A Rather Savage Beatdown

We have to wonder about the poor aide who had to explain to Donald Trump the meaning of the word “shellacking.”

The midterms delivered the most overwhelming rebuke of a political party in over half a century. You have to go back to the Watergate era to witness such a lobsided thrashing. That 1970s walloping, by the way, was because the country suddenly realized that they had twice elected a Republican bigot who was a corrupt lunatic and was leading the nation into disaster.

So based on this history, this shit might happen again circa 2080.

But with hope, the Republican Party is extinct by then. They have certainly set themselves on the road to obsolescence. 

For this election cycle, the GOP’s governing philosophy could essentially be summarized as “We will do whatever our orange messiah commands, no matter how illogical, deleterious, or straight-up crazy it is.” This pitch, surprisingly, did not resonate with voters, who grew weary of watching a pampered man-child rhapsodize about himself and his money.

It appears that the irrefutable evidence of widespread corruption finally broke through to voters this time. Even a half-billion dollars of advertising, courtesy of a weirdo trillionaire with a Nazi streak, could not convince Americans that Republicans gave the slightest bit of a fuck about them.

For “a country that barely head-fakes toward democracy anymore,” this election was a reprieve. Of course, everything will not magically be better overnight. The damage wrought by these gleefully reckless sociopaths will take years, perhaps decades to resolve.

But it is possible that the worst is over. Yes, we all thought that in 2020, when Biden won the presidency. I can say Biden won because election denialism is no longer a thing, right? Whew.

In any case, this election feels different because the narcissistic octogenarian has not just been defeated once more. He has been repudiated with zero chance of a comeback. In 2020, there was the lingering fear that he might return to the White House, which of course happened because the worst-case scenario was the default setting for America at the time.

However, in two years, this permanent stain on the nation’s soul will depart the Oval Office, and even Republicans, who have spent years selling their souls and principles in exchange for a fleeting taste of power, will be happy to see him go.

Our raging, blubbering president was never going to run for a third term, despite what your Newsmax-addled aunt and conservative “intellectuals” said, because the Constitution is about as crystal clear as it gets on this issue. It’s a no-go.

As for seizing power, well, if he was going to do that, he would have made his move already. Yes, there were active discussions in the administration about seizing voting machines and declaring martial law when it became clear that Republicans were going to get throttled.

But this was always unlikely, if for no other reason than this gang of incompetents could barely organize a press conference, much less execute a precision coup across multiple states. The death of this particular right-wing fever dream occurred about the time Texas went blue. The sheer magnitude of the electoral ass-kicking made grabbing ballot boxes and claiming fraud a ridiculous, pathetic ploy, and even the most ardent Trumpist had to slink away.

And while many commentators assert that our wildly unpopular chief executive is more dangerous than ever, unleashed by the need for approval and furious at the country, it is more likely that he will just stumble and mumble his way into irrelevance.

He is old now. Trying to take over the country against the will of the populace is way too much fucking work. It’s so much easier for him to golf, blame his yes-men for botching the election, and veto random bills to make himself feel better.

There are no guarantees, and tomorrow we could see ICE thugs arresting Democrats and throwing them into makeshift gulags. But I doubt it.

For the first time in a decade, we can dare to dream that this epoch of idiocy and cruelty is headed for its inevitable, long-overdue demise. 

At last.

Grand Slam

You know how you wait for something to happen? And that something never seems to happen, so you just wait, for like, your entire life up to that point? And then it happens?

Yeah that.

As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in Milwaukee. I spent my childhood rooting for the Brewers, and I was thrilled when they made the World Series for the first time in 1982, when I was just a kid. They lost, but I was confident they would return to the Fall Classic soon.

And I was right. It took only 44 years.

The Brewers and I came into existence the same year. I have seen them play at least once each year, except for the 2020 season (the pandemic era). I have no conscious memory of the first few years so I’m taking my mom’s word for it, although it’s a little strange that she brought a baby to a baseball game. And speaking of conscious memory, I cannot recall a time when I was not a Brewer fan. They are just that important to me.

Neither the Brewers nor I had ever won a world championship. That changed (for one of us, at least) this week.

When you follow a team for literally your entire life, and they constantly come up short, it can be exhausting. And yet I remained a Brewer fan, no matter what city I lived in or how badly they were playing. 

My son, born and raised in Los Angeles, asked why I didn’t make life easier by switching my allegiance to the Dodgers. I explained that it’s not that simple, and that you never abandon your hometown team. 

I don’t know where my son will be living when he is my age, but I’m sure that he will still be a Dodger fan, and he’ll finally understand what I’m talking about. Maybe the Dodgers won’t be the evil empire of baseball by then, but I digress.

The point is that years, even decades, can go by, with nothing but failure and frustration to show for it, and sometimes you have to acknowledge that it might never happen.

And then you win.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions about this assertion, and whether it relates to your life, our country, or our world.

Maybe you think it’s pablum, or maybe you think dumb luck guides us all

But I know one thing.

This was definitely worth the wait.

Shellshocked

My father killed some guys.

But it’s OK, because they were the enemy. Right?

My dad was a US Marine who fought in the Korean War. He had no idea how many North Korean and Chinese soldiers he killed in combat. The exact number was hard to count in the mud and snow. He shot multiple men and threw grenades that maimed or obliterated an unknown number. In hand-to-hand combat at the Frozen Chosin, he choked a soldier to death with his bare hands. 

After the war, my father returned home partially deaf from the explosion of motor rounds and with a scar across his stomach from shrapnel. He spent the rest of his life as an abusive, alcoholic wreck with undiagnosed PTSD. He got divorced three times, went bankrupt, and died in prison. 

So much for the military hero.

In contrast, my cousin who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq is a stable family man who will soon retire from the US Army. One of my good friends was a US Army officer in Iraq, and I know a couple of other veterans, which is odd for someone who never served and is a progressive. 

So I have to make clear that I am not criticizing veterans, unlike a certain repulsively smug president. But I’m going to go ahead and criticize our country’s bizarre fetishization of the armed forces.

You see, America has the biggest military in the world, by quite a bit in fact. How a nation spends its money tells you a lot about its priorities. And we clearly value aircraft carriers and bunker busters more than, say, well-fed children and basic health care.

When a country has more weapons than any other nation on Earth, it will look for any excuse to use those armaments. That’s one reason we bombed Iraq — because we could and those munitions were just sitting there. There were other reasons, of course, all of them vague or idiotic. But the point is that just like more guns don’t make a household safer, more missiles don’t make a country more secure.

You might object that we need a massive military because freedom isn’t free. Let me ask you something: When you insist that soldiers are fighting for our freedom, what the hell are you talking about?

This idea has literally never been true in my lifetime. I was an infant when Vietnam ended, but I can tell you that 58,000 Americans didn’t die to preserve our freedom. 

Whether the US military was invading Granada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, or some other far-flung nation, it had nothing to do with our freedom. An argument can be made for Afghanistan, but even that ended in debacle.

No, the last time US troops fought for freedom was World War II. It’s been a long stretch of military misadventure since then.

When conservative commentors bemoan the cowardice or lack of patriotism among young people who don’t enlist, these chicken hawks ignore the fact that millennials grew up watching American troops get killed and injured in wars that began as flag-waving festivities but eventually turned into ghastly, unpopular disasters. Young people don’t want to die in botched wars that accomplish nothing. And who can blame them?

But we have to justify our military might, so now we have the president of the United States gleefully blowing up fishermen on boats. 

We also have a human caricature of macho obliviousness shouting about testosterone and trying to eradicate “wokeness” in the military (but right-wing extremism is ok). This guy also proclaims himself the Secretary of War, because Republicans love violence so much. These chest-thumpers live for war, as long as they are not the ones in harm’s way.

Meanwhile, the actual enlisted people suffer, but not nearly enough for a narcissistic chief executive who dismisses sacrifice as something for the little people.

And yet we keep bringing out the color guards at baseball games and insisting that anyone who ever served in the armed forces is a hero and singing weird songs about war, because we are obsessed with the military and making it bigger and stronger and more aggressive.

That is not the mindset of a warrior. It is the mindset of a scared populace.

The Savior Cometh

Who doesn’t love a good prophecy?

Wouldn’t you be thrilled to discover that your tedious life has all been a nefarious ruse, and your true lineage has been hidden from you? And now you must fulfill your destiny to save the world, vanquish evil, and most likely, get laid?

Yes, it’s a beautiful story. Even if it is a common trope, a sad source of wish fulfillment, and a bit racist.

OK, I may need to explain that last one. You see, the “literary canon is lousy with Chosen Ones” because there is “always an ancient riddle to live up to, a monstrosity to depose, and a balance to be restored.” But as you may have noticed, the hero is usually a “straight white boy anointed the arbiter of balance.”

Think about it. What do Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Jack from Lost, and Neo from the Matrix have in common? 

No, the prophecy never seems to foretell the arrival of a Latino lesbian or a short Black guy who is there to save the world. We continue to gravitate toward stories where white men are not just natural leaders, but divinely ordained messiahs with powers far beyond the rest of us.

Taken to extremes, this is the kind of thinking that leads millions of Americans to look at a bellicose blowhard who is the most obese man to be chief executive since William Howard Taft and think “He’s the most manly man ever!”

Another issue is that these types of stories imply that “a flawed system can be repaired by simply trading out or removing a few bad pieces,” usually in one quick stroke or massive blast from the sacred object or a shouting of the sacred incantation. I mean, it’s cool as hell, but also more than a little simplistic.

Again, taken to extremes, you have a situation where “Americans decided that since we elected President Obama, that meant racism was over and everything was fine.” I’m pretty sure it didn’t turn out that way.

Now, I’m not saying we should boycott these stories, or reject tales where white guys save the day. 

But we need to stop buying into the idea of a godly master plan that focuses on one man who can fix everything.

That shit never happens.

But who knows, maybe the next prophecy will be the one that sticks.

West Coast Style

You can imagine my surprise when I found out that I am expendable, along with millions of my fellow Californians.

No doubt you’ve heard that our extremely popular president, during one of his rambling rants in front of a dwindling crowd of his admirers, recently implied that it would be “a small price to pay” if Iran destroyed Los Angeles (where I live) and San Diego.

Wow, if millions of Americans dying is a small price to pay for the illusion of victory in an ill-conceived and idiotic war, then what of the 19 military members who have already died in this botched misadventure? By his logic, their sacrifice must be miniscule, even insignificant. Let’s ask President Tough Talk if that’s true.

In any case, our demented chief executive’s handlers are already insisting that this blabbering, blubbering octogenarian was quoted out of context, leaving the rest of us to wonder what possible context could justify a president who says we should just relax and go along with Armageddon.

Giving a foreign adversary, whom we are currently engaging in warfare, the ok to bomb not one but two major America cities sounds suspiciously like treasonous behavior to me. But apparently, it is not, because according to this administration, treason consists solely of publishing unflattering stories about the president (and only the current one — you can say all the bad shit you want about those losers who preceded him in the White House).

Once again, we see grotesque displays of disdain and contempt, even outright sociopathic hostility, for America coming from people who claim to love America. 

After all, many in that crowd of red-state conservatives applauded the idea of California getting destroyed. A lot of them likely mutter, “never forget” every anniversary of the September 11 attacks, forgetting at least temporarily that most of the victims of that day were blue-state urban dwellers.

Blowing up California is a fantasy to these people who wrap themselves in the flag and proclaim America to be the greatest country in the world, except of course for all the cities and the biggest states (i.e., most of the nation). LA is particularly loathed in MAGA world.

After our unapologetic chief executive wondered aloud if LA and San Diego are disposable, many commentators pointed out that Southern California has multiple military bases and millions of conservative voters.  

This approach reveals two things: first, every psychotic warbling of this president must be rationally refuted rather than condemned outright, and second, lots of Americans are clearly missing the point.

For that latter group of commentators, it’s not that we have a large military presence and conservative enclaves here. It’s that any president who says he is fine with two of America’s largest and greatest cities getting destroyed is a treasonous cretin, or at the very least, subject for removal under the 25^th Amendment.

At this point, our most prominent California hater has defenders who are adopting a familiar and tiresome tactic. This is to praise a clearly bonkers old man as someone who says what he means, except when he says something horrible, then he was joking, except it’s well known that the man has no sense of humor, and when he double downs on the sick “joke,” it means you’re too sensitive over a little racial slur, threat to destroy humanity, indifference to the suffering of Americans, or plot to enrich himself, at which point let’s all change the subject to how great the country is doing under the leadership of religious zealots, ignorant frat boys, and slimy oligarchs.

The good news is that LA, and indeed all of California, will still be here after these guys are out of power (and possibly in jail). We will still be here, gazing at the ocean, hiking in the mountains, and living our lives in the sunshine.

That’s our long-term plan.