The point of no return? Oh, we passed it a while ago. . .
I’m old enough to remember the good old days when people were getting in fistfights over toilet paper. At least that old fashioned bare-knuckled brawl with our mortality possessed tangible evidence that the world was falling apart at the seams.
Today all we get are rumors of the apocalypse, delivered to us in piecemeal by myriad news agencies, the Twitterati and a whole bunch of independent contractors whose journalistic integrity accepts Venmo. We’re the consumers of a gross tonnage worth of uneducated guesswork that buries the lead because in the Bradburian Era, it’s more important to chase those trending trophies than the true shit. We’re anesthetized to the worst possible scenarios by now, so while North Korea stands on a stepstool to announce to the world that 800,000 of its favorite sons have signed up to fight the United States, all that really matters are those ballistics tests they’ve been conducting for the past forty-years under two dollar store regimes. And yet, that forgettable parody of Kim Jong Un starring James Franco and Seth Rogen got more press than the nuclear arsenal he’s packing in real time.
Meanwhile in Kasha-ville, we’ve been waiting for the next iron shoe to drop for so long that it feels less like a global catastrophe and more like a Kardashian divorce at this point. Putin’s war in Ukraine exemplifies the Negan Rules of Diplomacy: Attack first and punish indefinitely. But we’re bored with all of that here in the states, so we turned Ukraine into a political football. When pressed to name a crime Putin has committed during his Soviet remodeling job, most Americans would reference that video of him without a shirt.
Reading the news these days is akin to vaping in that you’re doing an immense disservice to your health. But that’s okay, because we have become expert at normalizing the seriously bad shit, or better yet, pretending it never happened in the first place!
Take our former president (No, I’m serious. Can someone please take him?). The expectation is that he will be indicted tomorrow by the Manhattan DA’s office. The charges involve a hush money payment made to former adult movie star Stormy Daniels in return for her silence regarding an alleged affair with Trump. All this happened ahead of the 2016 election.
Let’s face it, Trump ain’t going down for an infringement of campaign finance laws. But he’s already using the hell out of this indictment by calling it an “arrest” in order to chum the water. He’ll get his button men like McCarthy and Jordan to transform this into a political witch hunt and he’ll have his adversaries squirming too, since the GOP still runs on Florida time.
Trump won in 2016 because he pilfered a rudderless political party and he gamed a sick political system. Those who voted for him formed a collective beta reading group as a means of retrofitting our past so it would jibe with their warped narrative. Those who voted against him brandished their ideological swords in order to detonate our past, never stopping to consider all the lessons that will go missing as a result.
Missing, like the one word that is missing from the statement he posted on his website last week . . . .
“THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”
His pejorative was showing when he left peaceful out of the equation, because he knows exactly what he’s doing. Here’s a guy who has convinced his people that the January 6th riot at the Capitol never happened.
What’s to stop him from stealing the peace?