Thursday, February 16, 2017

Finely-tuned machine

I admit it.  I was unsettled when the Republican Congress voted to remove restrictions that kept the mentally ill from buying guns.  What a difference a day makes.  There is no point in keeping guns away from mad people as long as nuclear weapons are in the hands of Donald Trump.  It's like worrying about a leaky faucet when you live below the Oroville Dam.  It's like Yossarian carefully applying a bandage to Snowden's arm, only to have the man's guts tumble out of his jacket.  I don't know what the fuck it's like.  There is no precedent. 

Grandiosity, paranoia, excuse-making, lying, racism, ignorance, lying, incoherence, egomania, bombast, stupidity, and of course lying, all of it on display for the world to cringe at.  Since no one in Congress wants to touch this, what about a panel of clinical psychiatrists?  Since impeachment is not up for discussion, what is the procedure for involuntary commitment?  Comparison to Alice in Wonderland are tempting but misleading, for Wonderland has a rigorous logic.  Try to follow the "logic" of a trumpian trope -- the leaks are "illegal" and therefore true but reporting the information in them is "fake news" because the media is "dishonest" but the leakers are not -- and you want to go away and sit in the dark, humming.  Insanity is contagious.

Not feeling the unconditional love that all children need from those dishonest, corrupt, very very bad reporters, Donnie will go to Florida this weekend to drink in the adoration of the Stormtrumpers, to sic them on the media and lead the "lock her up" chant -- ah, the things we did last summer -- and to kick off his re-election campaign.  He inherited the worst, baddest mess in all of history, forget about Lincoln's divided nation and FDR's Depression, and it's all Hillary's fault and also Obama's fault, and not at all anything to do with Russia which is fake news, and Donnie alone can fix it. It's fixed already, just about, and the wall is practically built and Mexico is demanding to pay for it, and Iran and North Korea have been warned.  NATO --

I can't.  It's not fun anymore.  When this kind of thing happened in the past, religious leaders told people God was punishing them by giving them rulers like Ivan the Terrible or Vlad the Impaler.  By the twentieth century people no longer believed heaven had inflicted Hitler or Mao or Pol Pot.  So how do we explain this?  A quirk of the Constitution, or a loss of the will to live as a nation?

Explain it to me. 

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