Most Americans are clueless as to how bad our current crisis is and how much worse it’s likely to get
Originally published in June, 2022
It’s likely to get worse, maybe a lot worse, before it gets any better. This is often what we’re told when the situation looks grim. Hold onto your seat, they’ll tell you, it’s about to get rough.
How often do we think we’ve seen how low we can go, only to discover there are depths to our despair we hadn’t even considered. America looks to be in dire straits, and as bad as it is, most people simply don’t understand how much worse it’s likely to get. Also, that it might not ever get better. As bad as it is right now, this might be the best we can ever hope for, and we’re not even close to preparing for the worst.
It’s not any one thing either. Environmental catastrophe. Economic collapse. Deadlier global pandemics. The demise of western democracy and the collapse of the planet’s sole remaining world power. It’s all self-evident, right there on our near horizon for all to see, but there are only a few wild-eyed individuals, seemingly crazy, calling out from the desert, that indeed the end is nigh, and it’s far past time to repent.
I’m not talking about any sort of religious end-times, but I am talking about an existential crisis of Biblical proportions. The world as we know it may be coming to an end, and we’re just sitting around watching the show live on our phones, while we wait for our Uber Eats to arrive.
As Good As It Gets
In the 1993 film “True Romance,” written by Quentin Tarantino, directed by Tony Scott, and starring Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Michael Rappaport, and Christopher Walken, there is a scene that seems apropos to our current situation. Allow me to paint a picture for you.
A mobster named Vincenzo Coccotti, played convincingly by Walken, confronts Dennis Hopper’s character, a security guard named Cliff, about the whereabouts of his son Clarence, played by Slater.
Coccotti works for a big mob boss named Blue Lou Boyle, who was inadvertently robbed by Cliff’s son and his new wife (Slater and Arquette), where they stole a rather large suitcase full of cocaine by mistake. Coccotti believes Cliff knows where his son is, and is intent on making him talk, whether he wants to or not.
Coccotti explains to him, “I have a son of my own. About your boy’s age. I can imagine how painful this must be for you. But Clarence and that bitch whore girlfriend of his brought this all on themselves. And I implore you not to go down the road with ’em. You can always take comfort in the fact that you never had a choice.”
“Look, I’d help ya if I could,” says Cliff, “but I haven’t seen Clarence…”
Before Cliff can finish his sentence, Coccotti slams him hard in the nose with his fist.
“Smarts, don’t it?” Coccotti says. “Gettin’ slammed in the nose fucks you all up. You got that pain shootin’ through your brain. Your eyes fill up with water. It ain’t any kind of fun. But what I have to offer you, that’s as good as it’s ever gonna get, and it won’t ever get that good again. We talked to your neighbors. They saw a Cadillac, a purple Cadillac, Clarence’s purple Cadillac, parked in front of your trailer yesterday. Mr. Worley, you seen your son?”
“I seen him,” says Cliff, defeated.
Enabling The Big Grift
Yesterday, it was revealed during a Senate Select Committee hearing that the former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, committed wire fraud by promoting the Big Lie that the election was stolen by means of fraud, even though he knew it was untrue. He’s guilty of treason. He’s guilty of obstructing an official government function by pressuring Vice-President Mike Pence into illegally refusing to certify the electoral votes from the states, a choice he had no power to make. But he also appears to be guilty of wire fraud.
It’s this last bit that might end up coming back to haunt him. He and his minions, in the weeks after they lost the election, proceeded to raise over $250 million in small donations from millions of Americans. They claimed it was needed to help fight rampant and widespread election fraud. The money was to be donated to the “Official Election Defense Fund,” a fund that the committee found never existed. It was just a marketing ploy.
What was the money spent on?
It went to pay campaign debts, hotel bills for Trump’s own hotel, a million of it went to a charity run by Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and at least $60,000 went to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump, Jr.’s girlfriend, for a two and a half minute speech she made at the Ellipse on the morning of Jan 6th, introducing him to the crowd. It was one big grift of hundreds of millions of dollars, none of which was spent to help the American people, or even on a political candidacy, let alone to fight election fraud.
Presumably, they thought their donations would help restore the former president to power, which clearly did not happen.
The Danger of Political Apathy
Of the approximately 77 million Twitter users in the US, 10% of the users make up 80% of the posts. Of that number, only 13% tweet about politics, and roughly half of that support one party or the other.¹ That means that even on Twitter, the most politically-engaged platform on social media, only a tiny fraction of Americans are actually paying attention.
Most Americans are pretty apolitical, even if they present themselves as highly partisan when it comes to the culture wars. They don’t spend a lot of time paying attention to what is going on in the government. Partisanship aside, this is even more true of watchers of Fox News since so much of their broadcast is opinion-based editorial and structured as entertainment as opposed to news.
Thoughts and Prayers Won’t Stop The Rain
There is a lot of discussion in the media and on political Twitter surrounding the hesitancy to prosecute a former president because of the legal precedent it would set. Other failed states have turned to prosecuting their political enemies as a matter of course, and it’s a corrupt premise with no hope for democracy. America has never had to deal with anything close to that, and a lot of people are reasonably afraid to go down that path.
But it seems to me that the only thing worse than prosecuting a former president for crimes and misdemeanors, is not prosecuting a former president for crimes and misdemeanors. If we can’t count on our elected leaders to honor and respect the Constitution and the rule of law, then we have no hope of self-governance.
It has been stated that there are those who fear civil uprisings, or even the possibility of civil war, if the Justice Department were to indict, prosecute and punish the former president. That the mere act of holding one man accountable or his criminal behavior, would be enough to tear the country apart. What sort of democracy holds a single individual above the good of the country? What sort of people follow such a man?
Just today, the former president posted, “I am the only one who can fix our endangered Country.” It’s precisely that sort of irrational exceptionalism that leads a country to demagoguery and a cult-like following willing to support a leader unconditionally. Narcissism as a core attribute. A sociopath with a Napoleon complex.
If we have any hope of recovery, and I only give us about a 40% chance, which is being extremely optimistic in my opinion, we need to go the mats with this one. Just how many chances do you think we’re going to get to stop this slow-motion coup? They’re not going to keep trying and failing. They’re going to get better at it, and they’ll keep trying until they win. Once they win, that’s it. Game over. Literally. No more chances to get it right.
You can’t stop the rain with thoughts and prayers. It won’t go away just because you ignore it. That’s a tactic of four-year-olds who broke a vase and men in need of medical attention.
We have to deal with it, and we have to deal with it right now.
Of Fear Itself
What I fear is exactly what has taken place at every turn over the last six years. A few raving lunatics shout from the rooftops that the sky is falling, and no one listens. The sky has been falling. It’s not clear how much longer we have, but there is good reason to believe we may already be too late.
In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office and told the country that “the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.” But as Randy Newman told us, “Now it seems like we’re supposed to be afraid. It’s patriotic, in fact. Color-coded. What are we supposed to be afraid of? Why, of being afraid. That’s what terror means, doesn’t it? That’s what it used to mean.”
There are those arguing that we can’t fix the country, or prosecute those who break the law, lest they tear the country apart. That we can’t ban guns because the gun people will simply kill us. That we can’t expect peace unless we negotiate with terrorists.
It seems to me that if someone has a gun to your head, there are only two choices: do what they say and hope for the best, or take the gun away from them. There was a time when the conventional wisdom in an airplane hijacking was to give the hijacker what they wanted and negotiate the release of the hostages safely. Then they turned the planes into missiles, and that was over with.
There is no more hoping for the best, and we’re out of time. Who cares if it’s dangerous to confront the maniac driving the bus if you’re all going to go over the cliff anyway?
The longer we wait, the worse it will be. It’s probable that we’ll look back on this time fondly, when it was as good as it was ever going to get, and regret we didn’t do more—so much more.