I guess we all go about life thinking we did the best we thought we could. I mean, no one wants to bow out carving into stone they only did it half way. Frankie, ol’ blue eyes, told us he did it his way and I guess that was a point in the history books that we had our get up and go. Those were the days, and no matter that the old films tell you, life was in living color, all the way. Black and white was another fixation.
his letter, to whomever in the future reads it, may not even know and identify with the word “American.” They (our you, to be more intimate) may find this old note (how old
, really???) to be a trope, self indulgent, last-minute exhibition of a one human’s want of memory to be preserved amid the rubble of a culture you will comb through in hope for understanding.
Listen, it all comes down to this. President Trump, and after his historically brief tenure President Pence, threw this country into a turmoil that brought a much slobbered after end of days to their “holy land” of franchised and outsourced “freedoms.” It was holy hell. “Forgive them,” that weakened god-being cried out from his mythical nailed-to perch, “for they know knot what they are doing.” What a horny bullshit dream. Everyone knew damn well what they were doing, and they only did it because they wanted “change”. As the outgoing Vice President was caught saying on a hot mic just prior to the 2017 inauguration of Trump, “This isn’t a fucking Red Lobster for Crissakes, it’s a country.” Those were our sentiments exactly, Joe. Change is a double-edged sword.
I’m just writing to say I’m sorry. The election, if you can call it that, of 2016 was not a result of populist outrage, it was the greatest reflex of ignorance and opportunity even seen of such a scale. It emboldened the shit shysters around the world to act- without benefit of countermeasure- to prod with their conscience-free peckers and penetrate the systems that protect our semblance of democracy and replace it with sheer vapid entertainment. Yes, the election of 2016 was the most dangerous reality show in history. It ended history. The worries everyone had about Trump having the nuclear football were a great distraction from the risk of Pence having it. Trump sealed his fate with the most unfortunately remembered phrase in history, “grab them by the pussy,” which emboldened a generation of disgusting men, and the compromise that he’d quit once elected and swap offices once the pitchforks and torches cornered him. An even more dangerous man took the Oval Office.
Hiroshima. Nagasaki. The old war. The litany of the new one? The war against women, with the executive order that made abortion in most cases illegal and punishable. The mass annulment of gay marriages. The “bunkering” of high crime impoverished inner city areas. Then the clouds of death abroad came closer to home. Raqqa. The torpedoing of the Kennedy. Vladivostok. Then San Diego. The short lived truce allowed for scientists to run screaming from their universities as fallout’s real aftermath- no longer a hypothetical- spewed across North America and Asia. But it was too late. Anchorage. Seoul. Pyongyang. That’s when I stopped counting, and most of the world began losing the Internet. Martial Law. I lost track of the news as I lost track of my people. We were moved across the country to “strategically populate” non-targets. Famine, disorder… what else?
Do I really blame it all on two politicians? No, not at all. I indict ignorance and every single motherfucker that only indulged in the gratification of their egos when the world was burning long before either of these men allowed the Four Horsemen into the State Fair. I indict a culture that always looked for messiahs in other people or historical ghosts rather than finding any strength in themselves. But my indictment means nothing- this trainwreck has been in the making for decades, the train’s been out of the station for longer than anyone can remember. We all did this- we all made this. We all gave our tacit permission for this whenever we said “I don’t care,” or “whatever.” And how long has apathy been the balm to the world’s pains? Fuck if I know. But it’s had our frontal cortexes by the pineal the moment our dopamine decided to fire every time we saw someone worse off than us, and we patted our wallet, checked our watch, and mistook a mass illusion of control for a world.
America, shed some grace of yourself. God obviously has more cosmic matters to attend to. While my time is over, maybe whatever historian that finds this can take a moment to appreciate the day and the bigger damn picture. I hope the skies are blue. I hope the birds have come back. I hope your food grows out of the ground, not from plastic. I hope you are in charge of your own life, and whenever you make a decision, you know a million different decisions ripple outward. For whatever reason, I’m about to get a bullet in my chest.
Yeah, decisions, decisions. Good night and good luck.