The Fisting of America

It’s not something to brag about, but I’ve seen Caligula, that 1970s cinematic monstrosity that is widely regarded as the most expensive porno ever made.

The film is repulsive, but it makes an impression.

One scene that I’ve never forgotten is when the mad emperor, played with wild-eyed intensity by Malcolm McDowell, saunters into a wedding celebration of one his army’s generals. Everyone is terrified to see him there, because they know he is a sociopathic lunatic. Sure enough, he rapes the bride in front of her newlywed husband, then rams his fist up the general’s ass. The whole movie is like that.

In any case, I’ve always wondered why everyone in ancient Rome, even tough military leaders, allowed Caligula to issue psychotic orders, destroy their society, and literally rape them without objection.

I don’t wonder about that anymore.

We live in a society where people with advanced degrees argue that tariffs will lead to prosperity, that white men have been unfairly excluded from leadership positions, and that European countries are bigger threats to us than Russia.

They believe this because one old man who struggles to speak in coherent sentences has insisted it’s all true, and they have fallen in line.

People who, just a year ago, would have guffawed at the idea of the United States annexing Canada are now seriously advocating for making that country the 51^st state (against its will, no less).

There are several reasons for this, ranging from the infantile need to “own the libs” to the zealotry of the true MAGA believer to the conservative quest for power.

But one of the chief motivators for hardcore supporters is psychological preservation. Admitting that you are wrong, especially about something major and/or central to your identify, is incredibly disturbing for most people.

If you’ve enthusiastically supported Trump to this point, despite years of evidence that he is a menace to the nation, it’s not so easy to say, “Woopsie, I guess those libtards were right after all.”

In fact, the individuals who are most likely to admit their mistakes “tend to be empathetic, self-aware, and curious — all traits that prevent ever having voted for Trump in the first place.”

So people in red hats with Trump flags in their yard will come up with tortuous explanations for, say, administration goons who endangered national security “by chatting about a military strike in a Signal chat that included a journalist.” 

Now, that’s a really crazy example, because nobody is that bafflingly stupid, right? But if this were to happen, Trump fans will not admit the administration displayed ungodly levels of incompetence and exhibited glaring hypocrisy. 

Hell, they will even defend the administration for deporting their spouses rather than admit they were wrong to vote for a corrupt autocrat. Think about that — even after Trump has destroyed their lives, his devoted followers will not acknowledge that the man is anything less than perfect.

Of course, there is another reason why so many people acquiesce to Trump, and that is simple fear.

But as powerful as that emotion is, it remains in second place when it comes to subservience to Trump. Fear is not the reason why Republicans are trying to “make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday, rename Dulles Airport in Trump’s honor, carve Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore, and create a new $250 bill with Trump’s likeness.”

That’s just blind obedience. And there is a lot of it going around.

What Remains

When I was in college, my poli-sci professor said that if you’re ever asked about the root cause of any aspect of American culture, you should pinpoint one of three events:

The Civil War 

The New Deal

The Vietnam War

He said the odds were great that you would be right.

I went to college a million years ago, so since then, another event — the September 11 attacks — can safely be added to that list. But there is a fifth epoch-defining catastrophe that is a strong contender for history-altering status.

I’m talking about the Covid-19 pandemic, which as we all know, is celebrating its fifth anniversary this month. Even at the time, many of us realized that the pandemic was not going to be a weird pop-culture snapshot, like lines for gas stations in the 1970s or the OJ trial in the 1990s.

No, this little bug was going to fuck us up permanently.

When we look back at the pandemic, it’s fascinating how so-called alarmists were closer to the truth than anyone else, and how many people who foresaw the calamity were dismissed.

The list of how Covid-19 changed America (overwhelmingly in negative ways) is lengthy. We are now unhealthier, angrier, and more socially isolated than before. We drink more, are more distrustful of our institutions, and more likely to be anti-vaxx. The pandemic decimated the economy, set our kids back academically and socially, and destabilized the government. Covid gave us an America more into fascism, social Darwinism, and nutjob conspiracy theories. 

And this is an incomplete accounting of the disaster.

The pandemic left Americans “more alone, detached, and disconnected — changes that have lingered.” Those gray months in 2020 have to be understood “not as a singular event but as a multifaceted crisis that exposed deep-seated fault lines in American society.”

Five years after the start of lockdowns, mass death, and political malfeasance, “America stands fractured yet paradoxically transformed” because “the crisis magnified our deepest divides — urban versus rural, privilege versus poverty, individualism versus collective survival — while stress-testing democracy itself.”

We have never gotten over Covid. The pandemic is a direct cause of our nation’s current state, which is somewhere between “teetering democracy” and “full-blown collapse.” 

Weirdly, the pandemic is a chief reason why Trump lost the 2020 election and why he won in 2024. You see, “in the wake of the pandemic, which [the Trump] administration badly mismanaged, the country grew more skeptical of government.” But rather than blame the incompetent buffoon who suggested guzzling bleach as a cure for the virus, the nation’s “trust in the media, science, medicine, the judicial system, and other mainstay institutions of American life plunged as more voters embraced the doubts Mr. Trump had sown for years.”

Pandemics “tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.” They also push people toward authoritarianism, and alter the very core of a nation’s identity.

No, you will not catch me among the misguided, delusional group of Americans who feel nostalgic for the pandemic.

But I am among the Americans who were forever altered when Covid hit the country. Because that group includes all of us.

The virus has never really gone away.

Off-Broadway Debut

The following is my one-act play dramatizing DOGE’s foray into healthcare (which, let’s face it, is just a matter of time).

Curtain up.

On a barren stage, we open on a doctor’s office. The office is ramshackle and filthy.

The doctor, about 19 years old, looks at an x-ray. He is dressed in a white lab coat and wears one of those ridiculous head-reflector mirrors from the 1950s.

The patient sits on the examination table. He is a middle-aged man and is quite nervous.

Finally, the doctor turns, and with an overly confident smirk, he addresses the patient.

Doctor: Well, you have cancer. At least, I think you do. Yeah, let’s just assume that.

Patient: This is terrible. What do I do?

Doctor: Don’t worry. We’re going to start treatment immediately. You’ll be better than new by the time I’m done with you.

Patient: Will this involve a through exam? A biopsy? A well-formulated treatment plan?

Doctor: No, we’re just going to start chopping off limbs and yanking out organs. I’m sure we’ll get the cancer that way. If there even is cancer.

Patient: What? Shouldn’t you examine my body and identify the source of the disease?

Doctor: Who has the time or money for a biopsy? Whatever that is. No, we have to move fast and break things.

Patient: Including my body?

Doctor: Yes, if need be. But it will all be worth it.

Patient: When?

Doctor: Sometime. In the future. Down the road. Eventually.

Patient: Wait a minute. Are you even a doctor?

Doctor: Strictly speaking, no. But you don’t need someone with a fancy degree from some left-wing college. Or someone who has devoted years of their life to medicine and healthcare. You need an outsider. A rebel.

Patient: I would prefer an expert trained in this discipline who has professional knowledge and experience.

Doctor: That’s elitist.

Patient: I don’t feel comfortable doing this.

Doctor: Too bad. You’re booked for surgery in five minutes.

Patient: But you’re making decisions that could destroy my life without any considerations of whether I want this or not. And as it turns out, I don’t want it.

Doctor: We told you we would do this.

Patient: No you didn’t.

Doctor: Well, we implied it. And you might not have agreed to let us slice open your body if we told you this up front.

Patient: Of course I wouldn’t have agreed.

Doctor: See? That’s why we didn’t tell you.

The doctor gestures to the wings, and two burley orderlies rush in and strap the patient to the table. The patient screams.

Patient: But you’re just some arrogant teenager who has no idea what he’s doing.

The doctor forces the anesthesia mask on the patient.

Doctor: Just shush. It’s much more efficient this way.

The patient passes out. The burley orderlies step to the side. The doctor picks up a scalpel in one hand, and pulls out his phone with the other. He turns to the anesthetized patient.

Doctor: I’m going to live-tweet this shit.

The doctor makes an incision.

Curtain down. 

Could It Be?

I’m not a conspiratorial person. But even I have to wonder about the following scenario:

A foreign adversary seeks to bring down the United States by installing a sympathetic mole as the president. This easily manipulated doofus then implements economic plans that everyone — as in anybody with even a modicum of political, historical, or economic knowledge — agrees serves no purpose other than bringing about a second Great Depression. To be honest, it looks like the guy is deliberately trying to crash the economy.

But wait, this boorish loudmouth also lashes out at our allies and embraces the dictatorial whims of the foreign adversary. His actions undo almost a century of American foreign policy and national security within just a few weeks. Yeah, it looks like the guy is surrendering without a fight.

OK, I’m not saying Trump is a spy. But I’m saying that he could not harm this country any worse than he already has if he were actively working for Russia. Seriously, he is at maximum Putin puppet right now.

Let’s start with the tariffs, which as of this moment, are off. But check back in nine minutes. 

Even if his much ballyhooed tariffs never get implemented, the damage that this on-again off-again threat has inflicted is very real. Not content with shaking Wall Street to its core, the administration is now casually noting that “Americans are going to have to suffer.”

I guess the worst burst of unemployment since the Great Recession is not sufficient. Now the GOP wants Americans to collapse into poverty because… wait, what was the point again?

Who knows?

We’re all still reeling from the shouting match at the Oval Office, a calamity so bizarre, so grotesque that even lifelong conservatives are saying they are ashamed to be American. Trump and Vance yelling at Zelenskyy is “the equivalent of the US switching sides in WWII.”

For all our talk about being the moral center of the universe, “these are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys.”

U.S. policy is now aligned with Russia, a situation that even the most ardent Trump supporter would not have predicted in 2016. But it’s ok, because Trump has made it clear that he trusts Putin, which is “an odd statement from a U.S. president, whose loyalty is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution and the American people.”

Meanwhile, we get the great man himself pontificating and bloviating about how he is the most wonderfulest president since Washington (and even better than him, of course) in a longwinded, meandering speech stuffed with “his by-now-standard mix of braggadocio and self-pity, partisan bile and patently absurd lies,” which only proves that “even the most unhinged of presidential speeches can seem kind of boring if it goes on long enough.”

Once again, I’m not saying the guy is a Russian spy.

But can we stop with the claims that he is playing 4-D chess or kickstarting his master plan? 

Because there is no plan. It should be obvious to anyone playing any attention that this corrupt baboon simply makes shit up day to day.

He is an easily distracted narcissist who bases US policy on his personal grievances, petty jealousies, and spur of the moment whims.

So how long will we allow a megalomanic with an insecurity complex to align America with the most bloodthirsty despot alive?

How long will we let the world’s largest economy be guided by the fluttering thoughts and bubbling rage of an erratic lunatic who has no idea of what he’s doing?

More important, by the time we finally reject all this madness, hatred, and corruption, will it be too late?

The New Dark Ages

These are magical times.

I don’t mean this is an era of enchantment and wonder.

I mean we are living in a maelstrom of religious extremism, supernatural mumbo-jumbo, and delusional leaps of faith.

For example, you might believe that a sociopathic billionaire is devoting all his energy to eliminating government waste, with no benefit to him personally, out of the goodness of his heart and fierce patriotism. Oh, he will police himself about any conflicts of interest, he will perform most of this work in secret with no accountability (which isn’t suspicious at all), and the average citizen will benefit from his magnanimity.

To trust in this absurd scenario is indeed some powerful hocus pocus.

But it fits with national mood. We are talking about a culture where over a third of people don’t believe in evolution, and the man in charge of the nation’s health thinks vaccines cause your brain to explode.

The truth is that “anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe.”

We’re talking about “health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties … that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well.”

Over the past decade, there has been a lot of talk about America crumbling like the Roman Empire. But some historians believe we are more like 1910s Russia, where Rasputin and various mystics tried to prop up a failing monarchy but only accelerated its downfall. 

Consider that “like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational.” Like those beleaguered Slavs of a century ago, our trusted institutions are floundering, and the entire world is on the verge of widespread global conflict.

Unlike those Russians, however, we “exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time,” with the result that “techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand.” So by some measures, we are even worse off.

The result is that “uninformed laypeople come to believe that they are smarter and more capable in almost any subject than experts.” And the loudest and most narcissistic of these walking Dunning-Kruger samples insist that they alone can fix all of our problems with minimal effort.

But eventually, shit gets real, and fast. Refusing a vaccine “might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough.” 

People who believe that crystals cure cancer or that Jesus will swoop in and save us are betting the country’s existence on irrational hope and desperate prayers. They will soon learn that America “cannot function without experts in every field,” and that attempts to purge scientists, well-educated leaders, and competent professionals “is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction.”

This nationwide decline in logic and embrace of the supernatural makes me think of Aleister Crowley, the English occultist who was a favorite of hard rocks icons from Led Zeppelin to Ozzy Osbourne.

Crowley’s philosophy was a weird mashup of yoga, astrology, mysticism, and made-up gibberish. He conducted rituals that included pentagrams, sacrificial altars, and something called “sex magick.”

Yes, it’s all very metal. But it’s not the best guide for how to tun a country.”

Crowley believed that “magic is will made manifest.” He insisted that when you focus your intention or desire with enough conviction and energy, your willpower can create real, tangible change in the world. 

How is this different from the belief system of hardcore Trump supporters? 

They insist that Trump will solve everything and bring on a new golden age for America, with no more effort than a wave of his hand, or more accurately, the signing of a couple dozen executive orders. They believe he can do it all through sheer willpower and God-given inspiration. Basically, MAGA views Trump as a fucking wizard. 

Consider that almost two-thirds of Christians voted for Trump in November. And this pious demographic is now gleefully rooting on billionaires who are cutting off aid for starving children, cackling at “the kind of brutality made notorious by Abu Ghraib guards,” and exulting “in the repatriation of their fellow believers into the care of regimes poised to kill them.”

Ultimately, their high priest, their orange sorcerer, will go down in flames. But he will drag the whole country down with him, and no magic will repair the nation.

Abracadabra.