Making America Gross, Again

As the country degenerates into the kind of failed empire that fascism always requires, it’s hard not to think about the last empirical crash-and-burn, Nazi Germany, and the similarities between then and now. Bill Murray, in Stripes, best described the origin of America immigrants: “We’re Americans. Do you know what that means? It means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse.” When you read the comments from the MAGAots on any subject—social, intellectual, scientific, or political—you see all of the evidence that anyone should need to know that we have not improved on that original, defective genetic material over the past 250 years. In fact, in rural America we’ve doubled-down on stupid and tuned it into a fine mist of constant trickle-down piss.  

North American European immigrants have a long, vicious history of turning wine into asparagus-scented urine (the worst kind of piss). The Scotch-Irish immigrants who populated the southeastern states in the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries were . . . not the cream of the Anglo-Saxon crop, to say the least. They were clannish, violent, racist, and resisted any form of education as if learning something new was akin to contracting polio or the clap. As Colin Woodard wrote in his book, American Nations, “The founding fathers of the Deep South arrived by sea, their ships dropping anchor off what is now Charleston in 1670 and 1671. Unlike their counterparts in Tidewater, Yankeedom, New Netherland, and New France, they had not come directly from Europe. Rather, they were the sons and grandsons of the founders of an older English colony: Barbados, the richest and most horrifying society in the English-speaking world . . . The society they founded in Charleston did not seek to replicate rural English manor life or to create a religious utopia in the American wilderness. Instead, it was a near–carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity.”    

Contrary to the “un-woke” myths and fairytales regressive Americans tell about themselves, this origin story absolutely fits Murray’s description of “wretched refuse.”  When Southerners are ranting about preserving their precious heritage with statues of slavers and traitors and their blatantly racist and seditious Confederate flags, this is the heritage they are preserving.  Those “founders” were terrible people and the legacy they left the country with is one of many things keeping this country from ever being great; or even good or, at best, not awful. 

The Republican Party, and the billionaires who dominate that political disaster, prey on the low-information deplorables by telling them fairy tales about “the woke virus” and how special being illiterate, uneducated, and gullible makes them.  While that tactic is good for short-term wealth gobbling, as the vulture capitalists and 0.1% “parasite class” rapes and pillages the nation’s treasure and resources, it will prevent the United States from being competitive on the world’s economic stage.  Looking at the band of rich white kids populating the current Republican Party’s Executive branch, does anyone imagine that these nitwits would have the slightest idea how to fight off a concentrated cyber-attack on the country’s infrastructure?  If Russia’s bots and hackers linked up with China’s similar “talent,” what are the chances that Musk’s DOGE nitwits would provide even a microsecond of defense from actual skilled programmers?   Those goobers can’t even tell COBOL from C+ code.  Machine language coding would look as indecipherable to them as it would to Trump’s voters.  You might as well send an army of toddlers against a well-armed Seal Team 6 as hope that today’s Republican Party is an answer to any modern problem. 

If you were a Bond-style super-villain, you couldn’t do more damage than to stuff the White House, the Capitol Building, and the Supreme Court Building with exactly the people Republican voters have cursed the nation with for the past 40 years.   Trump and his moron-minions have exposed the festering underbelly of at least half of the citizens of this country to the rest of the world and our international reputation hasn’t been this low since the early 1970s (Vietnam War) and the early 2000s (Afghanistan and Iraq Invasions).  This is exactly what I mean by “making America gross again.”   

After one of my earlier essays, a friend from New Zealand wrote, “Let me say firstly that US politicians in particular (not excusing the rest of the world either) have done very little to genuinely advance mankind's wellbeing for many decades, other than to advance the wellbeing of their cronies.”  For an embarrassing moment, I wanted to argue that point.  But at least from Vietnam in the 60s and 70s to invading Iraq, three times, and the absolute mess we made out of Afghanistan, it’s been pretty obvious (even from inside of this country) that we are not making the world a better place.  During Bush II’s oil-theft “holy crusades” in Iraq and Afghanistan, it particularly irritated me to listen to those international criminals babble about “bringing democracy” as part of their nation-building bullshit.  The same people who violently stopped the 2000 Florida recount and ignored the majority vote of the citizens of this country are going to bring “democracy” to another country?  Not possible.  The only consistent contribution Republicans have made to the world in almost 100 years has been in “making America gross(er) again.”  I’d like to hope we’ve hit bottom with this last election, but one thing I have learned in my 77 years is that you should never imagine the bar is finally set low enough, it can always go lower.

Our Chaos Is Turning Inward

Since, at least, WWII, the United States of America has been, to the rest of the world, like a “big brother” in, mostly, all the worst ways.  Having flexed our ultimate muscle, Little Boy and Fat Man, on Japanese civilian cities and demonstrating to the world that we are willing to do anything (even risking destroying the planet) to win, like a large child who has gotten away with intimidating smaller, younger siblings our international reputation went from “hero to zero” in less than a generation.  Most of our political leaders and all of our corporations who did business overseas, buying and selling other nation’s natural resources, saw that as a win-win situation.  Those American who risked everything to stop Hitler’s Third Reich were betrayed by their government and idle, entitled, generational wealth even before their feet hit French shores at Normandy.  Politicians like Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy ingratiated themselves to the rich and powerful by overinflating their far-behind-the-lines-of-battle “{war experience” to gain political power before the real soldiers returned to their ordinary lives. 

Of course, before WWI the United States had been fucking up other countries’ governments, stealing territory and sovereignty, and installing “friendly governments” since American money interests decided to “acquire” large chunks of Mexico in the 1840s.  Between 1846 and 1867, even with the distraction of an internal Civil War, the US found time to “annex” what became the states of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.  All of that is consistent with the original “Manifest Destiny[1]” bullshit with which justified murdering 20 million indigenous Americans who were living peacefully, creatively, sustainably, and far above the standards of immigrant Europeans in the 1700s.  Since the Civil War, the United States has interfered with Samoa, the Kingdom of Hawaii (another hostile annexation), the Philippines (1899), Columbia (1903), Honduras (1903-1925), Cuba (1906), Nicaragua (1909-1933), Mexico, again (1913), Haiti (1915-1933), Dominican Republic (1916-1925), and that was all before WWI.  The freakiest fact about this country is how much we love war.  In its 239 years of existence, the United States of America has only been at peace for 19 years of its 249 years of existence.  In almost all of those wars, we have been a principal aggressor/invader.  For a country that considers itself to be some kind of force for good, a democratic role model for the world, we’re pretty damn awful looking from the outside. 

When Trump took office and started dismantling the federal government, making it look more like his own chaotic, dysfunctional, cash-burning, failed, misogynist and racist “businesses,” most Americans were shocked and dismayed.  The Trump cult, of course, remains “resolutely” staying the course all the way to economic and social collapse.  Once you’ve committed to drinking the Kool-Aid you’ve got to drink the whole pitcher.  Now that Trump is purging the Smithsonian Museums of all evidence that every moment of US history was directed and driven by old white men, there probably isn’t any way back to decency or reality.  He’s already driven out any semblance of competence, expertise, honor and decency from the rest of the federal government.  Republicans are lining up behind one stupid Trumpian idea after another and it’s pretty obvious that the country is following 1930’s Germany down the “4^th Reich” nonsense, all the way to destruction.

2025’s “Rural Goober Policy” (aka “Southern Strategy”) from Nixon’s disastrous administration is in no way more sophisticated than it was in 2016 or 2020, but rural America is solidly a decade dumber and more gullible.  When Republicans are done dismantling public education, public health, the 1^st Amendment, and the federal government, they will have done everything Vladimir Putin has paid for and Russia and China will be battling for the world’s super-power position.  Either way, the US will likely continue to decline into a minor power and might even come apart like the Soviet Union in the 1990s.  As off this past month, more than 60% of Californians told a poll that the state ““would be better off if California peacefully seceded from the U.S. at some point in the next 10 years.”  Secession is in the air all across the country, in fact.  Although, the funniest secessionists are in the Southeast where dependence on Blue State subsidies is the highest.  Again, all of this is playing directly into Russian and Chinese hands and the dumbest Americans are in the drivers’ seat at a time when the country most desperately needs expertise of all kinds.

Between threatening to annex Canada. Panama, and Greenland and betraying Ukraine and Europe to Russia, the USA is shedding friends as fast as a Trump business blows through coke and cash.  Unless something drastic happens to stop the bleeding, it’s hard to see a positive outcome from this round of chaos. 

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[1] The link I used is for the Smithsonian and it will be interesting to see how long the Trump fascists allow that institution to remain untainted.

Trump Economic Instability Is Part of the Package

 “Washington, D.C., handyman Bora Akcakanat said he believes the trade war is fluctuating the price of lumber and other materials he relies on.

"’I used to quote my customers estimates and stuff — with materials included. I don't do that anymore because I don't know what prices are going to be the next day,’ Akcakanat said.”

If this sounds like a new story to you, your memory is too short to be trusted.  In 2019 when Trump had one of his delusional “tariffs are good for the economy” temper tantrums, American car manufacturers and their US suppliers started to close down operations as prices from China became unpredictable.  At that time, a friend of mine worked for a Detroit company that provided electronic controls (mostly smart headlights and their controls), body parts (metal and plastic), and other assemblies to everyone from GM and Ford to Mercedes, VW, and Audi.  (Japanese, Korean, and Chinese manufacturers, of course, did all of that design and manufacturing work internally.)  In late 2019, he was looking for another job, ideally in another industry, because Detroit manufacturing was all but shutdown because the price of Chinese electronics and other parts became unpredictable.  He used almost the same words as Akcakanat in the opening quote, when his company’s purchasing department didn’t “know what prices are going to be the next day” and purchase orders were no longer placed with any confidence regarding delivery or price.  Not long after that conversation, his company laid off the entire purchasing department and shut down electronics assembly. 

Obviously, those short memory, history-challenged MAGAots have forgotten how expensive even low quality pine 2x4’s were during Trump’s last two years in office resulting roughly a 175% FLCP (a lumber price benchmark) price increases between April and September 2020, topping out at triple the 2018 pricing in May of 2021.  Currently, a majority (60%) of corporate CEOs expect a recession in the 2^nd half of 2025 and another 15% expect it to happen early in 2026.  Consumers are even less optimistic, with only 17% believing business conditions are “good.”  Personally, I don’t know what world the 17% are living in, but they are clearly living in a propaganda bubble. 

One of Hitler’s biggest advantages in overthrowing the German democratic government was that the US had blown up the world economy and some of Germany’s biggest financiers, US banks, were calling in loans which were bankrupting German companies and putting tens of thousands of Germans out of work.  Trump, on the other hand, took over the strongest economy in the world and one of the strongest economies in US history.  Economic instability is one of fascism’s most useful tools.  Even in the best of times, after an extended period of peace, it is almost impossible for any country not to be plagued with “excess males, but in a recession/depression those mostly-useless men are guaranteed to be unemployed and pissed off and looking to blow things up and kill people.  All of those January 6^th rioters, purposeless militias, and the obviously overwhelming numbers of incels and generally weird men stomping through the country will be even more purposeless when Trump blows up the economy. 

Doing that is, of course, a gamble and Republicans have been the “Party of Unintended Consequences” for at least 100 years, but Trump’s entire life has been filled with failed gambles and, so far, he’s managed to escape consequences for any of that.  At 78 with his physical and mental faculties in obvious decline, he’s sure to feel he has nothing to lose with one more toss of the dice.  And the Trump crowd are just too dumb to know they are the dice he’s tossing.  Nothing in our political system is “normal” and, as a friend said last November, “nothing will ever be ‘normal’ again in this country.”  This isn’t a right-vs-left thing, it’s a fascism-vs-everyone-else fight and fascism has a pretty good short term fight record.  So, we’re in for it over the next decade or so and the outcome is far from guaranteed. 

On that useless-males subject, one unintended consequence of the Russia-Ukraine war might be a golden age for Russia when it’s all said-and-done.  Putin is tossing the sorry remains of the last 80 years of Russian procreation into the fire as nothing more than cannon fodder. This headline has all sorts of implications, “Russia's recruited so many inmates to fight in Ukraine that it's shuttering some of its prisons.”  Of course, many of Russia’s prisoners are political “criminals,” but Russia has had an excess of unemployable men for at least 50 years and, just like the US and much of the rest of the world, the majority of educated citizens in Russia are women and that number is rising.  After this war is over, there won’t be a lot of men left to make up for that deficit.  Iceland demonstrated, after that country’s arrogant and foolish men blew up their economy gambling in the stock market, that women can make far better leaders than men in a complicated world. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene and the human refuse the Republican Party has offered as “women in politics” aside, only a total fool (of which the US has 76M, at least) would argue that Trump has anything intellectually over Kamala Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Stacey Abrams, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Cori Bush, Rep. Katie Porter, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and a few dozen other political figures Trump would call “radical left” and any rational person would know are simply 21^st Century progressives.  Our problem is that covid wasn’t a man-made disease and, as usual for nature, wasn’t nearly effective enough at culling the herd.  The US is, so far, entirely too dependent on technology for warfare and that isn’t going to do much to solve the excess-male problems here.  Maybe it’s time to remove helmets and protective gear from contact sports? 

How the Rapture Works

The popular religious image of the rapture is oddly accurate, as it turns out.  At least from the perspective of those of us “left behind” it looks like a random horde of humans suddenly floating toward the sky.  While most of the raptured initially panicked as they left the ground, but as they rose into the clouds they began to celebrate and bray at those left on the ground.  Some had to struggle, to claw their way from the buildings they were in, to a door or window to keep from being crushed against the ceilings.  The attraction was initially barely strong enough to lift their feet from floors and the ground, but it became stronger moment-by-moment.  A few were either asleep, drunk or stoned, or afraid for too long and, when the attraction grew so strong that they could no longer move or be rescued from the buildings where they were trapped, they were slowly crushed against the ceilings.  I don’t have any idea what that meant or symbolized. 

Regardless of the predicaments of the assumed “faithful,” the attraction was unrelenting.  It did not appear to be a violation of the laws of gravity, since the observers left on the ground did not feel anything different in their connection to Mother Earth.  It really seemed like specific beings, all humans, were being drawn into the sky.  It was not like the usual science fiction depiction of one or more humans being drawn into a central location, like some kind of huge “mother ship,” but like a large crowd of people were clearly selected to leave the earth via floating into the sky like human-shaped mylar balloons.  Also, similar to the known rules of gravity and Earth’s atmosphere, their rise appeared to be very similar to a rocket attempting to achieve escape velocity.  The higher they went, the faster they were traveling. 

The acceleration had some negative side-effects for a few.  The attraction seemed to those in their final moments to be as mindless and ruthless as gravity and nature, especially when they plowed into the undersides of airplanes and other aircraft.  A very small number of “the chosen” hit weather balloons, but they had enough momentum by then, usually at 12-to-30 kilometers, to drag the balloons and their equipment with them into the stratosphere. 

 An accurate count of how many humans were lifted up by the rapture won’t be available for years.  Really, there isn’t a lot of motivation from those of us still here to bother to count them.  Some countries, from Somalia-to-Afghanistan-to-Algeria, where 95-99% of the population were believers, practically turned to empty wilderness overnight, with pets and wildlife running free throughout the countryside and urban centers.  Even slightly less devout countries, from Liberia-to-Panama-to-Venezuela, with 80-94% of the population believers, went from overpopulated, polluted, and crowded to cities and towns looking like empty Hollywood sets from coast to coast and border to border.  70% of the United States vanished, leaving the Bible Belt Red States as unpopulated and free of European immigrants as they were before the Louisiana Purchase. Slightly less religious countries like Venezuela-to-Greece-to-Spain lost half of their populations and, within a few hours, all over the world expensive, expansive, and richly-furnished villas, castles, manors and mansions, chateaus, and penthouses were being occupied by everyone from the formerly-homeless to the middle class “moving up.” 

Back when the raptured were still rising, at about 8 kilometers, the chosen began to pass out and as they lost consciousness some probably saw the proverbial white light.  I expect some saw loved ones dead and alive, some saw total blackness, and several saw the fiery gates of hell, but those moments were brief as their brains starved for oxygen and the visions faded.  Like death, no one came back from the rapture, so we’ll never know what went on in their heads and imaginations.  Their bodies kept climbing, though, all the way to a bit less than 200 kilometers, where they went into a non-sustainable orbit where roughly six billion humans provided about as much solar coverage as half of the state of Delaware (or the tiny nation of Abkhazia) distributed over the most of the upper atmosphere.  However, different sized and shape and weight bodies ended up at different altitudes, because the rapture effect had an equal force on all of the raptured and a precise initiation and termination moment world-wide.   The heaviest and widest, offering the most drag in the lower atmosphere, along with people wearing bulky clothing, and the ones who spent some time getting free of buildings and vehicles to begin the rise into the upper atmosphere all ended up at the lowest terminal altitudes.  Those folks fell out of orbit first, and, mostly, they fell into the oceans and quickly fed the fishes.  Some fell on land, but with a drastically reduced human population, they mostly landed hard, splattered and broke into small pieces, and were eaten by insects and animals and what was left was unidentifiable.  Those remains nourished vegetation.  Over the next several years, the “sky people” fell out of orbit, but after an extended time above the atmosphere their body fluids had long boiled away and dissipated into space.  The desiccated human remains and flammable clothing easily ignited on re-entry and were too small even to be sighted as “falling stars” or comets. 

I’m sure it would be polite to claim that the believers were missed, but most of them were low-skill, uneducated laborers and the demand for that kind of work, even with the drastically reduced human population, was high enough that all of us still alive were very busy immediately and for years afterwards.  With labor at an extreme shortage, the 250 year labor-verses-capital argument came to a quick end.  Capital without labor, as many liberal economists had argued since Karl Marx, is valueless and powerless.  Not surprisingly, the old “no one is an atheist in a foxhole” proverb proved to be largely true and, suddenly, the world was drastically short on soldiers, eliminating the classic protection afforded to capital from labor.  Maybe a little surprising was the fact that police officers largely were among the raptured.  Also not surprisingly, the obscenely wealthy humans of every nation were nonbelievers, along with a curious number of priests, ministers, and evangelists, but since few of their skills are of any value in a labor-starved, utilitarian world, the rich and the faux-pious mostly became the most menial of unskilled laborers.  The world monetary system collapsed, but, fairly quickly, an international denomination was created, distributed based on population density, and rational national and international growth metrics were established based on productivity, societal contribution and value, and environmental benefit or harm. 

Nothing about the rapture had set back science and technology noticeably.  The human world didn’t lose a lot of irreplaceable technical skills: the number of scientists in the world remained very nearly the same as before, doctors of all disciplines except theology and some of the less-practical liberal arts were in abundance worldwide.  The best and brightest engineers were still doing the work they were doing before the rapture.  More than enough nurses, technicians, plumbers, electricians, and every other skilled occupation were still on earth for the remaining population’s needs.  Rural communities were mostly emptied everywhere and most of us would need to learn something about farming fairly quickly, but there were more than enough books about agriculture and much of the job had been automated for at least a decade or two. 

It’s not like all of the assholes were raptured.  Like every dystopian science fiction story ever written, lots of the bikers and gangbangers were left behind.  And they tried to cause the usual disruption and chaos.  The world’s military drones and robots were pretty much out of work for a very short time, until they were repurposed as law enforcement.  Japan was the first country to figure this out, with fewer gun lovers and a more intelligent public in the early years.  Like America’s Old West, the fastest solution to quelling the violence was to disarm the criminals and the robots patrolled the cities, first, disarming everyone entering “civilization.”   All that barely used airport security technology really did the job in the general population, when the general population didn’t want to be robbed, murdered, raped, and otherwise violated.  If the gangbangers didn’t submit to the robots, the drones quickly eliminated the threats.  It turned out that, without the interference from money and power, AI is a lot easier to make behave intelligently than science fiction predicted. 

In the end, the rapture did produce the exact utopia predicted by all of the religions of the world.  The only thing those predictions missed was where Nirvana, Heaven, Jannah, Paradise, Gan Eden, Svarga loka, and the rest of those perfect states would be at the end.  We discovered that the people who believed this world isn’t good enough for them should leave it.  None of us left behind know what or where, if anything, the levitators went to and we don’t care.  It isn’t even a regular topic of bar arguments.  I don’t know if those who were raptured have souls.  I sure don’t know if I have one.  But they left the rest of us to make this world the Eden it is designed to be, “Heaven isn’t somewhere else. It’s here.”