Until this last election -- which was NOT an election since it was controlled by Putin for his own ends which included destroying America -- I thought that the world was going along, bumping and groaning, into a progressive future. I respected Obama, though he seemed irrelevant to my life except for the Chicago years. It seemed reasonable to step apart from the heaving mass of the world by going back to Valier, next to the Blackfeet Reservation but unrelated to it. I would write a book, make a little money, claim old friends and places, and quietly grow old.
Everything I expected has reversed itself: publishing as a business; writing being skill-based; old friends dying young; lasting achievement in art; and so on. But at the top of the list is a shambling old man with dangling arms, his suit coat flapping, his bottom sticking out, his hair glued down, his face distorted -- a man whose coloring changes day by day, depending on his cosmetics. This man is determined to reverse everything Obama did, even if he agrees with it, because like a criminal alcoholic on an Indian reservation at least he is white. And his big security secret is mafia backing.
Fortunately for him, crime movies have shifted so that we turn up our noses at the straight-laced FBI and fall in love with mafia chiefs with psychological problems. After all, Marlon Brando never played a cop. And he felt entitled to be a fat old man with more money than he could spend, even after buying family. Because he had "talent", whatever that is. It might be just good luck. Anyway, acting is not so mysterious these days. It's in the camera. And a good screenwriter, predictable enough to please the masses.
I never expected to read the following about an article in VICE, which specializes in cruising the verboten edge of society in the name of truth and revelation: "The whole drinking-is-awesome ethos is tired, the nudity is boring unless you're a horny 14-year-old, and so many of the movies 'Animal House' inspired are terrible." . . . "Drunken frat boys don't seem so charming anymore, and the film's gender politics are fucked beyond repair." It was on my Twitter feed this morning.
Consider the strange mix here, the profanity mixed with a pitch for propriety. Or is that what they're talking about? Do they mean there are worse and more shocking things? Yeah, how about kids in cages, farmers going broke, presidents who stay up all night to be in the only reality they believe -- old black-and-white movies.
Like many others, I had thought that if there were a law against something, that there were consequences. If a president were told not to do something, he would naturally not do it. But this one pays no attention at all. He just does disruptive, damaging things with no second thought -- no first thought either. Judge's rulings means nothing to him. Instead of no clothes (thank goodness) he believes in no restrictions -- though his life has been severely restrained to the artificial world of real estate.
At first I believed that the Republicans who cover and augment graft and corruption were invincible and taking care of their own. After being astounded at first that nothing happened to stop Trump, I gradually developed the theory that those who had the power to monitor and correct, were leaving the miscreants to their bad practices in order to accumulate evidence against them. The bad guys, many of them old white guys with only a few years to live, are betting that they have a couple more months to hide their loot and scurry to safety. But they are old and greedy. You know the story of the monkey-trap that is only a vase full of cookies that has a narrow neck so that once the monkey grips a big fistful of cookies and refuses to give them up in order to escape, it's caught? The sheer number and international scope of what enforcers are finding and noting is staggering. Some of it isn't even hidden -- maybe unrecognized.
This wickedness is not new and some would say that the abiding and deep source is war, esp. the ambiguous sand wars that feed spectacular explosions into our news stories. War defines everything as conflict, power struggle, and then sells snake oil meant to convince both sides they can win. When someone says to Trump, "you haven't got the truth" and he retorts -- without knowing anything about it -- "You're wrong," he's moving the argument from factual/actual to Powerland, where belligerence wins.
In this country sex has been defined as middle-Eurasia blondes with breast implants, hanging hair bleached, wrinkles erased, eyes painted, mostly trophies. There's no name for this, but it isn't sex. A kind of "drag." I doubt whether coitus is even involved, at least not without chemicals. So much has been revealed, even the degeneration of Hugh Heffner and other icons of supposed "freedom" that even fourteen-year-old boys know that it's boring. The immature want a mother they can own the way they did as toddlers. (Some of these guys are middle-aged.) Both genders treat "sex" as tokens to be exchanged freely, no cost except . . . I think you know.
Money has been replaced by credit. Now and then an enterprising journalist will add up the amounts that people owe in credit card debt or school loans or new cars and stagger us all with the size of the amount. The government promises rewards for achieving populations, and then cancels them; promises safety nets to the increasing number of people who can't cope and then cancels them. It's all bait and switch. We can't go on like this. We only got this far because all money is merely bookkeeping and a phone call or computer program can change the numbers. There are statistics, fudged numbers, and damned lies.
In the meantime hundreds and eventually thousands will die of heat, bad food, and mysterious maladies from toxic chemicals; eventually expected pandemics as disruptors develop. We've been protected by our divisions but that's not true anymore.
We don't know who the next president will be or how we will choose that man or woman. We don't know what will replace the Electoral College, gerrymandering, current voter registration, and all the other problems. But it will have to happen or we simply won't be here anymore. And Putin? It's only a matter of time before he's gone, one way or another
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