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The New Monday Lament — 1/20/2025
Thinking about America’s mess
The Monday lament returns for the final chapter of the American Experiment. I used to do these back when Trump was president. There were many causes for lamentation then, but there was still hope that some level of sanity would be restored to representative government in America.
Alas, it was not to be. Trump’s incompetence and blatant corruption quickly sickened people, handing Biden an opportunity to attempt a house cleaning. But Biden, played by the 20th-century rulebook, succeeding in a patch to the completely unsustainable economy, acknowledged the Climate Disaster but missed the cause and didn’t notice that Israel had become an apartheid and genocidal state.
Biden was performing perfect football plays in a soccer game while failing to notice that the stadium was on fire. Meanwhile, late-stage capitalism’s mental disintegration had exclusively brought forth greedy billionaires as heroes.
Elon Musk had connected to the only person with any followers: the old pathological narcissist Donald Trump with his MAGA goons. Musk and the others recognized that he was increasingly dysfunctional and senile, but this was a short-lived opportunity to steal everything.
The billionaires knew little but knew the stadium would burn to the ground, and…