“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Thus spoke U.S. President Donald Trump on his Truth Social social media on Easter Sunday.
You don’t even need to let that sink in. It will of its own accord: Easter Sunday.
So, yes, it really has come to this: Our nation’s foreign affairs are being conducted by the equivalent of inebriated Uncle Rufus from his seat at the American Legion bar outside Toad Suck, Arkansas.
What a crazy old bastard.
What’s especially unnerving and odious is that my generation elected this potty-mouthed ignoramus, serial liar, draft-dodger, narcissist, convicted rapist, and an overseer of six bankrupt businesses. Six.
And not once have we elected him, but twice — to the highest office in the land.
It should be clear to everyone by now that my generation has woefully failed in its civic duties, and a depressingly large percentage of my group is either too dumb, too deluded, too self-centered or too altogether out of touch to have an inkling of the damage they have done to themselves, their children, their grandchildren and the nation.
We’ve screwed up.
And the thing is, as far as I know, there’s still no rehab for stupidity.
We gotta live with this shit and I’ve no clue how to do it. So I hope you haven’t come here looking for advice. I got nothing but despair.
But even I know that despair is a loser’s game.
“No society can expect its children to engage with a world they think has already given up on them.”
Robert Pondiscio, a former public school teacher who is now at the American Enterprise Institute, made that remark several months back while urging teachers to avoid adopting “an unbearable bleakness” in their classrooms.
Optimism, he argued, is an essential civic virtue.
Yet optimism is something in this day and age that seems to be its own category of rare earth mineral, but it’s out there, and it must be dug from the soil and championed.
Perhaps the only streak of optimism to be found in Trump’s disgraceful Easter Sunday post is that it opens yet another window to his soul that should make it easy to see through for all but the most deranged of his supporters: This is a man off his meds and off his rocker.
This is a man woefully unfit to lead, a man so morally and mentally stunted that questions about his sanity are not only apt they are essential.
Wherever you are on this spectrum of certainty and doubt, it’s okay to start small.
Let’s not join our old high school friends in re-posting ICE-friendly AI smut films; let’s not lean into that pot-like buzz of indulging in quick anger on our social media feeds.
When they go low, we go high really wasn’t bad advice. The air is cleaner and clearer above the clouds.
The view is better, different. It’s true, of course, that our technologies have made it easier for so many of us to see so much more of the world, but never before have so many of us seen so much without understanding what we are seeing.
Take time to understand the world. At the very least, take time to try.
Time may well be running out for there’s no dodging the fact that the USA has become a rouge nation where war crimes and the delight of bombing another nation “back to the stone age” are dangerously close to being normalized.
But there’s nothing normal about insanity.
All has become a boggy black bitterness thick with infectious insect swarms: the headlines, the subheads, the first graf and the last. All of it.