A Time For Writing

It’s really hard to write commentary on or explication of today’s news.

For one thing, we have Donald Trump. He is President of the United States of America and thus possesses stores of power incommensurate with his understanding of his job. So we have to pay attention to what he says, however demented. And that apparent dementia is also a subject of concern.

Then there are the lies. Words come out of his mouth in arrangements that are useful to him. Some he follows up on, others not. There are no signs to indicate which is more likely. Last week and this, there has been a theme of summary executions in the Caribbean and at home. This is something to pay attention to. But we haven’t heard about Greenland lately.

John Thune and Mike Johnson are serving up bushel baskets of lies. Every – and I emphasize every – word that comes out of their mouths is a lie. Not to mention the rest of the administration. Kristi Noem was filmed by her own people gazing down at a peaceful Portland, disrupted at that point only by a guy in a chicken suit, and the administration issued a cherry-picked set of claims about burnt-out Portland.

As I write this, the Cabinet is in a public praise session for the Dear Leader. The continuing destruction of science and education.

There is a great deal else going on in the world, which I used to pay more attention to. Russia’s war on Ukraine, stretching out a bit toward the rest of Europe. Rightwing MAGA-would-bes in Britain. Government collapse in France. Whatever it is that China is doing. Government collapse in South Korea. War in Africa. No time for this.

And the more general concerns of global warming and nuclear weapons, submerged. The nonsense about AI, which could sink the economy.

It’s the old blogging problem: it takes ten times as long to debunk garbage as it does to toss it out there to mislead people. But there remains some obligation to debunk, if only to remind ourselves that there is a reality that the lies and fantsizing do not destroy.

It seems like the only way to write is to focus on the very large or very small, but neither will take us far in understanding our situation. There’s too much to write on, and the very large flattens too much. The very small can be helpful, if I can find a particular hinge point or something that is indicative of larger problems.

Anyhow, that’s why I haven’t been writing a lot. This is something of a prologue to what I may write.