Who Are They and Where Are They Taking Us?

 Trump has taken the sad remains of the United States of America so far down the rabbit hole of corruption, domestic violence, treason, and incompetence that it should be amazing that he has any supporters left in this country. But he does. And that remaining 26-38% who still approve of Donny and his sad sack band of third tier elites are, and should be, amazing. “Loyal” doesn’t begin to describe their addiction and attraction to Little Benito. “Perverse” is the first description that comes to my mind.

Trump’s falling approval numbers are based on Trump’s incompetent “handling” of the economy, mostly the rising cost of consumables, and the suspicions (if you are totally gullible) that Donny is a pedophile and is hiding his relationship to his pedo-bestie Epstein. Weirdly, corruption, grotesque levels of abuse of Executive power, threatening violence against his opposition, his disdain for the US Constitution, and generally childish, petulant behavior isn’t even a thing for the shambles of the Republican Party and its minions. So, while I’m disgusted and discouraged by the goobers who voted for Trump and have, recently, soured on him, the ones who are left are something even more despicable. They are, in fact, economically and ethically, poor examples of exactly who Donald Trump is: narcissistic, amoral, greedy, childish, and stupid.

Ms Day and I often participate in a local protest event. We stand along Highway 61, downtown at rush hour on Friday with 100-200 other locals waving signs and talking to people about the decline of the American Empire. [I know. It’s probably a pointless exercise, like piling sandbags against a beach house when a tsunami is on the way. I’m almost 80-years-old. Thanks to worn out hinges and struts and biomechanical supports, I can barely lift my arms over my head some mornings. There isn’t much that I can do to change the direction of our destruction, but I’m going to do what I can, while I still can.] At that protest, we get a close look at who the Trump culters are and we hear a lot from them, too. This is rural Minnesota, which is no smarter than rural anywhere else on the planet. At least half of the citizens in our county are on some kind of government assistance for food, shelter, healthcare, and employment. The region’s education level is below the state’s average, the average age in our county is 42.3 years and a substantial portion of the population is over 65. Of the remaining population, maybe a quarter are actually fairly self-supporting and the rest are living on socialism and/or Mommy and Daddy’s money (most “farmers” inherited their occupation, real estate, and a lot more). As a group, we’re nothing to brag about, but that doesn’t stop the strutting, preening, and chanting. Rural Americans are nothing if not full of false pride.

Last week we had the usual bunch of loud pipes bozos, spewing noise and wasted fuel as they left the stoplight where we congregate. It’s hard to beat that for an expression of disrespect for law and order and the public peace and it’s a pretty clear statement from local “law enforcement’ that the only laws enforced are the convenient ones. We’re drawing near the end of the 3-month biker season (it’s much longer for motorcyclists) in Minnesota, but that crowd is consistently pro-Trump and anti-civility. Since early March of this year, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of Hardly riders who expressed anything but disdain for our protest. A safe rule is “the louder the exhaust system, the more pro-fascist the rider/driver.” This, by the way, appears to be true across the globe. Dictators from Putin to Venezuela’s Maduro to Israel’s branch of the Infidels Motorcycle Gang are used as enforcers without any sort of interference from police and government restrictions. You have to be a special kind of stupid to imagine that the Hell’s Angels, the Outlaws, or even the many biker gangs comprised of felon-loving US cops care about the US Constitution.

One of the weirdest protest-protestors was a young person of unidentifiable gender, in the front passenger seat of a car, somewhere between 18 and 30, who screamed “I hate you, I hate you . . .” as he/she/it slowly passed our group in the moderately heavy afternoon traffic. I’m not exaggerating the description. If you asked me to identify this person, I could describe a lot about clothing, hair color and length, but I couldn’t even make a guess about the gender. The voice was high and shrill, but not necessarily feminine. The person’s face was as gender-neutral as a baby. The person’s light brown hair was cut at about 2-4” and scraggly. Even the voice, screaming at the top of his/her lungs, was gender-neutral. None of us knew what to make of that display of weirdness.

We get a surprising number of weird looking old men who stop in the intersection to shriek indecipherable pro-Trump polemics at us. It’s hard to rank them for weirdness, because they are all peculiar, lonely, old Minnesota bachelors with varying levels of either credit or resources. That last assumption is based on the vehicle they are driving and the amount and content of the crap piled in the seats around them. I have never understood a whole sentence from any of them because they are incoherent and rabid in their love for Donny the Pedo. Hands-down, the weirdest of this old white men bunch is a ZZ Top looking gnome, about 5’5’ and with a white beard and long hair, who spoke with such a strong eastern European accent that I could only understand a few words out of the hundreds he shrieked at us. One of the people I was standing near decided to engage this doofus and was drenched in spittle as a result. I was impressed at that person’s ability to translate enough of the “conversation” to try and interact. Between the volume, the flying saliva, and the cartoonish Russian accent, all I could do was look away and try not to laugh.

At least once every Friday, there are the scraggly barfly groupies who scream “I love Trump” as they wobble through our intersection. Like women who vote Republican, these characters are seriously deluded. There is, literally, nothing the Mango Mussolini or the Republican Party could or would ever do for these people. Even if they weren’t poor, uneducated, and beaten half-to-death by a gnarly ugly stick, our Founding Farter is clearly fond of per-pubescent little girls who can be threatened by a micro-penis. Of course, Cheeto Benito has nothing but disgust for anyone who isn’t a billionaire or a Fox News supplicant, but he is particularly put off by “those dirty people” who were foolish enough to vote for him. Of all the filthy hands he doesn’t want to be touched by or seen near, “ugly women” are at the top of the list. But they still “love” him and that is, at the least, confusing.

This week, one of the most baffling counter-protestors I’ve encountered rolled down her window and very pleasantly said, “I Love Trump.” There was nothing classically Trump-cult about her: she wasn’t scared with the usual permanent anger lines, she made her announcement with a shy smile on her face, the driver of her vehicle remained as uninvolved as possible while waiting for the light to change as if he were somewhat embarrassed, and they both looked reasonably middle-class. The best response I could manage was, “That is sad to hear.” Of course, I thought of a dozen better comebacks after she was gone, but my first response was as honest as anything I thought of later. It is overwhelmingly sad to realize that some of the people ensnared in the Trump cult are not obviously awful people.

There have been a few political figures in my life who I have admired, but none that I would say I “love.” I don’t know any of them well enough to make that kind of emotional commitment. There is nothing about Trump to love, so what is going on there is beyond my comprehension. It is clearly and obviously a cult. In a Guardian article. titled “Watch Out for the Tell-Tale Signs,” a cult is defined as “‘formal religious veneration,’ ‘a system of religious beliefs and its body of adherents,’ ‘a religion regarded as ‘unorthodox or spurious,’ ‘great devotion to a person or idea’ as well as ‘persons united by devotion or allegiance to an artistic or intellectual movement or figure.’” That appears to be the mental state of at least 79 million American voters and, to me, it is incomprehensible.

When 79M citizens are this easily conned and take their selfish, racist, uneducated, paranoid conspiracy-insanity this far down the rabbit hole, the rest of us are condemned to suffer some of the consequences. On average, Trumpers are less educated, older, more rural, more superstitious, and, obviously, more gullible than the average casino sucker. Know-Nothing Donald ought to, at least, give them all Trump University diplomas, then they’d have something to show for all that they have lost. As for the rest of us, the United States of America will never be the place it was before the Trump fascist movement changed everything. The rest of the world has moved on without us and it’s hard to imagine that our former allies will ever consider us to be sane, intelligent, reliable, trustworthy, or even useful. There will be repercussions for all of that and none of it will make any part of America great and we will, likely, never be anything near great again.

The New FBI, Same As It Ever Was

When I was a kid, back in the 50s and 60s, television depicted the FBI in a relentlessly positive light: the J. Edgar Hoover-approved The Untouchables from the late-50s.  Television carried on the joke with The F.B.I, in the 60s, the 80s and 90s collection of The F.B.I. Files, FBI: Most Wanted, FBI: International, FBI: The Untold Stories, Criminal Minds, Numb3rs, and the farce is still playing with the current CBS FBI show,  In those fictional fairy tales, we’re led to believe that FBI agents are relentlessly protecting the public from serial killers, terrorists, bank robbers, and general purpose bad guys.  The delusion got played to its ultimate farcical denouement when the nation sat on the edges of 320 million chairs waiting for ex-FBI Robert Mueller to uncover and prosecute Trump for being a Russian asset and FBI Director James Comey to bring the Republican band of traitors to trial.  Of course, none of that ever happened, even though the evidence was overwhelming. 

In sad retrospect, it was pretty funny watching (and being one) liberals and even 60s anti-establishment types wildly hoping that the FBI would overcome it’s long history of corruption, right wing politics, being the federal strongarm for big business and bad government, and relentless incompetence and, finally,  put Trump in jail where he has belonged for at least 50 years.  A lot of that pipedream had to have been based on generations of television and movie propaganda misleading the public into believing the FBI was a protector of “law and order.”  The opposite is, generally, the truth. 

The origin story of the FBI was J. Edgar Hoover’s scheme to create an internal federal police force to keep politicians in line and to protect the interests of big business and idle wealth.  Hoover turned the FBI into a collection of mobsters who hunted down, sometimes murdered, threatened, and prosecuted anyone who smelled even a little bit like a small-“D” democrat.  There have been few moments since 1924 when the FBI could make any kind of claim to being on the side or working people, democracy, or even the United States of America. 

Competence-wise, the FBI has been made fools by WWII Germany, Cuba, Russia, Iran, and practically every other enemy of the United States over the past 100 years.  While there have been a few notable FBI agents who managed to do their jobs, in spite of a lack of leadership, most are perfectly suited to the job Trump has them doing now: intimidating US citizens and assisting ICE in terrorizing the country.  The agency’s vaunted “high standards” for applicants has long been little more than window-dressing, but today is is less than that.  As agents who actually investigated Trump and his minions for treason, corruption, and other crimes are being purged from the FBI, those positions are being filled by people who should be behind bars, not pretending to be law enforcement.  Along with the dilution of the military leadership, the NSA and CIA, the U.S. Marshalls, and even the Secret Service, the nation has never been this unprotected and exposed.  It’s hard to see a way back from this and I don’t expect it to improve in my lifetime. 

Couldn’t Find a Heart with an Axe

The current exodus of good, smart, talented people from the American medical system reminds me of my first experience as a “field clinical engineer” in medical devices in Colorado. Starting in early 1002, through an odd series of career plans gone bad, I ended up taking an offer from a Denver pacemaker company, Teletronics, in their Technical Services Department. I was offered the job because the department was overstaffed with nurses and understaffed with people who understood how the technology worked; engineers. The department manager was a nurse, by training, and every employee in the department was trained as a nurse, except for an old friend who had recommended hiring me, and was the group’s supervisor, and me. When I started, Technical Services was part of Training, Field Clinical Engineering, and a few other counter-intuitive operational groups with a manager who didn’t know much about any of the people or technology or customers. He did, however, know how to spend money like a Republican President and he introduced me to extravagance that made the 1992 “me” understand the true meaning of “decadence.”

I don’t remember how this happened, but early on I made a friendship with one of the Denver area sales reps and he decided to help me move from Tech Services to Field Clinical Engineering. Telectronics didn’t have much of a training system, considering the size of the company, the complexity and newness of the products, and the criticality of the products and applications. In fact, the “process” was pretty much toss the victim into the fire and see if they burn or escape with a few injuries. I was actually one of the instructors in my own training class. A few months after I’d started my new job and career, The sales rep asked me to cover for him at a hospital in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. To help me get ready for the implant, he let me follow him for a couple of days and about a half-dozen pacemaker implants, a few days before I was due in Glenwood Springs.

Glenwood Springs was, and is, a rich person’s town. It’s a 10,000 person city with average household incomes above $120,000 and lots of homes owned and unoccupied by millionaires and billionaires (probably none of them in 1992). There are five expensive private golf clubs in Glenwood. The overwhelming majority of houses in Glenwood Springs are over $350,000 with no shortage of $500,000 to $1,000,000+ homes in the city. If there was ever a city that epitomized the lifestyles of the rich and infamous, it would be Glenwood Springs. It’s where Doc Holiday withered away his TB-infested lungs and is buried.

As a western Kansas small town kid with a lot of rural relatives, I’d shot and butchered a fair number of small animals. I have never been much of an entrails or organs gourmet and I never bothered learning to identify organs because I was just going to toss them. Starting out in my new career, I often joked (sort of) that “I couldn’t find a heart with an axe.” I had, however, studied hard, learned to answer telephone questions about devices and implant procedures, and knew as much about the technical side of Teletronics’ products as anyone in the department. The sales rep and my boss thought I was ready to field test.

When I arrived for surgery, I discovered that the cardiologist had blown off the implant procedure because he’d scheduled a golf game some time earlier. The surgeon was not a cardiology specialist, but about as general a surgeon as a doctor can be. He managed to place the first lead, of two, fairly efficiently if not ideally. Positioning the second lead, the atrial lead, was far above his pay grade and he’d never done a dual chamber pacemaker before. After several attempts, it was obvious that he’d managed to incorrectly entangle the atrial lead in the coronary sinus, which did not properly synchronize the atrium and ventricle. The surgeon had an argument with the anesthesiologist about the structure of the heart: the surgeon was wrong, the anesthesiologist was right, and I stayed out of the argument. After failing multiple times to get good numbers from the atrial lead, the surgeon threw a pout and left the surgical suite and a nurse sewed up the patient.

Before I left the hospital, I left a message for the sales rep that the implant had gone poorly and that I suspected a follow-up surgery would be necessary. Two days later, I was invited to a Denver hospital to watch an actual cardio-vascular surgeon remove the atrial lead and implant a new lead in a functional position. There were a lot of jokes in the OR about the Glenwood Springs surgical staff (I stood up for the anesthesiologist) and rural hospitals in general.

Glenwood Springs is a hyper-rich community with as many idle rich “residents” as humans. Still, all that being true, two of the three doctors involved that procedure were among the worst I experienced in ten years of attending implants, “battery” replacements, lead extractions, follow-ups, and pacemaker/ICD troubleshooting sessions. The surgeon was absolutely clueless about cardiac structure and had no more business trying to implant a dual-lead pacemaker than does a veterinarian who specialized in horses and cattle.

All that was in 1992, post-Reagan but before the US tax system’s mangling from that period started spitting out more money-fondlers than doctors, engineers, scientists, and other useful professionals. Since then, almost anyone with less-than-perfect idealism has been drawn into the equity capital/money manager/hedge fund gold mines, leaving the country with a giant hole where national expertise used to be.

While it’s true that rural hospitals are dying off because they’ve been absorbed in the vulture capital nightmare, they are also unable to attract talented doctors and physicians’ assistants. Once you get any distance from a major city, hospitals are typically “sharing” physicians and specialists across long distances. Odds are that in any sort of emergency, those hospitals are not much more than helicopter pads with semi-skilled EMTs providing first aid, until the patients can be evacuated to a city. Even major cities are having problems staffing their hospitals with doctors and specialists and some specialties (family medicine, internal medicine, dermatology, cardiology, neurology, psychiatry, gastroenterology, endocrinology, oncology, infectious disease, orthopedic surgery, plastic surgery, urology, and pediatrics, for example) are in desperate shortage. There are no solutions in the foreseeable future to a drastic shortage of new doctors in the medical school pipelines.

The Republican’s Big Godawful Bill is about to make all of that move from desperate to disastrous. Cutting the heart out of federal support for the ACA and Medicate and, soon, Medicare will accelerate rural hospital closings in the short term and eliminate any sort of future revival in the much longer term. For a lot of rural communities, this is very likely an “extinction event.” As Republicans have proven, repeatedly since Nixon, breaking things is easy and “fun,” but building and repairing things takes time and skill. Republicans and Republican voters are notoriously short on either patience and talent.