Everything is stupid now

Everything is relentlessly stupid, all the time, and always getting worse. That is the news cycle. That is every day's hot, muggy march from yesterday to tomorrow. That is what we go to bed to, and what we wake up to.

It isn't that Donald Trump is a venal, stupid, and incompetent person. By itself, that is a survivable proposition. It's that his incompetence is clearly visible, at all times—and among those elected to ostensibly serve this country, nobody cares. Everybody knows it; nobody cares. Everybody knows the man is, at best, incompetent and deceitful, and at worst both malevolent and out of his mind.

But nobody, in the great halls of power, appears to give a particular shit about that as they play-act their way through their day jobs as if the nation were not headed by a madman. That speaks worse of them than it does him, and that we ourselves abide it speaks worse of us than of them.

They have their petty little squabbles, they appear on their favored "news" shows, they do their politicking and their legislative wheeling and dealing and it is left to people with no power to point out that none of their play-acting amounts to shit, in a government now premised on "Donald gets to do whatever pops into his head on any given day, laws be damned, and it is now everyone else's duty to nod their heads and pretend that the resulting national collapse is good, actually."

That is what America is, after all. You grow up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, you grow up reading legislature-approved history books that nod towards the nation's historic and utterly non-unique penchant for continent-spanning violence for the purpose of taking things or keeping things previously taken, books in which all of it is framed as lessons learned and which heap praise on your country for eventually confronting the sins and becoming better than the strange older countries that never did.

And then you turn on the television and learn that history isn't over after all, and that lessons learned was the euphemism deployed to allow every past generation to detach itself from each new set of errors while learning as few lessons as possible. And you're not allowed to say anything about that, in almost exactly the same way that every empty suit in Congress is not allowed to say out loud that Donald Trump is so unfit for office that he barely counts as a "president" at all.

If you mention out loud that things aren't fine, and that all of this looks suspiciously like what happened in those history books documenting the era in which the United States had not yet become the greatest and most moral and most financially clever civilization to ever exist; do that, and you are no longer a patriot. You have abandoned your Pledge. Pretending everything is fine is the highest and in fact only definition of a patriot, after all. It is the smallest possible lift, for a nation's citizenry. If you can't even manage that, then what are you?

No, in the halls of power you are still absolutely forbidden from pointing out that things are Very Not Fine. Do it, and in a public place, and a great many people who ran for office on the ostensible notion of serving the nation, people who presumed from the outset that nothing truly bad would ever happen because once you have a fancy enough office nothing ever does, will rush to the cameras to call you anti-American before going off to their next appointment licking a dying sociopathic madman's cankles.

I think anyone who ever pretended to know what America was about is probably deeply ashamed of it right now, which is an odd place for many to be in. There is a cognitive dissonance to it all. We all know what's going on. We can see it. We're none of us stupid, except for those of us who are.

We know that this is the stuff of crisis. What we can't figure out is why nobody above our own measly pay grade gives a shit.

Donald Trump declared war on Iran—by himself. We all know it, because it is obvious. We all know that presidents aren't technically allowed to do that, since the founders thought that a nation's decision to go to war needed to be debated and argued about rather than being left to the discretion of just one well-intentioned but possibly syphilitic-brained statesman. But we know it is a war, not some innovative new classification of global military violence, because the White House has announced that the violence will continue until Iran gives its "unconditional surrender," which is not something a nation not at war can give.

There is a dissonance here; the greatest and most moral nation to ever exist isn't supposed to do things this way.

But the statesman of our moral national have a solution to that conundrum. We're all going to just lie about it. We're going to lie and lie and lie until you stop asking, and then the problem will be solved.

And what do we do with the dissonance created from the lie? We reinvent language itself.

It would be one thing—still not good, mind you—if all of this was being done for the sake of a generational intellect promising great glories if only the nation acquiesces to a bit of illegality here and there. But that isn't where we're at. That isn't even close to where we're at.

There is no plausible interpretation of events that does not, at its center, acknowledge that we are being led by an incompetent, dimwitted fool. A man who, at his best, never thinks about anything...

...except his own amusement.

A man who is a child.

And surrounds himself with children.

But this is who we are, now? We know it is all we are allowed to be. This now is America, no matter what anyone says—a place of cheap leaders, men not worth the price of their own suits, a nation that condemns thinking and rewards bluster; one that has abandoned dignity in favor of vice and sin and spectacle.

We know Trump is unfit for office—or polite company. And yet we allow him to manage a war of his own choosing, because we have cultivated, for a long time now, a ruling class that will abide anything so long as they themselves can stay unscathed.

Is our magnificent idiot leader concerned as to how his war is going? Are there setbacks to be managed? No. It is no more or less important than pontificating on, say, college sports.

It is like one of those water-dunking birds—the plastic desk toys. Trump creates another generational crisis; Trump moves on to announce he's solved a far more important petty issue, one which he will also leave in rubble as he flits to something else. Repeat.

We are only meant to applaud like monkeys.

The man lies reflexively, and stupidly:

He can barely muster even the duties that require him to be nothing more than a vaguely-present suit.

He doesn't bother pretending that he is monitoring his rapidly-developing regional crisis—which is good, because his orders can only worsen things, but bad if you are of the opinion that presidents ought to keep watch over the fires they set.

And, above all else, the oaf remains bored. He is always terribly, terribly bored. Not even a war is enough to sate his appetite for constant noise and drama and chaos, and he will never tolerate the presence of anyone who does not fluff his fantasies into new full-fledged catastrophes.

Here is the thing of it. The nation can debate the Iran "not-a-" war. Our glorious and entirely moral lawmakers can putter about with their legislation and their important announcements. The news channels can run new polls trying to tease out what it all means, polls that absolve the press of its responsibility to tell us what it all fucking means.

But the dissonance to it all is that this isn't about the war. There is no strategy to be unpacked. There is no long-term vision, or even short-term vision. Trump's war is like Trump's ballroom and his triumphal arch; it is all pantomime, all of it cobbled together based on his surface-level notions of what words like leadership and empire mean. A great leader would desire Greenland, he thinks, so he desires it. A great leader would purge the undesirables among the populace, and if there are not many to be found than a great leader will invent them.

And so on.

Donald Trump is not well. He is not just incompetent, he is delusional. He cannot lead the nation because he does not, at present, have any vision of leadership not based on his own twitchy need for pomp and pleasures and exciting things to watch on his tv.

You cannot have a debate over the wisdom of global military interventions with a fucking goldfish, and everyone in power already knows that so nobody is even attempting it. Everyone already knows that Trump is manifestly unfit. That he has no plan. That he does not give the slightest shit what might happen to the nation due to his decisions.

And yet we are now murdering our way around the globe—solely so that everyone else in government can dodge engaging in that crisis. So that they can sit at their same desks, and make speeches, and hold hearings as if the man in charge of our nation's troops and missiles and nuclear weapons is not a batshit crazy halfwit riding a wrecking ball through the White House, our society, and our decency.

I have no advice, when it comes to coping with this stark reality. I am ashamed of my country; whatever we thought our nation once was, right now it is this and there is no denying it.

We cannot claim that America is better than this worst version of itself. Not when we elect people like this, and praise them, and nurture their personal vanities. And even for those of us who had few delusions over the cruelties this nation was founded on, nurtured on, and still feeds on now, the extent to which it could all be this abominably stupid is still almost too hard a blow to take.