(Image: ‘Vibrant Emotional Art,’ generated by AI, and found here.)
Early-evening Sunday here in California’s Central Valley. The day before the shit hits the fan in real-time, and in an official capacity — no longer talk but shitty action.
Tomorrow morning at nine Pacific Standard Time — noon in DC — the T-Rump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the US, in an action hard to handle as an actual event in three-hour real jump time. It’s a horror of anticipation. The T-Rump and all his ass-kissing shitheels are beyond terrible pieces-of-shit and we can/should expect the worst. Of course, you’ve read/heard about the shit T-Rump plans starting on ‘Day One,’ from becoming a ‘dictator‘ to a mass roundup of immigrants to reforms to the federal workforce, among a shitload of other nefarious shit, actions coming off from among hundreds of executive orders the Orange Turd is expected to sign Monday afternoon — the shit will be deep and will fill the zone.
Called “shock and awe” for reason: ‘Yes, the stated goal of “Shock and Awe” is to “paralyze the enemy” and “destroy their will to fight.” That is exactly why Trump and his allies are using that term. But this time it’s not against a foreign nation, but us. Their Day One goal is for Trump to unleash a massive number of Executive Orders in the hopes this will paralyze us with fear so we don’t fight back.‘
One of the best right-on, though sad-ass, views/analyses of the coming days was found Friday at Lawyers, Guns&Money:
Couple pre-inauguration thoughts, such as I can muster right now.
1) Going to try to avoid news as much as I can til I roll back into the office in February and have to deal with the fallout from whatever nonsense they’re going to impose. That I’m not looking forward to this is an understatement. The mix of cruelty for cruelty’s sake (let’s kick out all the trans people), cruelty for religious purposes (abortion restrictions and eventually a punitive article in the UCMJ probably), stupidity (watching these people try to navigate the world’s largest bureaucracy will be a sight to behold), and corruption (which will undoubtedly consist of buying all sorts of half-baked AI solutions that will get a bunch of people killed) is too much to think about right now. But, think about it eventually I must.
2) For whatever anything is worth, I implore people not to get hung up on whether the things they’re doing are illegal vs legal but bad. The overall point/context/thesis is this is awful awful stuff. “Lawful but awful” is not a particularly meaningful distinction. I’m not saying it’s not worth bringing up, but what I mean is I’m going to roll my eyes so far they’ll come back around on the bottom if I read any op-eds/smart minds telling me “AKSCHUALLY, Trump can fire all the generals and replace with him stooges, it’s part of being C-in-C”. Like, sure, but that’s not the point (though, why would the punditry ever get the point? Like [Dudley Smith says to] Sgt Vincennes in “LA Confidential,” “Don’t start now, boyo. You haven’t had the practice.”). Eyes on the prize. Again, for all the good it does.
3) I have no real prediction for what exactly they’re going to do or how successful they’ll be, but in general it’s a lot easier to destroy than build, and since their zeitgeist is “government is bad,” I don’t think it’s going to be very hard to smash things. That it’ll rebound in many ways and make it harder to do certain things is small comfort. Also I’m very cynical about their being political consequences. They will run shit into the ground and probably this will piss voters off enough to win back the House in two years or whatever, but by and large we’ve oscillated between parties by a few points for the last quarter century; they run shit into the ground and thanks to their control of the judiciary and the Senate/states, and just being ahead of the curve politically vs the Dems, it’s a completely asymmetric world.
4) There’s a view, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, that things always work out in the end or it can’t get that bad. I think this is partly just wishful thinking, but also we’re sort of in a niche spot; being an affluent professional (as the mean poster probably is) in this spot in world and American history is as privileged as one gets. By definition, everything else that happened before “worked out” in the sense that we’re here now. Of course that’s absurd as a soothing argument: millions were killed by Stalin and Mao and Hitler or starvation or disease or what have you; it didn’t “work out” for them just because you and I can buy fresh mango in January for a pittance. And it’s not like there aren’t numerous examples today, right here and now, of societies that are Not Great. Granted, there’s a long way to fall before we’re sitting around a fire eating the remains of some Others we’ve found and bested in the Wasteland, but, as a poster on another board said, the point isn’t to survive, it’s to thrive. And whatever else happens we’re about to Not Do That. It’s bad, it’s ok to be worried about it being bad, you probably should be worried about it being bad; that it PROBABLY won’t turn into the Holocaust is not really much relief.
I dunno, man. That’s all I’ve got. I’ve obviously got other stuff I’m dealing with right now and I’m going to try to avoid news as much as I can for a couple of weeks (which probably means trying not to come to the board). This sucks, though.
Yeah. Depressingly, I couldn’t have worded it better.
In turn, a thought on how to handle this shit comes from survivors of the devastatingly horrid wildfires in the LA Basin — Alec Gellis and his girlfriend, Kelly Lauren, escaped the Pacific Palisades fire with their lives but lost everything else. Terrible but it was the second fire story for the couple — although forced to evacuate, they survived the Franklin Fire which burned more than 4,000 acres near Malibu last December.
Losing material possessions requires a spiritual bent (from CBS affiliate KCAL-TV):
Both were able to get out unscathed, though Kelly Lauren lost a lifetime worth of her writing.
“It’s just hard,” Lauren said, fighting back tears. “Everything I’d, like, written for my whole life. I journal and write a lot, it’s just the little things you remember afterwards.”
She says that despite the loss of her home and collection of writings, she’s happy that she and Gellis got out when they did.“It reminds me of, like, the value of what is not tangible,” she said.
Actual observation for the times.
Never-T-Rumper Republican Charlie Sykes at the Guardian:
“It will not be a continuation of the first term. Trump 2.0 will be far more radical and we’ve already seen that during the transition both in terms of policy and in personnel. In many ways, Trump 1.0 will seem at least relatively normal compared to what is about to happen.
“You’re seeing this in Trump’s behaviour. Almost on a daily basis he is fraying the fabric of our society and feeding the divisions in American society. Part of the challenge will be the assaults will be on so many fronts. It will be everything, everywhere, all at once – and that will start from day one.”
Enough is enough.
Disaster ahead, or not, yet here we are once again…
