A Country Gone Nuts

People who refuse masks and vaccination, who still claim the election was stolen, who see nothing wrong with voter-limitation laws, who consider climate change a hoax, who stormed the Capitol, who believe the stormers were anti-Trump, who’re high-fivin’ white-guy Tucker Carlson’s “replacement” ravings, who fear transsexuals in bathrooms, who insist Trump never lied, who accuse Hillary Clinton of child-trafficking and cannibalism, who think if we stay long enough in Afghanistan we’ll “win,”

Who “do their own research” about science, who say ignoring pandemic social behavior is about “freedom,” who think black people killed by police asked for it – even an unarmed child with his hands up, who are convinced undocumented immigrants are allowed to vote, who insist there’s never been or no longer is racism in America, who say the only racists are non-whites, who don’t mind the Republican Party becoming overtly white-supremacist, 

Who elect people to Congress who harass and lie and block but produce little of value, who drive into crowds of demonstrators (now legal in Florida), who consider Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization, who imagine Christianity is under siege and that it’s only white people who face discrimination, who fear “Sharia law” while legislating based on their personal Bible interpretations, who say the ACLU is a Communist front and that Democrats want communism, who demand we consider America a Christian nation, who call Kyle Rittenhouse a hero, who believe Democrats want to take away their religion and guns and free speech and create open borders, 

Who think it’s easy to distinguish between good guys and bad guys with guns and background checks are fascist, who are convinced vaccines are mind-control, who’ve concluded Dr. Fauci is an evil liar, who reckon the “wrong kinds” of people are voting, who impeached Bill Clinton for lying about sex but deem the impeachments of Trump political hit-jobs, who believe there’s a “deep state” in cahoots with an international Jewish cabal, who reject proof that Russians interfered with Trump’s election and colluded with his campaign,

Are the same ones insisting if assault-style weapons are banned “the government” will track them down and haul them to reeducation camps or gas chambers, and that the Second Amendment was created, expressly, to provide citizens with the muskets to stop it from happening. And that the recent spate of mass murders, added to the mounting all-time total, is reasonable, unpreventable, maybe a bit unfortunate but not-worth-doing-anything price we should be happy to pay for keeping ourselves armed against, well, that thing that will never happen.

Except it did when Trump brutally cleared peaceful protestors so he could wave a Bible at us and later sent troops to Portland and Seattle against mostly peaceful demonstrators but it’s fine because it was people seeking justice which is communism and it showed them who’s boss and wasn’t the thing they’d been arming themselves for because government gassing non-violent citizens is okay because Trump is on our side and they deserved it and also inciting deadly insurrection against the Constitution.

Half of our country is nuts. We may disagree about which half, but, surely, we do agree this ever-widening, bridgeless divide is incompatible with democracy, and that we’re nearing the impossibility of finding our way back. If half the country doesn’t check every one of the foregoing boxes, they check plenty more than a few.

If there is a way back, it won’t come from Cruz, Hawley, Jordan, Nunes, Gozar, Gaetz, McCarthy, Graham, Greene, Boebert, Cotton, Barasso, Thune, Paul, Kennedy, Hyde-Smith, Cornyn, Gohmert, King, Scott, Ernst, Blackburn, or any of the rest who prefer dissimilation and cries of “socialism” instead of producing useful ideas.

But it could, in fact, come from Pelosi, Murray, Ocasio-Cortez, Porter, Sanders, Warren, Whitehouse, or the others whom Trumpists love to hate and dismiss with prejudice, but who are offering serious, fact-based proposals, like them or not. In Congresses past, their ideas would initiate constructive, good-faith debate; leading, if you can imagine, to workable compromise. If Republicans were to stop fearing their Fox-, Newsmax-, OAN-indoctrinated supporters and rise above taking orders from their corporate sponsors, perhaps they’d remember their job is to legislate for the good of everyone. Ticking, is the clock.

Meanwhile, on Mars, NASA flew a self-driving helicopter carrying a tiny piece of the Wright brothers’ first airplane. If that doesn’t cause you to admire science, what will? How many members of the design and build team are immigrants or first-generation or non-white? Lots. Its name, “Ingenuity,” came from an Alabama high-schooler named Vaneeza Rupani. Makes a person think.

Finally, for now, one word on the Chauvin verdict: just.

Catching Up

Here's my next newspaper column:

So much winning. Hard to keep up.

·      Reading his teleprompter like a forced hostage video, Trump condemned white supremacists and division. Which is like Jeffrey Dahmer condemning meat-eaters and freezers. His moral high ground cratered within hours.

·      Previously, at a rally, Trump: “How do you stop these people?” “Shoot them,” someone shouts. Attendees cheer. Trump laughs. But, we’re told, an inflammatory “president” bears no responsibility for inflaming the inflammable. A solitary Republican with guts and a conscience calls it what it is.

·      Democrats want reasonable gun regulations, Republicans blame video games. (Video games are in every country. Mass murders aren’t.) Trump added “fake news,” of which he’s the prime vendor, and poison on the internet, for which he’s patient zero.

·      Trump wants to designate Antifa, some of whose members have stood up to and had fisticuffs with Nazis, a terrorist organization. White supremacist groups and Q-Anon qrazies, though, are welcome at his rallies.

·      FBI director Wray testified to Congress that “a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we've investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.” No mention of Antifa.

·      Anticipating this flaying of the body politic must be among the reasons Russia chose Trump. Accordingly, their social media trolling pushes conspiracy theories and custom-curated lies, weaponizing Trump’s.

·      Kim Jong Un, Trump’s objet d’amour, launched another fusillade of nuclear-capable missies. Trump says not to worry, because they’re friends and Kim “will do the right thing.” Murderous dictators always have.

·      Iran fired missiles, too, and will resume enriching uranium. Under the agreement out of which Trump pulled, because, you know, President Obama, they were doing neither. Trump asked nations to join him in sanctions. Including the US, he’s amassed a coalition of one. Thus we see the respect he’s engendered around the world.

·      Fresh off maligning US Representative Elijah Cummings and other non-white citizens, Trump, who’s definitely not racist, gloat-tweeted about a burglary at Cummings’ home, virtually suborning more. Decent people would have abandoned him long ago. For hold-outs, therefore, his indecency must be the point.

·      That, and his cruelty to people unlike them. Trump’s latest budget throws three-million Americans off food assistance, adding to poverty and hunger. But, hey, small price for enriching wealthy donors. Mega-fraud – sorry -- megachurch leaders defend it, so it must be WJWD.

·      Exceptional among the holy, the Archbishop of Washington, D.C. criticized Trump for “diminishing our national life.”

·      Yet again, Trump is muzzling government climate-change researchers. In Greenland, unprecedented glacial melt is occurring, twelve-billion tons per day. July was the hottest month in recorded global history. Seventeen countries plus thirty-three highly-populated cities are running out of water. Those who deify Trump don’t care. At long last, have they no grandchildren?

·      “Conservatives” castigated President Obama for costing taxpayers $106 million in eight years of vacations. Trump’s golf excursions alone surpassed $110 million in two-and-a-half.

·      Trump’s ignorant, self-referential, national-embarrassment response to the anniversary of the anti-Nazi Polish Uprising: “The people of Poland like me, and I like them… And I know they’re building an installation that — and they’re putting in all of the money... So they’re building something very nice for the United States to have.”

·      But all’s well: “We will be ending the AIDS epidemic shortly in America, and curing childhood cancer very shortly.” (And Mexico will pay for it.)

·      In North Carolina, more Republicans were indicted for election fraud. But dead people voted for JFK sixty years ago, so we need discriminatory voter ID laws.

·      The founder of “Students for Trump” pled guilty to wire fraud, stealing thousands as a fake online lawyer. A student of the master.

·      ISIS is regrouping in Syria, says the Pentagon.

·      Moscow Mitch broke his shoulder. False flag? Then he retweeted his opponent’s name on a tombstone. AFTER the weekend murders.

·      Asked about his vetting process when defenestrating abysmally unqualified John Ratcliffe as DNI, Trump said he relies on the press (DBA “enemies of the people”) to do it. Nine cabinet secretaries have left, many in disgrace. Not counting nominees withdrawn. At this point, President Barack Obama had had zero.

·      This week saw the perils of using tariffs as instruments of “presidential” pathology, especially when the target is smarter and has a plan. Despite those tariffs, trade deficits with China are setting records. We’ve now learned taxpayer-funded reparations to harmed farmers (socialism!) are going mostly to the wealthiest. And China just stopped purchasing US farm products altogether.

·      “Trade wars are easy to win.”

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