Soothing Thoughts

Once again, I have no time to post a full-fledged article that bedazzles and delights, infuriates and illuminates. That’s because my book’s deadline is fast approaching, and the pages don’t write themselves.

So I will just note that recent polls show a virtual dead heat in a theoretical matchup between Biden and Trump. And this appalling revelation has provoked many of us to ask, “how can it possibly be … that after everything we’ve been through since 2015, even 5% of Americans, let alone 45%, would consider letting him within a mile of the White House?”

I have no answer to that, of course, because it is complete insanity.

So I will just point out that none of this matters in the long term, because in about 5 billion years, the sun will become a white dwarfand swallow the Earth whole. And everything that ever existed here will be gone forever.

There—don’t you feel better now?

The Twist

For nearly half a century, Americans have had to endure the phrase “Reaganomics,” which refers to a supposedly brilliant economic system that has the slight flaw of being a total disaster that never worked. Recently, people have been throwing around the term “Bidenomics,” which refers to a governmental philosophy that actually seems to be effective.

But conservatives aren’t happy about lower inflation and record employment, or a much better economy than anything a GOP president has presided over in decades. In fact, they are angry about it.

So Republicans tried doubling down (and tripling, quadrupling, etcetera) on the idea of limited government, which is an empty phrase that means, “Don’t tax rich people.” This approach is not terribly popular with most Americans. And with reason, because this philosophy has led to developments such as lax antitrust laws, which benefit big corporations but cost the typical American household more than $5,000 a year.

Of course, the GOP has never and will never care if their policies are hated. They are now implying, or straight-up insisting, that democracy should be severely limited or even abolished.

And if Republicans now hate democracy and the Constitution, anything is possible. For example, that whole limited-government thing has recently been revealed as the total sham it always was. 

In a massive shift, Republicans are no longer “committed to keeping the government weak to stay out of the way of business development.” Instead, they are now determined to create “a strong government that enforces Christian nationalism.” 

To do so, they must abandon their supposed core principles and embrace big government. You might think this would be hypocritical and anathema to conservatives. But it took very little to convince libertarian absolutists to change their “tune on the free market and state power to keep up with the 'New Right' ushered in by Trump and DeSantis.”

That “New Right,” which is a lot like the old right but louder, consists of theocrats who despise “the secular values of democracy—religious freedom, companies that respond to markets without interference by the state, academic freedom, public schools, free speech, equality before the law—[and] want to restore what they consider human virtue by using the state to enforce their values.” 

And that brings us back to Reaganomics, which was never really about the economy. You see, “Since the days of Reagan, Republicans have argued that people who believe that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure are destroying the country by trying to redistribute wealth from hardworking White Americans to undeserving minorities and women.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, all this was said in code. That façade started crumbling in the 21^st century. And today, conservatives have dropped the bullshit and taken their argument “to its logical conclusion: the country has been destroyed by women, Black Americans, Indigenous people, and people of color, who have taken it over and are persecuting” White Americans.

At this point, the GOP is very much the party of big government. And unless you are a White, straight, conservative man, you will not like what that government will do to you.

Anything Else

No, I am not going to post that lunatic racist's gruesome mugshot.

It's exactly what the narcissist wants. He will be using his grotesque visage for fundraising by the end of the day.

I remain mystified at my fellow progressives who have been clamoring for this treacherous insurrectionist's mugshot as if it is an accomplishment in and of itself. As if this picture will somehow humiliate someone who cannot be humiliated and convince people who cannot be convinced.

If he is convicted, or defeated at the polls yet again, or suffers anything that removes him from public life, it might be time to celebrate.

Until then, I will ignore his Big Brother glare.

Another Break

No new blog post this week. I have to devote my limited energy to my upcoming book. The deadline is approaching fast, and I won’t be using AI to write it for me. I know people are doing that, but it’s odd to have a machine create something for you and then proclaim, “I did this!” So I will be cranking out the manuscript the old-fashioned way, one word at a time.

I will be back in a week or two.

Thanks

Pain and Fear

Recently, I wrote about how Americans are more or less screwed. This is true whether you are Black, White, or Latino (but yes, as usual, it is better to be White in America).

Well, there is more horrific news on the horizon. You see, it is now extremely painful to be an American. I don’t just mean the pain of knowing that half the country is perfectly happy to vote for a triple-indicted racist who is threatening to destroy democracy. That’s a given.

What you may not know is that Americans are “developing new cases of chronic pain at higher rates than new diagnoses of diabetes, depression, or high blood pressure.”

Chronic pain—defined as pain on most or every day— is not “just a result of car accidents and workplace injuries but is also linked to troubled childhoods, loneliness, job insecurity and a hundred other pressures on working families.”

Yes, here in the greatest country in the world, our residents suffer from massive levels of economic insecurity, income inequality, racial discrimination, loneliness, and general unhappiness.  Chronic pain is “tightly woven into the bundle of diseases of despair, and causation probably runs in several directions.”

Pain is more common among the lower classes, and some studies show that the less education you have, the more likely you are to endure constant agony. Basically, people with master’s degrees rarely suffer chronic pain, but high school dropouts are probably twisted in anguish on a daily basis.

If you’re lucky enough to escape the torment of chronic pain, you likely still suffer from the deep-seated fear of simply living in the USA. Perhaps it is because the “incessant rat-a-tat of bloody headlines makes people feel—viscerally—that the risks they do encounter are unbearably dangerous.” Perhaps it is because the business models of so many media outlets depend on scaring Americans senseless. Or maybe it is the fact that the tactics we embrace to make ourselves feel secure — such as living in gated communities — are actually more likely to turn us into paranoid wrecks.

And that’s when our tactics don’t backfire, quite literally, and actively endanger us.

For example, we all know that gunowners are more likely to use their weapons on themselves or a loved one than any imaginary intruder.

But maybe you didn’t know that although suicide rates are falling around the world, “one high-income country is a particular exception to the downward trend: the U.S.”

Yes, between 2000 and 2018, the U.S. suicide rate jumped 35 percent. Now, you might yell, “The answer is guns! And you’d be mostly right.”

But you will never convince Second Amendment absolutists that an AR-15 is anything other than a source of comfort and a member of the family.

This fever pitch of fear is what “we have come to accept in our culture of violence, [and] this is the country we have become.”

Pain and fear bind all Americans together.