Fiddling while Rome burns – that’s what it felt like, thinking about the next blog post on the intricate subtleties of learning to live with the Colorado River, while all around us things we value are being broken by a PINO and his self-appointed unelected shotgun, claiming that a 1.5 percent voter ‘mandate’ gives them license to do any damn thing they want to us and to the institutions we have evolved over 250 years to try to govern ourselves.
PINO: President in Name Only, not just because he is not behaving the way presidential behavior is constitutionally defined, but mostly because the PINO himself is not satisfied with ‘president’; he has publicly stated his belief that ‘king’ would be a better name to call him, or whatever name would anoint him with the total authority he believes he warrants. Therefore, President in Name Only, until he can anoint himself with a name more fitting.
So anyway – Rome is burning. Or to abandon the metaphor for a little more accuracy – America is burning; the nation-state that we have evolved into a position of global leadership (even if we aren’t sure where we are leading to) is being broken up like old worn-out furniture and thrown on a burn-pile. America is burning, and for the most part most of us are just fiddling as it happens. Carrying on like it were just another day in our exceptionalist paradise because, well, what else are we going to do? When it comes down to it, the goal in the Preamble to the Constitution most of us most want is the one to ‘insure domestic Tranquility,’ and who wants to take on a handful of narcissistic egomaniacs throwing that Constitution on the bonfire of their vanities? It is as the poet Yeats said: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’
Most of the politicians who call themselves ‘Democrats,’ and who might therefore be expected to try with similar vigor to stop this destruction of our imperfect but sincere effort at democracy, are lying low, saying let the ‘Repugnican’ wing of those who call themselves ‘Republicans’ dig themselves into a hole they eventually won’t be able to get out of. The problem there is that the hole they are digging was the foundation of our democracy, and we are kind of in the hole with them. And as with Humpty Dumpty, all the president’s horses and all the president’s men may not be able to put Trumpty-Mumpsy’s debris of democracy back together again – if we can even muster the will to try.
Our generally convictionless media have been snide about the Repugnicans in Congress being ‘cowed’ by the PINO, afraid to speak up. But I think the PINO is doing exactly what most of the Repugnican wing of the once-responsible Republican party want him to do, and would be doing themselves, were they not afraid of having to face their electorate about what it is doing to them. We had, and some of us even read, their “Project 2025’ plan for more than a year before the election, which lays out in considerable detail exactly what they planned to do if elected, and we elected them, and they are executing their plan with a passionate intensity.
The callous and casual cruelty of what the Repugnicans are doing under PINO’s flood-the-zone assault is astounding. They have summarily fired thousands of our fellow Americans for no reason other than the fact that they were working at jobs created by saner, more far-sighted and big-hearted Congresses back when we wanted our government to be a positive force in the nation and the world, as well as possessed of and by the biggest military hammer ever assembled to which every incipient conflict in the world looked like a nail. But in addition to that cruelty, the DOGEies have illegally frozen the funds already committed by Congress to fund those agencies and departments, which will cause considerable stress and even death in the nation and around the world.
The DOGEy chainsaw massacre seems to have focused on three areas. First, any agency or department that tries to help people who are not wealthy is on the sawbuck for cutting; this ranges from USAID which tries to help the truly poor of the world, to organizations like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that tries to prevent predatory organizations like banks and other more usurious organizations from taking advantage of U.S. citizens. The DOGEies have not yet set the chainsaw to Social Security and Medicare (although those remain long-term targets for the Repugnican element), but Medicaid will undoubtedly receive serious amputations soon if any semblance of the current Republican budget proposal gets passed. To fund tax cuts for the wealthy, even SNAP benefits will be cut – one area where Trump’s promise to reduce grocery costs could be actually be fulfilled, but, well, it’s the fraud, you know. And the Trump approach to ferreting out fraud in federal programs is to shoot first, then question the corpse.
The second area of DOGEy massacres is any federal entity charged with being a watchdog on the government itself. Federal inspectors general have been fired; the Department of Justice has been totally weaponized to support the PINO, including the office charged with investigating corruption in the government. This opens the gate for patronage at best – already evidenced by PINO’s staff and his strange selections of thoroughly unqualified cabinet members.
And a third area for cutting/freezing/killing is anything remaining that might make people appreciate their federal government. Staffs for both the National Park Service and the Forest Service that manages the National Forests have been severely cut after decades of small cuts. It is as if the Repugnicans want people to have unpleasant experiences visiting our national treasures – possibly preparatory for ‘privatizing’ them or just selling them off; their protection from exploratory drilling and oil-and-gas leasing will probably be eroded. The Environmental Protection Agency, which also has considerable popular support for improvements in local waterways and other areas where both beauty and public health have been served, now has a new mission, according to its new director: to make using your car and heating your house cheaper. Drill, baby, drill.
Beyond the DOGEy chainsaw massacres on we the people, there’s PINO actions on the international level, where he seems determined to alienate all of our longtime democratic friends, and court all of the growing number of autocratic or oligarchic nations. We laughed uneasily when he talked about ‘annexing’ Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal; now we have stopped laughing because he won’t stop talking about it.
Summing it all up – the callous cruelty, the constant lying and false promises, the economic attacks on his own base, the insulting attacks on our longtime allies, the fawning behavior toward a longtime enemy, the midnight rages that he immortalizes on his ‘Truth Social’ site, the childish conviction that if we officially purge all mention of the climate crisis from any public discourse the crisis will no longer exist – all of these things make one wonder if we have not maybe elected a psychologically sick person to the presidency, a malignant narcissist slipping into dementia.
But then we remember that most of the substantive things he and his sidekick Elon are doing – excepting the more ‘personalized things like the childish language excision and the mad rants – is laid out in some detail in ‘Project 2025,’ authored by some of the people he has appointed to high places in governance.
The conspiracy theorist in my overactive brain sees the ‘Project 2025’ minions letting the PINO go until he has completely destroyed the existing government, then convening the cabinet to relieve him of his duties due to ‘illness’ and putting the vice-president in his seat. That would give us J.D. Vance who, to my mind, is a much more dangerous person than the PINO, who gets lost too easily in his own self-admiration and paranoia.
But all that I’ve said there sounds to me like just more fiddling while America burns. What am I doing about it; what am I going to do about it? For the moment, continue reading the news, calling my senators, and occasionally my representative (a Repugnican who I think would rather be a Republican). But it drives me back to what I wrote when I started posting these reflections. The subtitle for this blog is ‘Learning to Live in the Anthropocene.’ That is the long game here: adapting mentally and psychologically, then economically and politically, to the fact that we have – however inadvertently – become change agents at the planetary level.
This is not a small thing; it requires a paradigm shift to end all paradigm shifts, in the way we see ourselves in the world, and that kind of shift obviously does not happen overnight. In an earlier post here, I described Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages in the acceptance of death – but really the acceptance of anything that uproots our sense of who and what we are, and what we should do. Those five stages:
- Denial: This can’t be true; this can’t be happening here; if we ignore it, will it go away?
- Anger: This is not my fault; it is the fault of (Choose one or two: the immigrants, the Jews, the blacks, the whites, God, etc.). Get rid of them, and we’ll get rid of the problem.
- Negotiation: Maybe we tweak a few things that will enable us to adapt without changing everything.
- Depression: Damn. Nothing works to change the fact that the facts have changed. Our old world is dying. I want to go to sleep forever.
- Acceptance: Well. There’s nothing to do but to make do with what’s left – and what’s new where what was no longer is. Is something new possible? Lifeboat dialogue: ‘Pull for the horizon, boys. It’s better than nothing.’
And where are we now? We are so deep in denial about the changes we have inadvertently imposed on the planet, that we have elected a president who promised to make denial official policy – who has officially removed any mention of ‘climate crisis,’ ‘renewable energy’ and ‘green anything’ from any government communication.
There is anger too – the transition between denial and anger is a slow smoldering segue as denial is worn thin under abrasion from reality, and we begin to try to figure out who we can blame for the no-longer-ignorable reality. We get dangerous when we get angry.
And that’s where we are. President Biden had actually begun to try to move us on to the negotiation stage – how much of the world that we have and sort of love can we still have if we get more serious about a new infrastructure of energy and transportation…. But now we are back in the murky world of threadbare denial and enough anger to declare open war on anyone we can convince ourselves is part of our problems.
