I can't seem to find anything to write about. I've been staring at the blank screen off and on for an hour. I should probably give up.
One last try:
It's always an odd time to live in America, with so much division between those carrying torches and those with fire extinguishers. The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a torch is a good guy that removes all the oxygen from the room.
America's two biggest enemies might only be fire and water. Very biblical, that.
I'm not even sure what opinion I can hold on it any more. I'm not quite as sick with neoliberalism as I am with conservatism, but I'm not far off, either. American libertarianism is populated with too many frustrated republicans and angry conservatives for me to be interested. Bernie Sanders was always the Make-A-Wish candidate. He lured enough voters away from the bad candidate for everyone to get a good glimpse of the moment of impact. Either party would run with Ronald McSanta Claus if he polled better with millennials and wasn't currently trying to evade rape charges.
Perhaps this is just me getting older, I keep wondering. I'm growing tired of expecting people to shut the fuck up when confronted with the facts of their own wrongness, so maybe it is an age induced thing. The expectation now is to fight through your shamefulness and don't let any facts or data make you feel bad about yourself. You don't need that shit. All things vile find their validation online. The line between critical thought and unmotivated skepticism need not even be blurred for those who can't see it already. We are entering the great recession in observable criteria.
Democrats keep rolling in catnip at the latest drop in the president's approval ratings, as if that is somehow tied to the loss of past electoral votes. The right seems to be contented with Trump's approval rating never going over 50%, which assures them that he has no support at all from the democrats, which is all they ever really wanted, a candidate unanimously hated by the other side.
Little known fact: George W. Bush's highest approval rating was 21% higher than Barack's highest. There is an obvious reason for this, but still... (his lowest was also 13% lower than Barack's, so don't bother explaining the high part to me). Republicans seem okay enough with a Russian-influenced election. They had to endure Obama, for Christ's sake.
Running Trump out might cause a short-lived sense of euphoria for people like me, but we'll have bigger problems after his wake of destructive incompetence. The only coherent thing to come out of the last year is that there is an ever decreasing population who wish to see the experiment survive on any terms other than their own. Why can everybody see a bad relationship except for those involved in it? The non-stop public argument that is America has proven that some of the darkest observations of post-modern critical observation were not only accurate, but they low-balled the consequences. We are being manipulated into defeating ourselves by entities whose benefit for having done so is not at all clear, leaving it almost impossible to even define the terms of the cheat, much less to convince others that it's happening. Who can possibly trust the opinions of such a bi-polarized electorate?
Who knows, maybe when the two parties were working together to achieve "compromise" it was perhaps just the smiling version of the same economic fraud and collusion. Now, as the booty diminishes, each side is fighting for total victory, risking total loss. Everywhere there is too much desperation. With each election I get the feeling that it might not be as much fun to taunt the losers next time. Without that personal joy I question whether voting is even worth it any more. What could possibly be more fun than starting fires, except maybe really powerful firecrackers?
All the joy that the dems had at Trump losing was squandered leading up to the election, afterwards it mostly only seemed funny on SNL. Once we lost Sarah Palin being on a national ticket then I knew that things were going to be much less fun around here. I could watch her lose an election every month or so, just to help boost morale.
Blessed be the haters:
“Hey, the more they’re pouring it on, the more I’m going to bug the crap out of them by being out there, with a voice, with the message, Hopefully running for office in the future too… Bless their hearts, those haters out there. They don’t understand that it invigorates me. It wants me to get out there and defend the innocent,” she said. “It makes me want to work so hard for justice in this country!” - Sarah Palin, 2014
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