miscellany

In this year of plague and depression, the most powerful nation in human history has become a sad amalgam of laughingstock, cautionary tale and pariah. Roughly 170,000 Americans are dead, in large part due to a near-total abdication of federal leadership,  a decades-long evisceration of the social safety net, and a health care and economic system built on a bedrock of racial and class discrimination.

What a powerful sentence this is.

“Even by the standards of an administration that has spent the better part of four years alternating between ineptitude and cruelty, it is a truly spectacular failure – a failure so fundamental it will live on as a schism between generations: those who knew life before ... “

“ ... the pandemic, those who didn’t.”

On television, the President of the United States is hawking miracle cures – something about blasting the body with light and disinfectant. Later in the day, a parade of public health experts will be forced to appear on the news networks to plead with people not to drink bleach.

“Farcical as the whole thing is, it is also a fitting distillation of the Trump era – a spectacle of callousness and cartoonish incompetence that dominates a single news cycle before the next spectacle obliterates it from memory.”

But in reality, most of the lasting carnage of this year exists in a kind of negative space – all the victims who died alone and afraid, who never received public mourning; all the weddings and birthday parties and graduation ceremonies cancelled; all the vast and hidden toll ...

“... of domestic abuse and mental-health crises exacerbated by this half-year and counting of purgatory.

There will likely never be a full accounting of all that was lost this year, all that was wasted, only the crushing knowledge that it never had to be this way.”

“But the Trump presidency is neither an anomaly nor an endpoint of some temporary misguided turn. It is impossible to frame the current administration outside a lineage that includes the racist Tea Party and Birther movements, the illegal wars of the Bush era, the rise of ...”

“ ... Fox News and the general hyper-partisan slide of the American right wing that dates back at least to the Reagan administration.”

“One way or another, there’s a different America waiting on the other side of this year – either a country that puts communal survival ahead of individual self-interest, or one that slowly slinks away from relevance as it stumbles from disaster to disaster, its insulated few ...”

“... oblivious to the suffering of the rest.”

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