Somewhere around the time when grunts and burbles were advancing in the process of becoming words, a group of primitive hunters were creeping around a forest waiting for an opportunity to present itself. They quietly came across some kind of manageable prey, and they slowly maneuvered themselves downwind and loaded their throwing sticks with spears. Before they could launch their missiles, some kind of big saber-toothed cat dropped out of a tree onto the prey animal's back, sunk its huge teeth into the victim's neck. One of the modern but unsophisticated hominids blurted out, “what the fuck!!!” That was the beginning of a linguistic tradition that continues to this very day. (“WTF!”)
I'm sure that many readers are already thinking, “yeah, this is about Trump, for sure.” You may be certain that it is, but I am a rambling, shambling story-teller, so give me a minute to warm up to my subject.
Modern media has given us access to the close secondhand experience of every weird, shocking, fantastic, belief-defying event in the entire world, whether terrifying or terrific. YouTube; Instagram; Facebook; specialty websites; it's all spread out there for us to see. For those who prefer to read the details, that vicarious experience is also available. We get these opportunities whether the experiences are good for us or bad. We see things, or read about them, and then we often wish that we had never been subjected to the knowledge of them. In the visual realm I am especially careful to avoid eye contact with many varieties of the entertainments that now present themselves. Just the reading bits can leave a mark on you.
For instance, about seven years ago I came across a story on a reputable news aggregation site that drew my attention. “Man Dies After Having Sex With Horse.” Now I am a man of the world, and I know that the practice of men engaging in sex with farm animals exists. One most often hears about it in connection with female sheep, or dogs. It makes the man an object of ridicule, which is only proper, and it doesn't do much for the reputation of a good dog either. I had never given the matter much thought, and previous to this article, my greatest WTF moment in connection with the practice was the discovery that in some civilized countries sex with farm animals is a popular sub-category of the local pornography. Well, you think that you know somebody. The world is full of surprises.
“Man Dies . . .” I read the article because I wondered how fucking a mare could be fatal. Also, I assumed that there must have been some interesting kind of make-shift platform involved, to make up for the size difference, and it's always interesting to read the list of charges filed by police. As for the death, I was betting on either a heart attack or a massive back-kick from the horse. Brother, I was way off.
The horse was not a mare, but a stallion. An intact stallion; a sexually active stallion. Yes, there was a specially built platform involved, and the man was kneeling on it. He died as a result of several internal injuries, which were in the general category of “perforations.” It turns out that this is a thing, a thing that does not usually result in death. There are multiple entrepreneurs who own ranches out there in the woods and provide the service. I guess this stallion got carried away. If the article described any criminal charges, I have no recollection of them. Perhaps I was in shock. This story became, and remains, my benchmark for WTF.
As the great Bob Dylan once said, “the times, they are a'changing.” As the great Eddie Cantor famously said, “[we] ain't heard nothin' yet!” There is a pyramid of WTF now under construction that will put to shame not only Giza, but also that rampant stallion and his unfortunate boyfriend.
We just had a presidential election. You may have noticed. This is nothing unusual. There have been nineteen presidential elections in my lifetime. They haven't all gone smoothly, but the losers had, without exception, graciously accepted their defeat and offered a timely concession. Every outgoing administration, without exception, had cooperated fully in the transition to a new regime. This has been a point of pride in the United States. The world's great fortress of democracy! We play by the rules here! Fair is fair! The nation comes first! That's the way that it's always been.
The elections themselves may be a different story. There have been thumbs placed on scales. Several of these elections were affected by illegal behind the scenes machinations. (1968 and 1980, and probably 2016.) One was decided by murder. (Go ahead and guess.) There were some pretty vicious contests, and harsh words were often applied to opponents (whether the opponent replied in kind or not). The appearance of third party candidates has often stunk of mischief (George Wallace; Jessie Jackson; H. Ross Perot; Ralph Nader). The governor of a swing state took over the voting process in his state and, with the assistance of conveniently appointed Justices of the Supreme Court, stole an election for his own brother (2000). But still, none of this rises to the flood tide of illegality, abuse of legal process, poor taste, and sheer insane bullshit that we are witnessing now, here in December, 2020, six weeks after the sitting president lost decisively after a single term in office.
All of which brings us to our current What The Fuck situation, and it is one for the ages. It is part of a tsunami of WTF that has gone global. It is a worldwide WTF. Humanity as a whole has lost its ability to separate fantasy from reality, and what the fuck is that all about?
In this instance, this inability seems to have arisen spontaneously. Sure, politicians in certain countries pushed the delusion along, but I think that the essential problem arose from circumstances, a vast coincidence of circumstances. Computers happened, and people did things that could be done with computers. Mass communication spread to the four corners of the earth. Everyone from Eskimos to Wall Street bankers to Cargo Cultists to Portland hipsters to Amazon rain-forest Indians watches the same CNN. Many ordinary people became prosperous, fat, and lazy minded, and they confused their elevated social condition with high intelligence. Heads all over the world were filled with crap, and they jumped to bizarre conclusions en masse. Although their strings are being pulled by a ruling class, they do not bear the typical indicia of a manipulated class. Our new reality had the seeds of fantasy in it, and people only needed a nudge to make the leap into irrationality.
Rampant greed and corruption after about 1980 pushed the entire Republican party, most of the rest of the political and corporate apparatus, and more and more average Joes into the irrational zone. Deregulation, blah, blah, computerized stock trading, blah, blah, collateralized debt obligations (real and synthetic, you can't make this stuff up), the black president, and then, the coup de main, Donald Trump! What could go wrong! War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain, those doughy, luxury-besotted white guys smoking Cohibas and getting blow jobs from sorority girls while they laugh at the working stiffs whose lives they are dismantling as quickly as possible. And into all of this shit steps the WTF extravaganza of all time: the stolen election!
Editorial comment: I got scooped by the Supreme Court before I could post this thing, and the reaction of the Supremes was anti-climactic, thank the Gods. This particular sequence of actions by our elected officials is still worth examining.
We were five weeks post election, and Trump was still insisting that he had won. Even now, his reelection committee continues to raise money from his stooges (about $200,000,000 at this time), and Trump says that he is saving America from the “greatest fraud in political history.” His gang of crack attorneys has lost almost sixty court actions since the election, but they continue to file law suits everywhere trying to get votes thrown out, or recounts without those pesky mail in ballots, or signatures triple checked, any damn thing that sounds like a legal argument. Judges are starting to lose their tempers, on the record, in open court.
The really breathtaking What the Fuck moment came on or about December 11th, after every state, Red or Blue, had certified the vote count, certified the Electoral College situation, and declared Joe Biden the winner, and by a wide margin. The Trump lame duck administration then somehow got the Attorney General of Texas to file a lawsuit directly against four other states praying that the results in those states be overturned, and Trump declared the winner! That's a law suit between the sovereign states of America, and the original jurisdiction for such law suits lies in the Supreme Court.
The gall required for one man, or one AG's office, to do this, is beyond imagination. But it got worse. The White House, of course, joined the suit. Six states officially joined the law suit. (Arkansas; Louisiana; Mississippi; Missouri; South Carolina; and Utah, to break up the Confederate tone of the proceedings.) The Attorneys General of an additional seventeen states, acting together, filed an amicus brief, which means they want to lend moral support while not putting their own asses on the line. 106 (one hundred and six) Republican members of the House of Representatives also filed an amicus brief. The Supreme Court wasn't having any of it. They just shrugged it off with a decision consisting of one short paragraph, on the grounds of lack of standing. Even so, this was still some Top-of-the-Pops WTF.
The Texas AG who got this ball of shit rolling? Why was he doing this? He needs a presidential pardon, because the law has been after his dumb ass over what, I do not care to know. The rest of them? All Republicans, we must always remember who we're talking about here. What was in it for them? Are they all still afraid to make Trump angry? Are they afraid to alienate Trump's base? After all, 71,000,000 Americans voted for the guy.
The voice of reason in that mess, and possibly the lead counsel for the defense if the case had gone forward, was Chris Carr, the Attorney General of Georgia. He is a solid Republican who was just not having that shit. Not after triple checking the vote count in his state and verifying three signatures for every vote more than once. His patience had run out. He went on TV and said that the law suit was “constitutionally, legally, and factually wrong,” which I thought was reasonable. He got a nice, long, threatening phone call from Trump himself after that statement.
He turns a nice phrase, Mr. Carr. In his filing with the Supreme Court, he said, “[t]he novel and far reaching claims that Texas assert, and the breathtaking remedies it seeks, are impossible to ground in legal principles and unmanageable. This Court has never allowed one state to co-opt the legislative authority of another state, and there are no limiting or manageable principles to cabin that kind of overreach.”
The Supreme Court agreed with Mr. Carr.
The adults in all of this were few and hard to find. Only twenty-seven Republicans in Congress will admit that Joe Biden won the election. Much worse than that, a statistical calamity, is that 71,000,000 Americans voted for Trump, and that two-thirds of the self-identified Republicans among them believe that the election was “rigged.” (From a Reuters/ Ipsos poll.)
Trump, of course, still refuses to concede, still refuses to admit that he got beat. That he lost. He knows that he will be leaving the White House, but he will never admit that he lost the election. Now we can look forward to the spectacle of Trump complaining loudly about “the stolen election,” and various militia groups threatening or actually shooting people. Some of us have seen Presidents fuck up royally in our lifetimes, and we have noticed an unfortunate trend: when individuals, parties, or circumstances, present a genuine threat to our democracy, the matter will be swept under the rug with as little ceremony as possible to avoid anything that could erode people's confidence in our government.
That will happen in this case as well. Any normal person in Trump's situation would easily be driven into obscurity by a combination of pardons and failures to prosecute. It's been four years now, and society and the media and the political establishment still insist on treating Trump like a normal human being. So we'll get the worst of all possible worlds: no justice for the aggrieved, and Trump still parading around complaining about how badly he has been treated, and how he really won the election, and how Joe Biden is a socialist stooge, and whipping up his MAGA idiots and the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to generate as much mischief as possible, while threatening to run again in 2024, mostly as an excuse to raise money, which he will use to support his lifestyle. Don't forget, Trump's expenses will jump shortly after his removal from office. Between the divorce, settling scores, finding a new fake-breasted trophy wife, and filing numerous law suits on multiple subjects, Trump's budget will be stressed. Baby needs a new pair of shoes! “White House Apprentice,” coming soon to Fox Entertainment!
I have a good idea of how we got into this mess, and I shed some light on that subject in my wonderful book, “Political Rants: Lefty Vitriol in the Age of Obama and Trump,” available almost free on Amazon (99 cents, Kindle). The current state of What The Fuck now in progress is painful to even consider. How do we get out of this mess is a question for the ages. I wonder if any of our current crop of geniuses is up to that task.
And What the Fuck! 3,600 Americans died last Wednesday (December 16th) of COVID-19! That's over 300,000 all together! More killed than in all of World War II! What the Fuck? The Russians hacked into dozens of our government agencies, intelligence services, and corporate headquarters, all at once? And Trump hasn't mentioned it? And what? What the Fuck! The Pfizer COVID vaccine is just sitting in warehouses, or sitting on loading docks back at the factory, because no one has given instructions regarding its distribution? And the MAGA people dying up at the hospital are groaning at the doctor with their last breath that COVID-19 is a hoax! What the Holy Mother-Fucking Fuck is that all about?
The way that things are going, I wouldn't bet you a dollar that the sun will come up in the East tomorrow.
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