Ossimism
Where are we going? And, how did I get in this handbasket?
It’s not being paranoid. It’s not being conspiratorial.
It’s not just incompetence. It’s not just dumbfuckery in action.
Oh, if only it were!
The current administration, aided and abetted by almost the entirety of one political party while the opposition party acts more like a speed bump than a Jersey barrier, is dismantling all of our governmental safeguards brick by brick. No one appears capable of coming up with some kind of arcane Robert’s Rule of Order to stop them.
Military leaders speak out. Attorneys Generals sign on to scathing condemnations delivered by letter. Governors push back. Thousands of mental health professionals sign on to petitions. Ex-Cabinet members sign lucrative tell-all book deals which gets the media all frothy for a hot second before disappearing as fast as the foam on a latte.
Our lard-assed leader steamrolls on as he tinkers with government protocols like it’s a game of Jenga.
I teeter between the belief that justice grinds slowly, tortoise-like with stolid intentions, glacially in its leaving no stone unturned or untouched, and the polar opposite opinion that the “fix is in”. The well-heeled and powerfully connected will grind the wheels of justice to dust long before the reckoning comes.
And then the reckoning never comes. No one gets reckoned with. No one has been reckoned with since that insanely murderous and ineffective eastern European leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu.
Ceaușescu’s regime collapsed after he ordered his security forces to fire on antigovernment demonstrators in the city of Timișoara on December 17, 1989. The demonstrations spread to Bucharest, and on December 22 the Romanian army defected to the demonstrators. That same day Ceaușescu and his wife fled the capital in a helicopter but were captured and taken into custody by the armed forces. On December 25 the couple were hurriedly tried and convicted by a special military tribunal on charges of mass murder and other crimes. Ceaușescu and his wife were then shot by a firing squad.
How quaint. They were still using firing squads in 1989.
Voting is our only recourse other than a ten million person ‘Sherman’s March’ on Washington where in the end they are evacuating by helicopter from the roofs. It is that serious. This situation feels that dire.
People like the insufferable boor in the White House get off on gaming the system.
As Sarah Kendzior likes to point out, “They don’t mind getting caught. They mind getting punished.” Because they so rarely pay for their criminal actions. And, when they do, the punishment never fits the crime. Powerful, wealthy people bend, break or disregard the rules every day. They don’t believe rules and laws apply to them.
We are watching in real time how our highly regarded court systems and constitutional laws can be manipulated by a man who bludgeons his adversaries with childish nicknames, issues orders as if he is Caesar or Don Corleone and argues in public over the size of his rallies, hands and penis. He’s shameless.
He’s also ruthless and you have to wonder watching all of this from afar as to whether our vaunted system of checks and balances has been thoroughly compromised.
David Rothkopf, host of the podcast Deep State and author of “Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump”, so a man of my heart, tweeted today:
I cling to this notion of a party of enmity and another of comity but could it also be that - ultimately - too many of them in leadership roles with the opposition party, though they talk a big game in public, are either compromised as well or, since they do have more in common with Wall St. bankers than sanitation workers, immigrants and former bartenders, if they have any skin in the game at all it’s on the side of the disaster capitalists?
I see too many instances where the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has sided with a stodgy, more conservative incumbent over a more progressive candidate.
But, most obviously, you have to wonder how the GOP is always capable of obstructing progress even when they are “out of power”, while Democrats are not even able to coerce fellow supposedly patriotic Americans to come before Congress to give testimony.
And then the Senate Intelligence committee, chaired by a Republican and presumably consisting of a majority of Republicans, verify more than once that the Russians significantly interfered with the 2016 elections in favor of the faux billionaire playboy who was known to hang out with Jeffery Epstein and “prefer his women younger” and - like the impeachment process and the gross letdown of the Mueller Report - the headlines and the story vanish like the morning dew.
It just makes me wonder if the Democratic leaderships’ hearts are truly in the fight. They may fear the progressive left more than they fear Benedict Donald.
After all, the stock market is doing just fine.
###
James Baldwin, author of The Fire Next Time, wrote a stinging essay entitled “On Being ‘White’ and Other Lies”. He posits that there really is no “white” race. No one was “white” until they reached the shores of America. Thought-provoking and a relatively short read.
Also, always alert reader, Nancy Enz Lill, sent me a sweet story about the 19th oldest dog in the world and the oldest of its breed - a golden retriever named August. August is her name and august, meaning marked by majestic dignity, she is. Enjoy.
