It has been quite a week for politics, hasn’t it? In case you haven’t been paying close attention, allow me to catch you up to just some of the goings on:
On Tuesday, Trump fired the Director of the FBI, James Comey. He did so citing a letter from Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein recommending Comey’s removal. The American people are to believe that the testimony from the day before by Sally Yates (the former Attorney General that Trump fired for not rubber stamping illegal activity) about the Trump camp being well aware of Flynn’s problematic association with Russia is mere coincidence.
More coincidence? The request Comey made to Rosenstein for additional funds to expand the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the election that ultimately won Trump the presidency that happened just days before Rosenstein recommended—and Trump executed—Tuesdays firing.
Clearly coincidental. The White House spent the day Tuesday re-asserting that the FBI investigation had nothing to do with the firing of Comey and that it had everything to do with the Comey’s behaviors in October that the President had previously applauded on numerous occasions.
ALSO coincidental was Trump meeting with Russian diplomats at the White House the next day…a meeting that also included Sergey Kislyak, which we found out about despite his name being curiously left off all announcements and his visage being left out of all photographs (aside from those that the Russian press took). If the name Kislyak sounds familiar, it’s because he is a very important name in the investigation of Flynn’s very suspicious ties to Russian intelligence.
Again, let me be clear, everyone at the White House is completely on the same page that these are all coincidences and that the FBI investigation had nothing to do with Comey’s firing.
Well, most of the White House is completely on the same page. Trump, on the other hand, has stated in no uncertain terms that he made the decision to fire Comey independently, that it was not because of the advice of the Attorney General’s office, and that he made the decision, in part, because…now on this one I have to quote the dubiously coiffed Cheetoh spokesmodel himself…”this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story.”
Let me circle back in case I lost you in the narrative along the way: Trump has stated—himself, and on tape—that he did consider the Trump/Russia issue as part of the decision to fire the person investigating the Trump/Russia issue. This is, to demurely understate things, not great.
Of course, while all of this is going on, Trump is continuing to prove that his finances are not locked tightly into Russian interests, so he finally released his tax returns….to his legal team…so that his legal team could release a statement that indicated that he had no financial ties with Russia “with few exceptions.”
Seriously, it said that. Oh, it should be noted that his law firm’s Moscow office won Russia Law Firm of the Year last year for being such a great Russia law firm in Russia which is where Trump’s Russian friends are predominantly found.
The important word up there is ‘Russia.’
Here is the most important fact, though. None of this matters, because, in aggregate, everyone is shit.
Harsh? Who cares, add it to the pile of other facts that you’ve politely ignored because you don’t like them or to the pile that you’ve shrugged off as beyond your power to deal with…just like everyone else in the country.
Some of you, right at this very second, are sitting in your comfortable home, listening to music that made you feel good back when you were in high school—right at the moment you stopped listening to or absorbing new information—and you’re smiling the smarmy smile of agreement as you summon up a picture of some redneck from a southern state with a beer gut spilling out of the bottom of a partially unbuttoned flannel shirt. Yeah, those fact ignoring hillbillies, fuck them, right?
No, you sack of shit, I mean you. I mean, that guy as well, but mostly I mean you!
At some point along the timeline we made two ignorant assumptions at the same time, and now we’re mired in the results. On one side, a bunch of brain-dead shitheels learned to stop feeling shame for their ignorance, instead choosing to double down on it resulting in anti-vaxxers, climate-change deniers, flat earthers, and politicians. On the other, a bunch of ideologues for whom neither intent nor impact matters—all that matters is dogmatic adherence to even the most peculiar precepts of their identity church—gleefully chewing up and spitting out all comers (even their own) resulting in Sarah Lawrence graduates, white kids with dreadlocks, and Rachel Dolezal.
But neither of those groups are the problem. Those folks have always been around. There aren’t all that many of them and while they, using a megaphone known as the internet, have managed to amplify that voice to some degree, they certainly don’t swing a big enough stick to do any damage. Not on their own at least.
Unless, that is, everyone else became truly apathetic.
No, it’s you, right now, in your home reading this missive through Facebook or Twitter or whatever it is that the young, hip kids are using that I haven’t heard of because I’m too old and irritated. You, who read through the first half of this and weren’t even slightly inspired into action. You, for whom the fact that the President of the United States has sold his soul to various foreign powers for something as pathetic as cash has stirred virtually nothing in your soul.
As you sit there noting with mild disinterest that the verifiable fact that your elected officials have absolutely no intention of stopping our nation’s executive from obstructing the investigation into his myriad crimes has barely nudged the needle on your antidepressant-leveled emotions, you are the problem.
If you read the first half of this message and didn’t—at least for a moment—ponder where you last saw your grandfather’s old Mossberg with an itching in your soul to spill the blood of tyrants, you are the actual issue, not these people out fighting for their idiotic, misguided views. They’re doing their fucking job.
Our comfort has bred complacency, and that complacency has allowed American exceptionalism to deteriorate from delusions of grandeur to delusions of adequacy. How we maintain that delusion while our nation’s highest political figure gets such a raging hardon for a piece of chocolate cake that he literally cannot remember which country he just bombed during a statement to the press is beyond me. But still, we manage.
Literally everything going on now should be appalling. I spend a sizeable chunk of each day in a barely coherent state of frustrated rage because I look around and see people completely unengaged with the day-to-day activity in this country that should be generating such fearsome activity that no wannabe orange dictator could withstand its fearsome might.
Our collective cries of anger, of outrage, and of demand should be crumbling the very foundations of the buildings in our nation’s capital; instead they squeak out as simpering pleas to our embedded, invulnerable politicians in voicemails and tepid town halls. We piss our pants as honest-to-god jackbooted thugs murder our citizens in cold blood—on video, no less—and our singular voice is a petite mewling captured on YouTube for posterity. We deserve to be stomped into some sad historical footnote.
If you didn’t vote, you are shit.
If you don’t listen to the news because it’s a downer, you are shit.
If you don’t call your congresspersons in a fit of barely coherent rage because it probably wouldn’t help anyway, you are shit.
If you listen to your Vassar graduate friend explain how someone using a male pronoun for a group is basically the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone and you don’t kick him down a flight of stairs to add perspective to his life, you are shit.
If you listen to somebody equate legalizing gay marriage to allowing pederasty and you don’t punch that person’s dick completely off from their useless body, you are shit.
If you stand on the street and let some high school dropout with a confederate flag tattoo shout in the face of a follower of Islam that they should go back to ISIS-land and you don’t pull the fucking voicebox completely out of the stump that holds their neck off their slumped shoulders, you are shit.
And all of you pieces of shit are scrawling the letter that will ultimately be the suicide note of the American ideal of freedom; and you’re doing it one shrieking Tumblr post at a time.
And I hate you for it.
No, I don’t have a call to action for you on this one—let’s face it, action isn’t really what we do here anymore anyway.
Fuck off.