Too Soon to Celebrate

Friends and folks who read my Substack and Rat’s Eye pages have sent me notes asking if I was too “pessimistic” about the US midterms.  Could be, but history wouldn’t backup that sentiment.  It felt like we should be celebrating a change of weather/seas when John Kennedy was elected and that didn’t turn out well.  Jimmy Carter was an actual reformer and he accomplished a lot, in spite of a sluggard Congress and an easily distracted voting population, but Reagan (like Trump) reversed every good thing that happened in Carter’s single term in less than a year and by the end of Reagan’s 2^nd term he’d tossed out much of the 1940s media, banking, environmental, and law enforcement regulations and reform.  Clinton managed to balance the budget, once, brought back some energy and environment progress and made significant steps to increase national security systems and enforcement.  He was, in his own words, “an Eisenhower Republican,” certainly not a progressive or reform Democrat.  G.W. Bush literally blew that up with the 9/11 sequence of stupid moves, put the oil companies back in the economy’s driver seat, violated internal law so ruthlessly that he and his VP, Cheney, were hated internationally, and blasted the national debt into the stratosphere.  Bush II, like Reagan and his daddy, screwed up the economy so badly that even short-attention-span American voters kept their heads long enough to keep Obama in office for two terms.  But the “backlash” (politispeak for “racist asshole vote”) from 8 years of a competent black President produced the worst president in American history (Trump, of course) and his negligent COVID homicide of 1,000,000 Americans and creating an exodus of doctors and healthcare professionals from our medical system with an incompetent federal response wasn’t enough to create a lasting memory. 

We’re living in a weird biological experiment, at least in this country and maybe many others.  The smartest, most capable people who have every lived are right here among us and the dumbest bastards and bitches who have ever stumbled into a bar, stoned on fentanyl and looking for more, are all around us.  The morons are breeding like rats and the best of us are holding off reproduction, not wanting to bring offspring into a cesspool climate disaster that will likely be inhospitable for human life in a few decades.

My “fellow Americans” have an ability that I used to hear aimed at the dumbest of the dumb (notice I included the “b”), “They can fuck up a wet dream.”  Here where I live in rural Minnesota, my neighbors voted for every loser Republican running for state and federal office and all of our elected local “representatives” were solidly among the loud and proud “worst-of-the-worst” Trump cultists in the country.  Rural Minnesota is dumber, more brainwashed, more violent, and less informed than Texans, if you can imagine that? 

Maybe from a long distance, the United States appears to have turned a corner away from fascism.  Up close and personally, I can’t see if from where I live.  All three of the Lessor Minnesota (rural, low population, low education, low information) US Representatives were re-elected: Tom Emmer, Pete Stauber, and Michelle Fischbach.  If it weren’t for Rochester, my district would have re-elected Brad Finstad and my country voted overwhelmingly for that useless nepobaby pretend-farmboy. 

The US has never proactively put the brakes on a degenerative slide toward national disintegration.  In 1775 there were more Tories than patriots, in 1861 there were far more Confederate fighters than Union, and in 1941 more wannabe fascists than antifascists.  We haven’t hit the bottom of this barrel by a long shot.