Dear America,
There's no viable purpose in discussing Donald Trump anymore. He said spontaneously recently that there was no point in playing games with regard to accepting the results of the election, so what does he actually do? He plays games and his cohorts love it. He insists that he won the election but it was stolen from him by commission of fraud by whatever malefactors he has conjured up in his disturbed little mind. He has no evidence mind you, but doesn't deter his acolytes; he has convinced them that you don't need reality when you are looking for a lefty conspiracy. He has prevailed upon his coven of consorts and his "base" that we have "turned the corner" with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic despite the all too obvious reality. Never mind that morbidity has more than doubled since the first time he made that blatantly false assurance to the non-mask-wearing, true-believing, self-anointed patriots who will follow him anywhere; they still choose to see eschewing mask wearing as a shibboleth of their bizarre cadre of wannabe loyalists, which they are willing to perpetuate even if it kills them. I guess he has known that he could get away with a statement that was palpably false if his base wants to believe him out of self-interest. They share his despicable attitudes and sub rosa creed but now don't have to admit to them in order to see them manifested in government action because Trump doesn't admit to them either, but he does act on them on their behalf. So they get their ill-begotten way with impunity, and that's all they really want. To put it concisely, there are about 73 million misguided people out their who have arrogated the concept of Americanism to their own use, even though their misuse of the sobriquet "American" actually defiles it in the eyes of virtually everyone else on the planet. And in service of their contrived claims of virtue, they will claim to believe anything...but what's real. So what should we talk about this Thanksgiving with our Trumper relatives?
Well, there's the portent of a catastrophe if Donald Trump gets lucky. I think there's only one chance in a hundred that Trump will be able to flout the election results and hold on to power through a popularly backed act of recalcitrance and legal chicanery, but even one chance is one too many. Putting that aside though, there is the fact that a nation that harbors a contingent that loves to wave guns around and tell us all what we should believe is going to be hard to subdue, and even harder to extirpate. That's a problem that will survive Trump and his presidency, and dealing with it is going to be a long, slow slog. Then there's the fact that we won't get over this pandemic if all of those 73 million people refuse to take the new vaccine that looks to be a remedy for the ubiquity of Covid 19...until they all get personal proof that it was no hoax. I don't wish that upon them, but speaking of extirpation, that might do it for both the disease and those who insist that it's just a common cold contrary to all of the palpable evidence. And of course there is the economic cataclysm that the pandemic has wreaked upon the world. What are we going to do to ensure that everyone can eat and sleep under a roof out of the rain and cold? Between the deficit created by the tax cut inflicted on all but the rich and its cognate trillion dollar increase in both the deficit and our national debt, the financial pain that millions of us are feeling despite the already enacted $3 trillion relief packages, and the loss of economic vitality our nation is going to experience in consequence of the decline in the number of jobs available, the sequelae of Trump's tenure will be very difficult to overcome. And of course there's the decline in the mental health of our citizenry in consequence of not just the pandemic but the Trump plague as well. We can talk about that until both are in the past, but that could be a long time without precipitating any honest contemplation on their part, so why bother.
So, America, I suggest that we just stop talking about "Trumpworld" altogether. Let's talk about...well, not the present. We've already established that it looks bleak, at least foreseeably. The pre-Trump past might be alright: the fifties when everyone was sure of what virtue really is, the sixties when everyone rediscovered pleasure only to rediscover decay in its wake, the seventies when hedonism really took off, or the eighties when the reward for the seventies, AIDS, started killing everyone who liked sex without constraints. Of course we could jus limit ourselves to Clinton's nineties or Bush's two thousands, or even the pre-Trump Obama era, but then we wouldn't have much to talk about. Not much happened in those three decades if you look back on them...two wars that are still going on, but not much that is heartening in any way, which brings us back to the present.
Let's hope we'll have more to talk about starting in January. I'm optimistic...pretty much.
Your friend,
Mike
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