The Best (and the Worst) of Us

A wingnut posted a comment on my Facebook page (which I will soon be abandoning), claiming that Trump was “in my head forever.” That is, of course, a scary thought, but after some consideration (and a little worry) I realized that is almost the opposite of true. However, these guys (at right) and their fellow cult members are very much in my head; and they should be. Trump, on his own, is nothing more than a New York mobster turned cartoon character. The 76 million fools who fell for his con have self-identified themselves as proud members of the historical American “worst of us” and they are exactly the kind of threat America has faced since the moment this “great experiment” became an ideal that we have yet to live up to.

In their books Generations: the History of America’s Future (1991), and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997) Neil Howe and William Strauss proposed argue the idea that American history flows in 80-100 year cycles that always climax in a disastrous crises that will reshape the country. We’re over due for that crisis and Donald Trump’s second administration and the associated fascism and oligarchy ought to be a more than sufficient trigger.  Of course, “past performance is no guarantee of future results” and any one of those previous crisis points (The American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and WWII) could have had terrible outcomes.

The Worst of Us in 1776 were called “Tories” and they supported the British government’s repressive taxation, limits to commerce and expansion of rights, and the British monarchy and all of the inherited wealth and power that comes with that form of government. Obviously, Tories were the conservatives of their day. Before the 2016 election, I saw a huge Trump sign outside of Rochester, Minnesota claiming “This is our 1776!” Irony is not in the conservative’s wheelhouse, but that was hard not to laugh at. Today, a day after King Trump was re-elected after 34 felony convictions, a civil suit rape where Trump was declared a rapist by the jury and judge, and after Trump should have been prosecuted for insurrection after the January 6, 2021 riots, it appears 2025 was the Tories’ 1776.

As George Washington wrote after suffering losses early in the Revolutionary war, “The reflection upon my Situation, & that of this Army, produces many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in Sleep. Few People know the Predicament we are In …” This war is not yet finished and we can only hope that the “moral universe” arc will continue to bend “toward justice.”  The Best of Us made incredible sacrifices in an attempt to create a government that represented everyone equally. The Revolutionary Army included men and women of every race, including African Americans and Native Americans, who gave their lives and their fortune for the cause. They beat the most powerful nation in the world, soundly, and forced the British Empire to abandon most of North America. Sadly, the move toward justice was stalled when the former Revolutionary Army soldiers wanted their back pay and relief from oppressive taxation intended to generate funds for the money class. The Congresscritters of the day decided to repay financiers and allow them to levy taxes on farmer-soldiers that resulted in Shay’s Rebellion and the government putting down the rebellion in favor of moneyed interests. The Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, including a very undemocratic Senate and the Electoral College, to make sure democracy never seriously broke out in the United States. The moral arc flatlined for another 80 years as a result.

In the American Civil war, 1861 was a rough year. The Worst of Us, the Southern Elites,  not only owned black slaves but they wanted to enslave everyone who wasn’t of “their class” and hoped to convince poor whites in the border states to join their fight to enslave themselves. While southerners still insist the “War Between the States” was about states’ rights, history quickly defeats that silly argument. The Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens wrote, “The new [Confederate] constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by . . . most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of . . . the equality of races. This was an error. . . ”

For two terrible years, The Best of Us appeared to be on the verge of not only losing the Union but the Confederates seemed to be able to go where ever they wanted; including well into Pennsylvania and on their way to Washington, D.C.  Gettysburg, followed by the Emancipation Proclamation, changed the arc of the moral universe at that moment and U.S. Grant put the slavers into route in 1864 resulting in Lee surrendering in 1865. Reconstruction began to put a serious curve into the moral arc but was quickly flattened again after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1965 and Andrew Johnson became President. Johnson was a southern Democrat (today’s Republicans) and he withstood America’s first impeachment attempt, although he was abandoned by Democrats before the 1868 election and replaced by U.S. Grant. Grant did not accomplish much in his term, even though black voters put him well over the top in the election. And the moral curve flattened, again.

The next US crisis was the double-whammy of the Great Depression, starting in October of 1929, and World War II, beginning with the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Leading up to the Depression was the same kind of Morbidly Rich excesses we’re seeing today (although today’s robber barons make the 20^th Century bastards look middle-class). Florida real estate scams (where the term “Ponzi Scheme” originated), an inflated and irrational stock market, monetary manipulations (Bitcoin’s great-grandfathers), and massive financial inequality drove the economy to the brink and beyond. The Worst of Us, fascists in all shapes and costumes, ran wild in the hinterlands of the US. Nazis marched in practically every major city, from coast-to-coast. The KKK marched with them and in their own clown circuses. There were Nazi sympathizers in both houses of Congress right up until Japan attacked the US Navy at Pearl Harbor and public support suddenly turned against them.  It didn’t hurt that Franklin Roosevelt was President, thanks to the Great Depression, and he was ready to push the curve back upward.

The sacrifices The Best of Us made in World War II are stunning.  There are sections of libraries and, even, whole libraries dedicated to the stories of men and women fighting the enemies of freedom and decency.  So much was committed by so many that it took 40 years for The Worst of Us to find a candidate slimy enough, Ronald Reagan, to convince the American public to slit its own throat and like it.  The moral arc inclined toward justice for a solid 40 years, slowly but upward, until 1981.  Then it flatlined again until 2017 when it tipped solidly downward with a slight bounce-back in 2021 before it went into a steep dive in 2024 with the connection of the Morbidly Rich to the morally corrupt Republican Party.

The startling characteristic of the current crop of The Worst of Us is their total lack of purpose beyond “hurting liberals.” The MAGA crowd only seems to want to injure people who are not like them, which is the majority of the country. They aren’t trying to make anything “great,” but they are trying to drag everything down to their base level as expressed in their constant complaint, “I’m tired of everyone doing better than me.” My wife calls these people “artless bastards” and it’s hard to argue against that description. The MAGA crowd contribute nothing of value to society or the world. Their moment in the sun peaked in high school, if ever, and they desperately want to return to a world where their parents took care of all of life’s complications. Of course, the MAGA crowd are all well past childhood and the closest thing they can find to “parents” is the wimpy elderly golfer who whines like a baby but somehow appears, to them, as a “strong man.”

So, here we are again at one of those critical moments where The Best of Us are pitted against The Worst of Us.  A 1960s quote credited to Nikita Khruschev threatened Americans that Russia would "will bury you from within without firing a shot."   Fake-Americans like Tucker Carlson and the Fox talking heads are Russia’s favorite children. The Trump business “empire” was built on loans from Russian banks, after Donnie foolishly squandered his $800M inheritance.  Republican Congresscritters happily accept campaign contributions from Russian oligarchs.  Today, Khruschev appears to be on history’s winning side, but this moment isn’t over . . . yet.

Who Are We, Where Are We, and Where Are We Going?

The first question, “who are we,” is the saddest question of the lot. 77,302,580 of us elected a President who, at the time of the election) was charged with a total of 88 felony counts (including inciting an insurrection on January 6, 2021) across four criminal investigations and who was convicted of 34 of them. They voted for a Presidential candidate who was sued for defamation and rape in civil court and who “lost two defamation cases to Carroll in 2023 and 2024 in federal court after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing the onetime columnist and subsequently defaming her. Two juries awarded Carroll $5 million and $83 million.” This sham of a man is a known mobster. He is so corrupt that even the most incompetent of the western world’s banks wouldn’t risk other people’s money on him. After all that, Donald Trump, convict-traitor-con-artist-business-failure, was elected President of the United States even while promising to blow up the country and trash the economy and sell-off our national security to practically any bidder. Worse, about 90 million eligible voters were either too lazy, too stupid, too cowardly, or too stoned or intoxicated to bother to vote at all. That is the quickest way for me to sum up who we are. If the United States of America isn’t one of Trump’s “shithole countries,” no one is and there is no such thing relative to my home country.

As a result, here’s “where we are”: a country with a convicted convict as President, a boot-licking billionaire’s pool boy for Vice President, a Cabinet filled with the moral, intellectual, and competency equivalent of a coked-up biker gang, a Congress more than half-filled with uneducated, cowardly, treasonous, superstitious and anti-science, bought-and-paid-for fools who were cheaply corrupted with a billionaires’ pocket change, and a county that is overwhelmingly stocked with marching morons who cheer this clown college on as if they are the second coming of Beelzebub himself.

Leaving us with “where we are going.” It didn’t take the Republicans a whole week to blow up a good bit of the stock market, with the Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq all dropping significantly on the 27^th due to depressing news about crypto currencies, AI competition from China, and vaccine manufacturers’ losing value anticipating the nutcase anti-vaxer, Robert Kennedy Jr., heading the Department of Health and Human Services. That’s just the beginning of where this is all going. Usually, it takes a Republican at least a whole term to trash the economy. Nixon threw the nation into a decade of recession with his Vietnam War excesses, Reagan extended Nixon’s recession for another dozen years with dribble-down economics, and Bush II blew up everything from manufacturing to banking and housing to restaurant jobs with the Great Recession, even Trump made it all the way to early 2020 before losing more jobs than any President in history with his botched handling and cover-up of the Covid 19 pandemic response. This time, Republicans have hit the ground running, disabling practically every critical regulatory, national security, consumer protection, and infrastructure investment apparatus the federal government provides. I expect a full-blown recession to be in progress by no later than the end of the year. And it could be a whole lot worse than that.

Republican threats to dismantle FEMA and anything resembling federal support to states has all of the income-producing states on the west coast talking about stopping federal income tax payments to the federal government. That has several other blue states buzzing about becoming part of Canada or cutting off federal funding. Red states, of course, are all dependent on blue states for their welfare and they can’t threaten to leave the Union because no productive, educated citizen cares if they go. Russia and Putin have to be celebrating their propaganda successes because this is exactly what Nikita Khrushchev promised in 1956 when he threatened/promised “We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within." If the United States does manage to self-destruct, that will leave China and Russia as the world’s remaining super-powers.

I suppose this is what Republicans promised when they threatened to “make America grate again?” I know they are sure grating on my patience, tolerance, sense of security, and humor.  However, it’s not hard to see where this is going with Putin’s “useful idiot” as President, a fascist South African billionaire’s pool boy backing him up, the Secretary of Defense being a semi-literate talking head from Russia’s “favorite American television network,” the rest of the Cabinet possessing not a single useful piece of knowledge of skill, a House of Representative that is half-filled with fools and crooks who are busy counting their bribery checks, a Senate that destabilized and too cowardly to even enforce established federal law, and an Extreme Court that is the disgusting laughing stock of every literate person in the world. Republicans have disabled and disarmed the entire federal government and all of our enemies are waiting to see how far we’ll tear ourselves apart before they destroy the remnants.

If you rural goobers think you have it bad now, your imaginations are as stunted as I have always suspected. You don’t pay enough taxes to put a coat of oil on the highways that pass through your abandoned and neglected towns. Ten generations of the best and brightest who were born and raised in your hateful, racist, superstitious villages have abandoned “home” as fast as possible and they’ve been paying your bills from the nation’s great cities since the turn of the last century. The Republicans you’ve elected will “fix” that and you might live long enough to feel a moment of gratitude for what you’ve been given before it all goes away. Is that “great” enough for you?

All the Devils Will Be There

The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2. Ariel to Prospero, relating what Ferdinand cried out as he plunged into the water from the shipwreck. Ferdinand recognizes the true and evil nature of his father King Alonso and the royal party with whom he traveled. In the full quote, Ariel uses a simile to compare Ferdinand’s hair to reeds: "Then all afire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand, With hair up-staring, – then like reeds, not hair, – Was the first man that leaped; cried, ‘Hell is empty And all the devils are here.’" – William Shakespeare

In their fantastic book describing all of the corporate criminals who caused the Great Recession, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera fully documented the names and crimes that should have resulted in a bunch of equity capitalists handing from telephone poles or being executed in firing squads. Sadly, it only too the election of a black man to President of the United States to distract the Marching Morons from a righteous anger into their usual self-destructive stupid fallback, racism. Even worse, President Barak Obama calmly and competently righted the sinking US financial ship and put in place a collection of safeguards that would, until now, keep the vulture capitalists from blowing up the system again. Even Trump in his first term couldn’t break that lock, but with a MAGA Extreme Court and Congress on his leash it won’t take them long this time.

While the MAGAots will be dreaming that they’ve fucked the liberals on January 20^th, 2025, it won’t be long before they discover they’ve fucked themselves and, very likely, there won’t be a way back to the old “normal” for at least a generation or two, if ever.

The new normal may be very different from the one they might faintly remember; when unions could protect workers, when Unemployment and Workers’ Compensation insurance protected them from workplace cycles and injuries, when the ACA kept insurance companies from gouging them for “pre-existing conditions” (like being fat and diabetic, as in the two wannabe-Russians at left), when Social Security and Medicare kept old people from living in cardboard boxes in rural economic dead-zones, when the FCC, FDC, FTC, FDA, and the rest of the federal bureaucracies kept the country safe from the abuses of the robber barons and fascists. You know, “the good old days when America was great?”

There are roughly 800 billionaires in the US at this moment (and fewer than 3,000 in the world) and 320,000,000 of the rest of us (there are fewer than 3,000 billionaires in the world and 8,000,000,000 of the rest of us). On Monday, January 20^th, 2025 (ironically, also Martin Luther King Day in the US), it’s safe to say that almost all of those 800 billionaires and their spawn will be in Washington, D.C. and all of the country’s problems will be gathered together to celebrate successfully having screwed everyone else. If there was ever a perfect moment to test a small neutron bomb (primarily to save as many precious Washington monuments, museums, and historic buildings as possible) January 20^th, 2025 is it.

A better solution, to minimize collateral damage, might be to deliver a bus-load of lethally-contaminated caviar to the Trump Inaugural Ceremonies. If there was ever a delivery system designed to target the worst-of-the-worst it might be caviar (although Trump and his low-brow ilk probably won’t touch “fishy-stuff” so a basket of poisoned Big Macs would be necessary). There may never be a better moment to put a pause on the  "dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra wealthy people" that Joe Biden warned us about in his final Presidential address to the nation. This is definitely a moment when “Hell is empty And all the devils are here” and there may not be another like it for a long time.