Update on That Golden Age

Here’s a little factoid that Americans never remember: the highest murder rate in U.S. history was in 1980. And for most of Ronald Reagan’s first term, the homicide rate was astronomical. That’s right — more Americans were murdered during the sainted Republican’s reign than at any other time in recorded history.

Many of those deaths were among inner-city blacks and Latinos. As such, the Reagan administration didn’t give half a fuck, which is why so many people at the time (and to this day) thought that the 1980s were a carefree and innocent era.

In actuality, that decade sucked.

Back in the 1980s, no president was going to deploy the military to prevent the homicide of ethnic minorities. But in our current state of perpetual hysteria and autocratic desire, one white guy getting mugged is justification to call in the National Guard.

This histrionic and dictatorial maneuver is part fever dream of the right wing, part attack on Democratic-led cities, and part distraction from the Epstein files.

In no way does it actually help any Americans.

By now, we were all supposed to be living in the Golden Age of Trumpian prosperity. Instead, recession warning signs are flashing, and Americans are losing their health care. The grim forecasts on the economy can only be forestalled by killing the messenger, and swing voters who based their decision on the price of eggs are wondering if maybe, just maybe, they fucked up. 

Even conservatives are acknowledging that blue-collar people are getting screwed over more than ever, and red-state Trump fans are losing their jobs at a furious rate.

But don’t worry, billionaires are making more money than seemed possible, jackbooted thugs are terrorizing ethnic minorities, and neofascist whites-only communities are springing up with increasing frequency.

So for oligarchs, bigots, and lovers of chaos, this truly is the Golden Age.

The Long Slide Down

Politicians have long employed vivid metaphors to explain how they envision America’s future. Maybe it’s a New Deal or a Great Society or a shining city on a hill.

But according to our friends in the Republican Party, our country’s future can be summed up in the phrase “serf city.”

You see, conservatives see Hungary as the model for America. This is because they love its leader, Viktor Orbán, “a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country… while enriching his family and friends.” In turn, Orbán and other autocrats love “Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women.” 

Hungary is now the poorest nation in the European Union, and the government oppresses the shit out of anyone who isn’t a straight Christian (so you see the appeal to Republicans).

It’s a bizarre role model for the world’s most powerful country to emulate. But that’s the direction in which we are headed, because the current occupant of the White House “has grown more impulsive, more vindictive, and more anarchic” while pursuing his “witless, incoherent, and incompetently executed policies.” The truth is that “if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone.”

We will be Hungary, just larger and with fatter people.

What can we do about this slide into oligarchal incompetence? Apparently, not much.

As our befuddled, furious, demented president “takes a sledgehammer to the rule of law, intimidates and bullies those who stand in his way, hacks away at press freedoms, guts government agencies, and continues to demonize those whom he sees as ‘woke,’ who will dare to stand in his way?”

His hardcore supporters will love him no matter what. This is because devoted right-wingers are often “abused people who identify with power so they’ll never be hurt again.” Their approach to a wannabe strongman is “Big Daddy will protect me so that I’ll never be hurt again, like I was hurt by my real daddy.” Such zealous Trumpers “attack vulnerable people because they hate their own vulnerability.”

So don’t count on angry people who have voted for Trump three times to reign in a guy who is “going to war against America” itself.

We are suffering through a rapidly escalating series of “moments where malignant normality… somehow keeps getting worse as the country collapses into autocracy and authoritarianism.”

America is in a horrific situation where if Trump fails, “then we all do.” But if he’s successful, “our republic fails. That’s the historic situation we find ourselves in.”

Damn. 

I hope you like Hungarian goulash.

Bad Buzz

On more than one occasion, I have had the following thought: “Is this whole damn country on drugs?”

It turns out that the answer may be yes.

About 17 % of Americans aged 12 or older — or roughly 49 million people — are addicted to illegal drugs or alcohol. In addition, about 16% of Americans are on some form of psychiatric medication for depression, anxiety, or the like.

That’s a whole lotta pill popping, snorting, smoking, injecting, or licking.

We all know about the personal, societal, and cultural consequences of drug addiction. As if those weren’t bad enough, we also have the political ramifications to consider.

Because oh yes, there is a political side to America’s drug problem.

You see, research suggests that “the Democrats’ struggles in communities battling fentanyl addiction had little to do with economic theory or messaging.” It was more likely that in these ravaged slices of the country, the opioid epidemic was “easily exploited by politicians interested in racial demonization” and that rural Americans, in particular, were quick to “blame the Democrats.”

One could argue that “the opioid crisis is underrated as an explanation for Americans’ dwindling faith in institutions.” The epidemic shattered the country’s belief in “the greatest health care system in the world” (it’s not, by the way) and exposed the government’s flailing inability to safeguard its citizens. It also revealed that doctors, big business, and obscenely wealthy families conspired to benefit from “greed-driven failures,” which in turn “led to a national tragedy that has only been compounded by the failure to properly address the scourge.”

Lots of well-educated, supposedly respectable people raked in grotesque amounts of cash from the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of their countryman.

Does that make you proud to be an American?

By the way, if it is not drug addiction that is making America more right-wing, it is the sharp decline in literacy. It seems that American adults are reading fewer books on average than in any year on record, and that “the digital age’s modes of thought and discourse increasingly resemble those of pre-literate oral cultures.” 

This means that as “reading declines, the electorate’s commitment to pluralism, objectivity, universalism, individual rights, and the rule of law is swiftly receding.” People who don’t read are more likely to be vulnerable to “demagoguery, where falsely raised hopes and falsely raised fears trump reason and the capacity for reflective thinking recedes, along with its influence on rational, empathic decision making.”

If these theories are correct, it means that the opinions of drug-addled illiterates are more prevalent and powerful than yours. 

And America will continue to decline until more of us put down the pipe and pick up a book.

Days to Come

“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.”

— Criswell, Plan 9 From Outer Space

I have been predicting a World Series victory for my Milwaukee Brewers every year for the last decade. Clearly, my powers of prognostication are not as strong as they could be.

But you don’t have to be psychic to know that the future does not look bright for America. I’m not just talking about our crumbling institutions, vanishing freedoms, and shaky economy.

I’m talking about China, baby.

Yes, the last communist empire is getting ready to dominate the hell out of us in the coming years. Experts say “policymakers in Beijing believe they will benefit from the destruction of America’s global credibility,” and that China is “aggressively contesting the innovative sectors where the United States has long been the unquestioned leader.”

The result is that China is poised to lead the world in technology, economic strength, and sociopolitical power, leaving the USA in its dust.

But don’t you worry, the Trump administration is fighting back. For example, they are “gutting our national scientific institutions and workforce that spur US innovation.” And they are obsessing over “what teams American transgender athletes can race on, [while] China is focused on transforming its factories with AI so it can outrace all our factories.”

OK, maybe that is not so inspiring. In fact, if you were trying to throw the game and let China win, you would likely do exactly what the White House is doing.

Still, the Trump administration must have some kind of master plan to maintain America’s strength. They must possess a uniquely brilliant strategy, considering we have been told—over and over again—that they are the smartest, most competent group of patriots ever assembled. And the scourge of DEI is no longer oppressing them.

So what’s their approach to this geopolitical crisis?

No one knows.

You see, it’s unclear who is actually running this country. The Trump administration is a mishmash of morons, sociopaths, sycophants, and random dudes who just meandered in. We’re talking about people who don’t even show up for their jobs, can’t keep their conspiracy theories straight, and are woefully out of their depth. 

Nobody in the White House knows what to do, so their days are spent screaming “Illegals!” and threatening trans people. That’s it as far as insightful thinking and productive action.

This amalgamation of dullards and lunatics has prepped America for a future where the nation will be left “corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.”

And that’s if we don’t devolve into civil war.

No, it’s not the rosiest prediction. With such a grim fate looming over us, somedays the only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that this year, the Milwaukee Brewers will finally win the World Series.

You can count on that one. Trust me. 

To the Fields With the Lot of You

If you’re confident that ICE will never grab you off the street, throw you into a van, and whisk you off to some filthy basement before kicking you out of the country without so much as formal charges, well congratulations on being white, because that is the best protection against such a fate.

And even that is not 100%, because ICE is now grabbing white people as well, which is an inevitable consequence of handing unchecked power to thugs and fascists who want all the power of governmental force with none of the responsibility to actually protect anyone.

Our favorite band of homegrown authoritarians “has opened a new phase in its immigration agenda, one that goes well beyondthe mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.” They are harassing academics, grabbing citizens for looking swarthy, and “targeting legal immigrants who have expressed views that the government believes threaten national security and undermine foreign policy.”

Basically, they are going after anyone who annoys them, under the pretense of kicking hardened criminals out of the country. 

So now we have mothers getting abducted in front of their kids, masked men who refuse to show ID as they manhandle people who may or may not be undocumented, and armored vehicles rolling down city streets.

Meanwhile, whole communities feel terrorized, most Americans are aghast at what their government has become, and crops in the fields “are rotting at peak harvest time.”

But don’t worry about that last issue. You see, the opening of concentration camps in America means that, in all likelihood, undocumented people will soon be taken to these camps, where they will either toil as “slaves to government projects” or be “offered to American companies on special terms: a one-time payment to the government, for example, with no need for wages or benefits.”

In the latter case, “detained people will be offered back to the companies for which they were just working,” and their imprisonment “will be presented as a purge or a legalization for which companies should be grateful.” Indeed, our American il duce “has already said that this is the idea, calling it ‘owner responsibility.’”

If this does not bring to mind images of black slaves suffering in the fields of the antebellum South, then you have no grasp of history.

It also exposes the hypocrisy of conservatives who say they want to deport all undocumented people, but really just want them to keep doing what they’re doing, but under even more barbaric conditions, so the economy doesn’t collapse.

And if there aren’t enough undocumented people to perform this slave labor, what then? 

Hey, was that ICE agent who is rolling past your house looking at you? It was probably just your imagination.

Probably.