JANUARY 10, 2020 – Yesterday as I approached my bus stop, I hear a loud, intermittent noise. It sounded like some kind of motor on the fritz. Upon reaching the bus stop, I discovered the source of this unearthly sound: a human being on the fritz. People avoided the guy as he sat inside the bus stop, pounded his fist on the glass, and made that crazy sound.
Soon my bus came along. I observed local bus etiquette, which means whoever has been freezing longest gets to board first. I was somewhere in the middle of the crowd and found one of the last available seats. As the bus pulled away, the guy on the fritz let loose with a blast of nonsense talk. He was aboard my bus!
From what little I know about drugs and mental illness, I concluded the guy was having a meltdown.
Later, at home, I watched cable news as I donned my ski clothes. I recalled the guy on the fritz. I myself was now “on the fritz”—over White House news . . . since Inauguration Day, 2017. Exhausted by the pall of madness over the land, I wanted to shout nonsense and make awful noise.
“Okay, okay,” I hear you say. “Calm down . . . c-a-a-l-m down. Take a deep breath. Sit down here . . . no, over here, in this comfortable recliner. In a moment I’ll ask what’s bothering you, but while I’m putting this cold washcloth across your forehead, consider this: unemployment is at an all-time low, the stock market is at an all-time high, would-be intruders on our southern border aren’t intruding, and the crazy people have their judges. Okay, so tell me. What’s so bad?”
I think of one of the protest signs I encountered at the anti-Trump rally outside the Trump rally in downtown Minneapolis. The sign read, “WHERE DO I START?”
“First,” I start in, “there was Trump’s insistence that the inauguration crowd was the largest ever, despite definitive evidence to the contrary. No, “first” was his speech itself, which prompted, George W. Bush to say on the scene to Hillary Clinton, “Well, that was some weird shit.”
From there it was all downhill: flaunting the emoluments clause; failure to condemn white supremacists; edicts directed at people for whom Trump’s minion, Steven Miller, holds darkly visceral hatred; trashing allies; embrace of dictators; contempt for the environment—for planet earth; chaotic trade pronouncements; divisive “red meat” rallies; demand for personal fealty; holding up the Mueller Report as exoneration when it says nothing of the sort; belittlement of anyone who doesn’t leap to Trump’s support, however unsupportable his version of fact and reality; funny business in Ukraine, getting caught red-handed, stonewalling the House impeachment investigation, and scaring Republicans into announcing the trial verdict before the trial, their version of shouting, “Sieg Heil!”
And then . . . an “imminent threat,” a high-risk drone attack, and playing with disaster. “Imminent threat”? We’ve been living with that since Inauguration Day.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2020 Eric Nilsson
