Who’s the “bad guy” here? (Getting the Story Wrong)

 

I’ve mentioned this before, but, where I live in rural Minnesota, the world is so upside-down it’s now beyond comical and into clinically self-destructive.  Either that or Hollywood has had me fooled for 70+ years.  For all that time, I thought I knew which side was good and which was evil in those pulp fiction stories I grew up watching (and still watch).  From It’s A Wonderful Life to Chinatown to Cool Hand Luke to James Bond movies to the Die Hard collection and every other “good vs evil” movie and television series, it never occurred to me that half of the American audience was cheering for who I knew, without a doubt, were the bad guys. 

I’m not sure I ever want to be in a full movie theater again, knowing that half of the audience is likely to be rooting for the worst characters screenwriters can imagine and invent.  In those states where every other nitwit is carrying a loaded weapon, I don’t even want to take a bathroom break on a long drive across the country.  I’ll take my chances pissing on the side of the road over being in a building with those nutjobs. 

Little Bill Daggett, from Unforgiven, has to be the role model for every scumbag “Constitutional sheriff” in the country; although the Fargo series’ libertarian Sheriff Roy Tillman might have jumped that shark.  One of the things you can count on is that, no matter how badly they do their job of enforcing the actual law, Constitutional sheriffs keep getting re-elected because a substantial number of Americans love bad guys and want to be just like them.  Al Pachino played the freakin’ devil in The Devil’s Advocate and that character is a lightweight compared to Musk and Trump and the Republican House lunatics.  And Hans Gruber?  He’s just a typical CEO, I guess.  How about Jeff Bridges?  Was he a good guy as “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski or an even better guy as Stark Industries CEO Obadiah Stane in Iron Man?  

Out of boredom and escapism, last night Mrs. Day and I watched a really terrible Liam Neeson B-movie, “The Ice Road.”  Neeson is, supposedly, the good guy; a down-on-his-luck trucker and his Iraq War PTSD and aphasia-damaged brother  who are part of a “team” trying to get equipment to a a collapsed mine a few hundred miles north of Winnipeg in early spring.  Spoiler alert: one semi-member of the “team” is working for the corporate assholes who paid some of the miners $100 a day to shut off the methane alarms to save money.  Of course, they hit a pocket of methane which causes the mine explosion, collapse, and the trapped miners.  The corporate assholes (aka Musk/Trump/Bezos/etc clones) are paying one of the rescue characters to sabatog the rescue attempt and kill the rescuers.  As usual, the hired assassin is practically indestructible (sorta like thye robots or drones that Musk/Trump will use to put down any sort of citizen revolt) and at least 40 minutes of screen time is burned trying to escape and kill him. 

If you are a Trumper/Republican, the movie had a really sad ending with the assassin dying, the executives getting caught for blowing up the mine and sabotaging the rescue, and they get fired and arrested by Canadian government officials.  All through this movie, I tried to put myself in the mindset of the 76M Republican voters who, obviously, would be cheering on the executives and their hired gun, but I failed. 

Seriously.  In what world do middle and lower-middle and even poor people celebrate the trashing of the United States by someone as obviously evil and outright treasonous as Elmo Musk and Two Face . . . whoops! Harvey Dent . . . I mean Donald Trump?  I clearly need a new bifocal prescription.  Maybe it’s time for trifocals? 

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.