I’m still recoiling from last week’s flurry of ominous news, staggering, wobbly legged, about to hit the canvas where my country prostrate lies, put there by the mad moron who obeys alien voices entering his right ear.
What news? The nation shut down because a peevish boy couldn’t get the wall he wanted, for starters. Our troops withdrawn from strategic Syria without warning, shocking our allies and the Middle East generally, bringing wide smiles to Messrs. Putin and Erdogan, ever ready to fill a power vacuum. Half our troop commitment to NATO’s presence in Afghanistan summarily brought home, leaving our allies to play out the “Great Game” on their own. The resulting protest resignation of General James “Mad Dog” Mattis as Secretary of Defense, widely considered the last rational person in Trump’s cabinet and the lone defender left between our impetuous president and the nuclear football. Secretary of the Interior Ryan (“Stinky”) Zinke canned after setting a new record for corruption in the Trump administration. Growing chaos and human suffering stalks our southern border. A Texas judge declared Obamacare unconstitutional, eliciting huzzahs! from our Queens-trained Caligula. Meanwhile, climate-change-induced severe winter weather that cometh early, is predicted to stay late. Then there’s that bottomless swamp of investigations into the conduct of our dear leader—a waxing 17 at last count.
There’s more. But I’m spent. Can’t keep up. Crises now come at an ever-mounting frequency and intensity without resolution, slipping from surface memory into the overcrowded depths below. Who remembers beyond a blur the Floridian nutjob who tried to take out the entire Democratic political leadership group with pipe bombs? Was that only this October?
Or the anonymous author (authors?) who told us on the front page of the New York Times not to worry about the antic doings of the boy president—there were wiser heads present to keep him from going off the rails. Presumably, those wise guys were the military triumvirate of Generals Kelly, McMaster and Mattis—all of them now going or gone. That reassuring editorial appeared in September. How should we feel now?
In past funk attacks I’ve found relief in booze, baseball and poetry. But I’ve been dry for the last two-and-a-half years, and baseball doesn’t start again until spring, so I must turn to verse—which will find space here over the next ten days.
Apologies for this rude lament. I wish you the best of holiday seasons, with the hope that the horsemen pass us by.