Why I'm Not Celebrating the 4th of July

      Let me clarify something before I get going: I love my country in the way that a man still loves his first girlfriend. The magic is gone, it can't be recaptured and compatibility was an illusion all along. 

     America was never a perfect country and never will be. And on this semiquincentennial, I'm in a position to compare the America in which I'd grown up to the fascist hellscape it's become. I'm not going to belabor why I say this except to ask those in my generation if their lives are actually better now than they were a half century ago.

     Gerry Ford was the president during the bicentennial. In an otherwise bland and mercifully brief presidency, Ford presided over the 200th anniversary of our nation's independence. Vietnam was just a memory and the nation was recuperating from Watergate and Nixon's mishandling of the economy. We Americans were excited to celebrate that unique milestone.

     Although he was an ineffectual Republican, at least Ford didn't have a bloated ego like the current squatter in the White House.who's obsessed with naming everything after himself and putting up monuments in his so-called honor. Ford wasn't concerned with monetizing the presidency and making a pile of money while taking away government assistance from the poor.

     Fast forward a half a century. The America State Fair has been a clusterfuck from the beginning. The stage is literally falling apart while dancers rehearse, failing generators resulted in a busted Ferris Wheel and melted ice cream, people suffering from the heat are on life support, states are pulling out of the state pavilions, you couldn't even pack a phone booth with the people who were foolhardy enough to show up and virtually all the musical acts pulled out because they weren't notified of the partisan nature. Patriot Front, a fascist hate group, today took over the National Mall, fighter jets are flying overhead while people below ignore them and Trump's fireworks display, consisting of 880,000 pyrotechnics, is going to cause a health crisis and pollute air quality (a study that was then suppressed by the government),

     There's no way to redo this, no way to make it right. Next year will be the 251st anniversary. Who cares about that?

     And always, Trump tries to recast everything in his bloated, umber image. And while Americans struggle to gas up their cars and put food on the table, Trump admitted he'd stuffed his already bulging, bottomless pockets with $2,000,000,000 last year.

     Sorry, I'm just not feeling it. And that goes for many of us.

     We're a nation that's at war with a nation that wasn't threatening us (sound familiar?). Masked goons are sweeping across the streets of America and murdering American citizens with impunity. Jobs aren't really being created, inflation is up and our government is crawling with psychopaths and freaks who so disrespect your intelligence, they're brazenly telling us we're living in an unprecedented Golden Age.

     The Founding Fathers would be horrified.

     Happy 250th? Nope, sorry. Not feeling it.

     If it can be construed as a "celebration", then I'll "celebrate" by walking down West Peoria Avenue in Phoenix and going to the local Barnes & Noble for the first time in over two years and maybe buy a book. I may stop off at the nearby Chili's for dinner, maybe have a beer then perhaps see some of the fireworks from my patio. Then I'll work on one of my novels before going to bed, looking forward to the relief tomorrow that this grotesque spectacle is at last over.

A One Man Crime Wave

 

 

     I'd like to think if Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, he would've punched Donald Trump in the face. In Medora, North Dakota the other day, Donald Trump took part in a ribbon cutting ceremony at the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. As it often happens, the ribbon cutting ceremony involved gold-plated scissors.

     After they cut the ribbon, Trump then tried to slip the scissors into his jacket and eventually walked off with them. At this point in his life, Trump is like a Temu Auric Goldfinger, the Bond super villain who's obsessed with gold (He even has his own Oddjob in Steven Cheung, for fuck's sake). If he sees gold, he immediately grabs it.

     You might remember the time last year when professional Trump suck-up Gianni Infantino brought the FIFA trophy to the Oval Office and made the mistake of handing it to Trump. They had to practically pry it out of his grubby little hands after he asked, in all seriousness, "Can I keep it?"

     Hilary Shea, a licensed pathologist, put out a short video explaining the difference between a true kleptomaniac and someone with actual dementia. 

     "The stealing is usually a symptom of changes in the brain affecting memory, judgment, impulse control, or the ability to recognize ownership... I do not think that Donald Trump is actually, psychiatrically speaking, suffering from kleptomania. I do believe it is just one more sign and symptom of dementia. As always, Donald Trump has got to go."

     Considering his ongoing crime wave, especially since he stole the presidency again with Musk's help, it's very easy to conclude that Trump is a kleptomaniac. After all, his latest financial disclosures show that he hauled in $2,2 billion last year, a level of corruption that is, to use one of Trump's favorite phrases, the likes of which have never been seen before.

     But we've also seen just in this past year a serious degradation of his cognitive faculties. And when I saw Trump literally try to pocket those gold-plated scissors, I immediately thought of Barbara.

     In the last year she was living with me, long after her own dementia began presenting, Barbara got obsessed with a pair of scissors I kept in the kitchen drawer. We needed a pair for various things I regularly needed to do in the kitchen. But every so often, Barbara would remove them from the drawer and walk off with them. 

     I'd ask her to put them back and she'd always respond in a towering rage that "they're mine!" She'd developed this perverted sense of ownership.

     I'm seeing this in Trump and, naturally, it alarms me as it should alarm all of us. It got to the point Barbara couldn't or wouldn't get to the bathroom on time, or feed herself or even write her own name. And seeing her infantile sense of ownership reflected in Trump just scares the shit out of me.