TomFlannery.com

None of this is normal. The fact that it seems normal now, due to repetition, doesn’t change the fact that it is not normal at all. The childish insults. The flagrant lies. The almost casual racism. The constant appeals to the lowest common denominator. Whatever standing we had in the world has eroded, and we’ve largely been left to our own devices as the rest of the globe watches in worried fascination. Nearly every utterance is something inane. Every decision is driven by petulance and mean-spiritedness. Every press conference is a shit-show of easily disproved falsehoods and distortions and Orwellian pronouncements…a bizarro alternate universe where, to echo the aforementioned Englishman, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength (and Trump is the same weight and height as Albert Pujols).

We’ve gone from offending individuals, to offending races, to offending entire continents. And none of it seems to matter. The President’s supporters seem to revel in it, literally like pigs in shit. Forget Teflon. Stuff doesn’t bounce off the man. Rather, it all sticks and emboldens him.

The more outrageous his idiocy, the more they circle his wagon, defending the indefensible like Sean Hannity on laughing gas. His talking heads invade news shows looking like David Duke’s family tree, a brazen cast of stupid white people who would be tossed out of any self-respecting city council meeting for wasting everybody’s time. Republicans lawmakers either remain silent, like somebody in the waiting room who won’t admit to farting, or will grovel with so much obsequiousness one wonders if they’ve been morally castrated. And finally there’s Trump, sitting in bed watching Fox and Friends, cheeseburger in one tiny fingered hand, his even little-er dick in the other, trying desperately to jizz over the picture of Hillary on his nightstand before Melania wanders in looking for her green card. Nothing to see here. Move along. It’s the new normal. And as such, we grow weary and care less and less. That first nail driven into our head? Hurts like hell. The 567th? Ain’t so bad.

Truth used to matter. Decency used to matter. It doesn’t anymore. We let it happen. We’re all to blame.  So when that North Korean nuke is falling on your head, it probably won’t do you much good to blame its trajectory on Hillary’s emails, but have at it bubba.

Does anything think he didn’t fuck a porn actress and have her paid off by his crooked lawyer? What’s astounding is that we know it’s true, and we justify it by saying “of course he fucked a porn star and had her paid off by his crooked lawyer, because he’s Trump”, and that’s enough to move the story to page 12….if indeed it’s reported at all. Meanwhile, Clinton being blown in the oval office remains the 5th gospel of the right-wing bible.

Evil flourishes when good men do nothing. But there will always be more good men than bad. It takes work to be a dick. Effort. A suspension of reality. To be legitimately evil is to be perpetually pissed off, to careen through life in some sort of perpetual road-rage….hating all who differ from you….hating all that you do not understand…..being unwilling to step into the shoes of another, and not feeling the lash on the back of another. A lack of empathy, in other words. A spot-on description of our current President and his staff perhaps, but not one that applies to the vast majority of Americans. We’ve got better things to do, more important things to concern ourselves with.

And, as such, we’ve been too damn busy. We do little but roll our eyes to combat the cancer in the White House. So it spread. And spreads. A malignancy that might be too big to be cut out at this point. How many steps are we, really, from having a David Duke as President of the United States? It sounds absurd on the face of it, but not much more absurd than Donald Trump, back in 2015, an avowed racist, a spectacularly failed businessman and reality TV star, becoming the leader of the so-called free world by getting poor white people to think he cares about them. Even Trump himself didn’t count on Americans being that fucking stupid. His was a PR exercise, a vanity license plate campaign meant to increase his own market share. He had no intention of actually winning. Winning made his wife cry.

No. Hillary would win and he would remain on the golf course and in his tower, nipping at her heels via Twitter….like men with small appendages are wont to do. He would link up with Fox news, the propaganda wing of the Republican party, attack women in private and brown people out loud, and hope his Mar a Lago retreat wasn’t washed away by some global-warming induced natural disaster….because that would be hard to explain to Joe the fucking Plumber, eh?

And yet, here we are. Churchill warned the world to never underestimate the stupidity of the average voter….a warning we neglected to heed with self-destructive glee. As a result, a child-like imbecile is in the White House, making Stalinist pronouncements about the free press, and sounding like Lester Maddox behind closed doors. A man of constant dog whistles, firing up Fox News viewers 140 characters at a time. Perhaps the ugliest of ugly Americans. Is ours a great country or what? 

Well, it used to be. Maybe it can be again…….if we’re not too busy or shell-shocked to take it back. Or if we refuse to learn from history, which has taught us that monstrous evil can sprout when fear preys upon ignorance.

In short, we’re most likely doomed.

In a bit..

–tf