Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
Turns out there’s a difference between living in interesting times and trying to exist amid delirium. How I envy those Trumpian Americans, their bloodstreams teeming with patriotism and microplastics, whose biggest concerns seem to be transexual athletes and paper straws. But with apologies to the 45th and 47th President and all those lying prostrate before him, I can’t help thinking the United States would be a far better country if we were willing to recognize multiple genders but only two mental states: sane and hallucinatory.
Yet it’s not Trump I find unforgivable… it’s President 47 E. Elon Musk is a repellent human being whose enormous wealth seems intent on turning his face to stone. Unlike Alexander Hamilton, an impoverished bastard child who showed up in the colonies and made good, Musk is merely a South African bastard who showed up to embellish his fortune.
Little Elon was raised in luxury amid Hitler worshippers and Apartheid proponents who taught him that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” Sure, like any of us, the serial entrepreneur and impregnator ( 6 companies and -as of this writing- 15 acknowledged children) did know hardship as a youth. Elon’s daddy allegedly made so much money from Zambian emerald mines he once boasted that “we couldn’t even close our safe.” Maybe the trauma of enduring a money-strewn floor is what led him to crypto.
We need to be very clear about the unprecedented nature of this moment. And I’m not referring to Ukraine and Russia and funding wars and selling armaments and keeping our legions well fed. Musk himself makes open-ended billions from defense contracts. He is Boeing in a tee shirt. The business of death will be fine.
What’s unprecedented is that a pair of psychopaths, one elected the other squatting, control the Executive Branch. They govern by whim. Madness, injustice, and impracticality pore forth in endless diktats from their seldom closed mouths. Just how horrific is the potential for this co-reign? Consider. In matters of legality, ethics, and the workings of the Constitution, Donald Trump is the more grounded one.
Trump has spent his life seeing dead ends as exit ramps. But his use-by date is fast approaching, and even he must know somewhere in his tortured psyche that every inane pronouncement brings him closer to the clock striking all of the time and, at long last, having no one left to fool. When his implosion comes the only question will be the size of the debris field.
But to see Musk bounding out the door of the White House or hovering next to the Resolute Desk or semi-presiding at Cabinet meetings is to witness a cartoon level of obscenity. Our government has always existed to help the rich. But with Elon, the rich are now insisting on helping themselves. And it’s not the line between democracy and dictatorship which is being obliterated, it’s the one between Plutocracy (rule by wealth) and Kleptocracy (rule by theft of resources).
Musk’s vast wealth enables him to act from a fit of pique and portray it as a sense of principle. He bought Twitter to keep from being mocked, and purchased The Eisenhower Executive Office Building to keep from being regulated. Under DOGE, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security may all be turned over to the untender mercilessness of Private Equity by Musk’s horde of Skittles-pounding pissants. But you can rest assured that Elon’s personal sense of entitlement will emerge unscathed. For The Great Stone Face defines public service as the public servicing him.
The rich are indeed different from you and me. They suck more impactfully.
Only a fool would tell you how this will all turn out. But only someone who has given up on the study of history, politics, and human behavior would find this boring. Lincoln believed the United States could not exist half slave and half free. Yet even he might have thrown up his hands over how to save a country trying to exist half certain and half terrified.
Nations have prospered monopolizing silk or tulips or the sale of human beings. Under the reign of Trump and Musk it appears we will try to monopolize delusion. And do not expect Republicans to set a limit. They will happily allow Trump to determine psychological well being and Musk to repurpose a 200 year old Constitutional Republic as his personal startup because they are energized at this once in a generation opportunity to keep the poor from living.
And what of Congressional Democrats? As Charles “We Will Win” Schumer resoundingly proved, they remain torn between inertia and appearance, while their perpetually paid consultants flail to rephrase spinelessness as sagacity.
In the United States Of America, knowledge has never been a prerequisite for high office. But our elected officials now find it safest to be neither fox nor hedgehog. To know neither many things nor one great one. Taking shelter in a lack of complexity, they have become the simplest of organisms… bacteria.
And the Democratic Party is the least useful bacteria of all.
