

Yes, right now, they can do it to anyone.

Shifting, Always Shifting

It would be immediate golden age.

OK now there’s going to be a recession, but that was the plan all along.

The stock market was set to soar to new heights.

OK, now it’s tanking, but don’t worry because Trump is playing 4-D chess with the market.

Inflation was going to drop.

OK now it’s accelerating, but the president couldn’t care less if you pay more for basic goods and services.

If you are a rational person, you might think back to Trump’s promises to make every American instantly wealthier on day one of his administration, and contrast it with the reality of just three months later, when recession signs are flashing, Americans' expectations for the economy are at their lowest level since the end of the Great Recession, and financial experts say our nation’s fiscal strength is “on course for continued decline.”

But if you are a MAGA supporter, you see the best of all possible worlds.

For hardcore Trump fans, it doesn’t matter that “almost everything the administration and congressional Republicans are doing to the economy is making a collapse more likely.” It is irrelevant that Trump’s policies “have shaken a once-solid economic outlook.” And it is an insignificant detail that the GOP wants to fling America back to the Gilded Age of the 1890s, which was a great time for the rich but a horror show for everybody else.

You see, Trump’s followers have a history of not just moving the goalposts, but tearing the goalposts down, leaving the stadium, and passing out drunk in the parking lot while denying anybody was ever trying to kick a field goal in the first place.

Back in November, virtually nobody voted for a complete government overhaul that would be orchestrated by an unelected, unvetted, unaccountable billionaire. Republicans never said this was even remotely part of the plan, much less the whole objective. Many people claimed their vote for Trump was because of fucking egg prices.

But now, a lot of those same voters are cheering on oligarchs who are “effectively gaining control of the U.S. government” and threatening to end Social Security. They have rationalized their horrible decisions.

The economic outlook has gotten so bleak that a brand-new conspiracy theory — we can never get enough of those — has erupted to explain why Trump is screwing over the very people who voted for him. 

It’s a QAnon for tariffs, and it attempts to explain Trump’s “incoherent, inconsistent, self-destructive mess” and transform it into “a carefully orchestrated master plan to revive American manufacturing, reduce the national debt, reconfigure the international-alliance system, and deliver the greatest geopolitical deal of the century.”

In truth, the theory is so preposterous that it is “less a genuine plan than a way for Trump’s backers to put a strategic spin on the president’s inchoate impulses.”

This conspiracy theory has “somewhat implausibly gained adherents, if cautious ones, in respectable quarters” because of “the intense demand for some kind of coherent rationale” that covers Trump’s bizarre, self-destructive actions.

His followers can’t accept the fact that a belligerent man-child has taken over the Oval Office (again) and has no idea what he is doing.

The need to justify Trump’s nonsensical policies is evident in the fact that congressional Republicans recently passed a measure saying, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” as a legislative maneuver to help the buffoonish chief executive out of a legal quandary. But the GOP’s insistence that “a day is not a day seems to prove the truth of Burke’s observation that by trying to force reality to fit their ideology, radical ideologues will end up imposing tyranny in the name of liberty.”

Again, there are no goalposts here. And there never were.