Guess what guys, it’s time to embrace the horror! Look, we’ve got front row tickets to the end of the earth! Rockhound: Armageddon.
If I were raising children today I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.
If I were in my 30s I’d walk around in a cold sweat.
But I turned 77 today. And these days I feel like I’m staring down the barrel of my own mortality.
So lately I’ve been thinking about that front row ticket. About embracing the horror.
Like Rockhound in my favorite disaster movie.
Listen, if nothing else it’ll be a hell of a show.
It was not always thus.
The Nixon years came and went. And I knew that too would pass.
Reagan turned politics into show business. And I was confident that cooler heads would prevail.
Bush II started a war on a whim. And I expected his Mideast madness to abate.
But now?
I no longer assume that this too shall pass.
Or that cooler heads are even still out there.
I’m not confident that the America I was born into…
… the America I grew up in, went to war for, paid taxes to, raised my family and pursued my career in …
…can survive this madness.
“The constitution is not a suicide pact,” a Supreme Court Justice once wrote. In a more innocent age.
But the election just passed sure feels a lot like an American suicide pact.
How did so many of us became so besotted on his Kool Aid?
It’s not that I don’t care anymore. I do.
And it’s not that I don’t think I have anything to lose.
I am painfully aware that everything I possess – my savings, my retirement, my home, my health, even my liberty – could dissolve in the Great American Unraveling that seems to be hurling toward us with all the velocity and inevitability of a planet killing meteor.
I know very well his capacity for evil – for incompetence, for chaos, for fecklessness, for treachery.
We have never before seen his like.
He could, and very well may, destroy all that we hold dear.
But I can’t blame him.
Because he was arguably the most transparent candidate in American history.
He told us exactly who he is. Explicitely so.
And he told us what he intended to do.
There is nothing about his character, his amorality, his capacity for hate and bigotry and his greed that he didn’t beat us over the head with. Again and again and again.
We managed to survive his first term with our democracy more or less intact. And we counted ourselves lucky.
And still we sent him back again.
Why? I dunno…for the sheer entertainment value maybe.
As though America is a reality TV show. And we contestants were expected to behave badly in order to prevail.
Are we not entertained?
We are not a serious people any more.
We who glorify gratuitous violence. We who identify with the outlaw. The cruelty is now the point.
Our politicians tell us government is bad.
But they have no inclination to govern better.
Instead they spend their time goading Americans into hating and fearing other Americans.
We are “bloated, fat and disgusting” this bloated, fat, disgusting demigogue tells us.
We are steadily eroding the very institutions – public education foremost among them – that made America great.
Intellectuals are now presumed to be the enemy. The media tell us nothing but lies. Scientists are charlatans.
What purpose vaccines if not to brainwash and poison us?
My friends wonder if America can survive him.
I wonder if America deserves to survive him.
Perhaps my children’s generation may yet save us from the abyss. I dearly hope so. For their sakes.
But I’m an old man now. My bones ache.
And I’m thinking about that front row ticket.
About embracing the horror.
That is the end of the America I knew and loved.
(Disclaimer: Or, I dunno, maybe I’m just feeling bummed out about turning 77.)
FreeGNV 