Lost at Sea

“The prime constant factor in American politics across the past six decades has been a counterattack by the rich against the social reforms of the 1930’s.” Alexander Cockburn

All week I’ve felt this terrible sense of foreboding, even though my personal life, and that of my family, is fine, nobody sick or living in poverty, nobody going hungry or struggling to find  clean water, nobody running for their lives because of political or environmental upheaval. Right now mornings in Santa Barbara are cool, but by midday the sun is out, the sky is blue, and all is well.

I’m prone to bouts of depression, dark, somber moods. I’d be better off if I stopped reading dozens of online news sources every day, but it’s hard to look away from the most bizarre political era of my life. I think Trump fatigue is as real as any ailment the pharmaceutical industry hawks during the evening news. If only there was a little oval -- purple, blue or white -- pill to cure Trumpism. The Orange Menace must be worried about the midterm elections because he’s really gone off the rails this week, even by his lofty standards of sheer madness. Provoking a nuclear arms race with Russia and China. Promising his supporters a tax cut before the midterms, even though Congress isn’t in session until after the election. Opening the Alaskan coast to oil drilling. Identifying himself as a nationalist, which means “white” nationalist. Calling for unity after spending nearly two years pouring gasoline on the flames of division. Claiming that the ranks of a Central American caravan of migrants headed toward the US are infiltrated with MS-13 gang members and Muslim terrorists, hell-bent on “invading” the country that spends more on its military than any other on the planet. The corporate media, playing along with Trump, calls the migrants an “army.” (If it’s an army, it’s an army of the desperate, the fearful, the displaced, and the impoverished.) Spewing utter nonsense about the great US jobs his proposed arms sales to Saudi Arabia will produce, pulling numbers out of his ass and flinging them at reporters, all fabrications, of course.  

A nation is in deep trouble far at sea when facts don’t matter, when a president makes stuff up on the fly, and the media more often than not accepts the mindless drivel, rather than calling BS, loud and incessantly.

Trump is a laughingstock. His administration is a shambles, a cruel, dangerous shambles. What about the children in custody at our border, separated from their parents, in limbo in cages? Have we forgotten them? Yes. The media moves on, fascinated by the next shiny thing, the next outrage, the next scandal, the next heaping pile of lies. What about Fukushima? What about the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, spewing oil as I write these words? What of our endless war in Afghanistan? Silence. Not shiny enough, not as interesting as Trump’s latest Tweet.

I worry about the malignant seeds Trump is spreading in our soil, some of which will wither and die when he finally leaves or is forced from the stage, but others that will take root and grow, with the fruit not to appear until ten or twenty years from now. Sometimes the real danger is unseen. Trump didn’t come from nowhere. He’s the result of a political and economic system turned corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of the people. The tinder was there when Trump rode his escalator down, primed and waiting for a match.