Like our country. It's a shit show. A dumpster fire. A Kirk Cameron argument. It's terrible. And there is no sign that it's pulling out of the tailspin.
Here's my hot take of the day: If you still support Trump you are one of two kinds of people:
- Woefully ignorant
- Willfully ignorant
Look, I get it. Life is hard. Knowing what's true is hard. People have spent millennia believing all manner of absurdities in order to try to make sense of the chaos that defines life in the known universe. It's a strange and difficult project attempting to parse that which is true from that which is bullshit. Spend a little time researching the various fallacies of reasoning and argument to which we all fall victim and it's easy to descend into moral and epistemological relativism and conclude that there is simply no way for your average dullard (eg: me) to understand much of anything.
But in this case, it seems so easy to determine that this dude is a morally bankrupt buffoon who has zero interest in the well being of anyone who's name doesn't start with a T and end with a rump. It's so comically obvious, and that the fact that such a broad swath of the American landscape considers this a feature, not a bug, is incredibly alarming, especially after three years of collective insanity.
This morning I read this piece by David Brooks in the Times, and lays out a "ridiculously optimistic", fictional look back at the 2020's from the perspective of 2030. I liked it, in the same way that I like most of David's writing. It was a pleasant fiction, all except for David's knee-jerk romanticizing of religious belief, which I find silly. He lays the groundwork, as he has done for a couple of years now, for a path that would lead us all into a better future, from his perspective. But our trajectory isn't merely veering away from an optimistic decade, it's careening headlong in the opposite direction.
Last night that fucking turd running our country ordered a pretty substantial attack that killed the Iranian Norman Schwarzkopf, and did so unilaterally, so far as I can tell, meaning he didn't bother to inform Congress or any of our regional allies. And it's not like he sent Seal Team 6 in to eliminate this guy via covert op or anything. Dude sent a cruise missile up his ass at Baghdad International Airport in broad daylight. Is this a "wag the dog" situation? Does Trump forecast too much risk in 2020 to his reelection campaign? We shall see, but it's obvious that there is nothing he wouldn't sacrifice at his own gold plated altar.
This could prove to destabilize the Middle East even more, and it's impossible to predict the ripples that are now flowing out from this event. Iran isn't likely to take this lying down.
I now believe that this country is in a downward spiral, and instead of Sully guiding us safely into the Hudson, we have the real life version of Leslie Nielsen wondering if Ivanka has ever seen a grown man naked....
So domestically we're a mess, and there are literally zero bright spots from a foreign policy perspective. I think I will continue prepping for the worst and hoping that the fictional country envisioned by D Brooks is out there somewhere.
I picked a hell of a week to stop sniffing glue.
