If there ever was any doubt, there’s none now. There’ll be no justice, no mercy, and no place to hide so long as Trump, Vance, Musk, and their coterie of bootlickers, wannabes, and volunteer thugs are running things. Act accordingly.
Songs of Experience
More Historical Rhyming
Trump and Musk are about to do Social Security what Jimmy Hoffa and Frank Fitzsimmons did to the Teamsters’ pension fund. But not to worry, the Republicans will wring their hands for you, if only on those rare occasions when they’re not busy licking Trump’s boots or praising Musk’s moral clarity. And the Democrats? Well, I hear they’ll be glad to help you look under the couch cushions, but only after you guarantee them 50% of what you find.
A Quasi-biblical Revelation
I’ve never been in any doubt about the depth of Donald Trump’s depravity, but I’m familiar enough with German history to understand why half the country voted for him, and why our titans of industry rushed to provide him with the means to fulfill his vile ambitions. I am surprised, though, at some of the people I’m belatedly finding in the miles-long line of fools waiting to kiss his ass.
It’s not just the hypocritical gasbags who’ve been lecturing us for decades about ethics, morality, courage, manliness, and the sanctity of free enterprise. Everyone knows that commoditized list of virtues by heart, and all of us know at least one person who’s made a career out of preaching from it. It’s not as shocking to me as it should be to see them now suddenly burning their own books, scrubbing their own mottoes off the walls, and looking down at their shoes when I ask them why.
No, the people who’ve surprised me are those I’d come to know as decent, compassionate, human beings, who now refuse to defend the defenseless, who turn away now from those in the greatest need with a shrug, with platitudes, with lectures about choosing one’s fights, with supposedly sage advice that one must be patient, that this too shall pass. This won’t do, this won’t do at all. If we want to keep calling the United States the Land Of the Free and the Home Of the Brave without being consumed by shame, this temporizing, compromising, agreeing that black is white, that President Zelenskyy should wear a suit when invited to lick the tyrant’s boots—all this nonsense will have to go. We need to do better. A whole lot better.
How It’s Going
Politics as usual hasn’t been as usual lately as it used to be. Were he still among the living, even our 20th century Nostradamus, Mr. Orwell, might be surprised to learn that Oceania has finally and definitively lost its war with Eurasia, and is presently hiding the rump of itself under the skirts of a demented real estate developer with delusions of grandeur. Definitely not the Big Brother Mr. Orwell promised us, this one, although the red hat rubes hardly seem to have noticed. Eastasia, meanwhile, is licking its chops, oblivious to its own vulnerabilities, doing its unctuous best to look as inscrutable as western racists expect.
A couple of degrees more of global warming, a nuclear exchange or two between idiot regimes, and even Elon Musk and his sycophant armies might find themselves roasting rats-on-a-stick over burning rubber tires somewhere where angels fear to tread. That, my fellow deeply concerned citizens of the First World, is actually how it’s going, and you didn’t even have to sit through a commercial to hear about it.
Equivalencies
What we might get if we were to draw comparisons the way the Washington Post or New York Times does. Too bad their digital editions can’t be used to wrap fish in, or line the bottoms of bird cages.
All Your Base Are Now Belong To Us
Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen.
Der Musk maschiert mit mutig festem Schritt
Kam’raden, die Wokist’n vernichtet haben
marschier’n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit.
(For those of my readers who don’t know German, this is a contemporary parody of the 90 year-old Nazi party anthem das Horst-Wessel-Lied.) In English, it goes more or less like this:
The flag held high, ranks firmly closed together!
Musk marches on with bravely stiffened stride
Comrades who’ve done away with Wokeists
march with us in our ranks in spirit now.
GERMAN CITIZENS PLEASE NOTE: Reproducing these lyrics is, with few exceptions, currently illegal in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the US our laws are more permissive. My apologies to the citizens of the Federal Republic, but given the current constitutional crisis in my own country, I felt the need to fiddle with them here.
A Pledge of Non Allegiance
With Austria now governed by Nazis, the US destined to follow at the end of the month, and Germany itself due to join both of them in the wake of its upcoming election in February, I have an announcement to make. Since there’s nowhere to go now that isn’t under threat from the Zeitgeist, it’s time to stop merely alluding to my lack of allegiances, and to publicly and formally declare myself a rootless cosmopolitan.
Yes, I know that’s what Stalin called the Jews. I can even give it to you in the original Russian: безродный космополит. (No, I don’t know any Russian I didn’t learn first from the glossary at the end of A Clockwork Orange, but we have Wikipedia now, don’t we? If nothing else, it allows us to more accurately catalog our afflictions.)
Full disclosure: I’m not a Jew, but I could easily have been one—I suspect a great grandfather of converting to Catholicism in his native Austria during the waning days of the Habsburg empire, something he seems to have done to advance his career prospects in uncertain times. Be that as it may, I’m willing to grant Stalin a bit of poetic license here, as the phrase clearly has resonances well beyond the obsessions of a single autocrat. (I doubt Donald Trump is aware of it, but Stalin was a poet laureate of brutality long before Donald stumbled into the role on idiot TV.)
So, with my apologies to the muse of history now made, I can say openly that I feel no allegiance to any current political faction, nor to any forseeable future faction, no reverence for any religion (in my view they’re all based on fear and steeped in superstition and hypocrisy), and finally, no desire to submit to hagiographies and catechisms past, present, or future. If you need help, I’m available. Whatever I can do, I will do. But if you want me to rat on my neighbor, round up people you consider undesirable and put them in camps, reeducate the children of the very poor, or otherwise kiss a vicious imbecile’s ass, look elsewhere.
Novus Ordo Seclorum
Along with many others, I’ve long thought and said as much here and elsewhere that Americans would have a difficult time adjusting to the end of post-war US hegemony and the rise of a multipolar world order. It now seems fair to say that the re-election of Donald Trump makes that hard-core recalcitrance a certainty. And when you start finding things like this on the Internet, it’s probably also fair to say that none of that pig-headedness will go down well with what our previous leaders have been pleased to call The International Community:
