I had a great opportunity to get satirical: the Trumpster is scheduled to make an 8 minute announcement tonight.
I wanted to write a funny post. I couldn’t. I tried but nitwits have worn my heart thin. After 8 minutes this evening, everyone will act stupid. Some will froth at the mouth in opposition “Orange Man Bad” and others will bitch that Trump didn’t personally bludgeon Nancy Pelosi to death with a mallet. These crazy reactions are already baked into the cake. It doesn’t matter what Trump says. He could announce he’s cured cancer, funded free college for hippies, will personally deliver pizza for every good kid on their 10th birthday, and talk about his new fuzzy puppy named “Cuddles”; it wouldn’t help.
A sizable portion of the populace will see him on the screen and lose it. They’ll act like Satan just took a shit on their cat. They need to overreact. Hate for the Orange nitwit is part of their self image. If they said “the dude had some cogent points” a whole pent up landslide of cognitive dissonance would pummel their soul. So they double down… over and over again. And this doesn’t excuse the other side. Nancy Pelosi will be there and we’ll recoil in horror like she’s about to grab Toto the dog and stuff it in a blender.
Too many of us have lost the ability to simply change our minds. Can’t we perhaps decide one or another political thing is just not that mind blowing? We’re acting like cult members in the presence of normal society. We see the larger world and recoil from its indifference to our perceived self importance.
It’s drifting from funny to pathetic. The election was two years ago and that’s plenty of time to get used to a president you hate. For fuck sake, there are Vikings fans who watched their team tank last weekend and there were Cubs fans that went a century without a win. Yet folks just can’t fuckin’ deal with a couple years. Two years isn’t even that long in dog years. There are goldfish older than two years. It’s nothing! It’s simply a truth of the universe that no team wins every game. I see silver linings that are ignored. Remember when people said “your vote doesn’t matter”? Well, 63 million votes for Trump and suddenly the sun cannot rise in the east without it being proof that the voters were wrong. For two years.
Lack of perspective worries me. What happened to citizens in a Republic as opposed to petty rulers in a fiefdom? Are we to never have peace until the ones that want to rule… rule? And if those that want to rule crave the sweet nectar of power this desperately, what kind of revenge will they unleash when their time comes? Aside from better coffee and grunge music, what’s the difference and tipping point between Rwanda and Portland?
Ideas that were totally unremarkable a few years ago are now (in the immortal words of Vizzini) inconceivable. Lacking a deeper world view, everyone continually flips on their head; dogs meow, cats bark, up is down, light is dark, and I wonder where all the adults went. Both parties reverse themselves in their heightened panic: Republicans want to “reform” socialized medical care for which not one of them voted. Why reform that which you didn’t want? Democrats bitch that we’re not continuing a minor war in Syria. Since when are peaceniks upset about ending a war?
Through it all, molehills start as mountains and become cognitive blocks. Keep in mind that 99.875% of the budget is not the wall. It’s not sane to lose one’s shit over 0.125% of a budget request meant to do something that was literally Federal law 12 years ago.
Self inflicted trauma makes it hard to write jokes. We need to quit taking shit so seriously because it’s fucking up humor!
A.C.
P.S. I came up with 0.125% by dividing 5 billion (with a B) by 4 trillion (with a T). Point is, this is a hissy fit that’s not about money.