SAINTS PRESERVE US

Stand Back, Stand By as the World Turns More Strangely than Ever

Well, I don’t mean to harp on this but I’ve enjoyed a few fine Guinness beverages. Last Tuesday’s United States presidential debate should have been staged in a Rust Belt barroom about an hour before closing time: “Will you shut up, man?”

Bruce Springsteen called it years ago during the Reagan era on his ‘Nebraska’ album: “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” But nobody expected criminally insane and Pinhead from the ‘Hellraiser’ horror flicks in 2020. It’s an ugly hot mic world and we’re just living in it. American politicians once conducted themselves with a certain stately decorum and had respect for their elevated offices in American society. At least in public.

The absolute nadir of the planet’s leading democracy turned funhouse weird later in the week when the White House announced that der Trumpenfuhrer had tested positive for covid-19, a new disease best treated by light bulbs and Clorox. I admit to experiencing the gleeful and selfish elation of schadenfreude. I happily hummed a John Lennon lyric all the live long day: “Instant karmas’s gonna get you, knock you right on the head, better get yourself together, brother, pretty soon you’re gonna be dead.”

Around beer o’clock I was check stopped by a sobering thought. The untimely death of the orange, odious vulgarian in the final weeks of the meanest and nastiest presidential election ever could serve as a bugle call for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I’ve an awful sense that Russia and China are circling American skies like giggling Warner Bros. cartoon buzzards.

The small grace, the modest miracle was news that Joe Biden tested negative for covid-19. Dear God, the Democratic candidate was just ten feet away from the incumbent’s bloviated dog whistle spittle Tuesday night. Perhaps der Trumpenfuhrer’s mucous missiles couldn’t go the distance, overly laden as they were with ignorance, intolerance and invective. Viscous vitriol.

Meanwhile, thoughts and prayers have been tweeted to the 45th president from national leaders the world over. Their collective unspoken plea is that the good doctors at Walter Reed, the military hospital in Washington, DC will not treat der Trumpenfuhrer’s condition with steroids.      

             

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of end of empire observations since 2013. Sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9, use that thingy on the right. It’s safe to emerge from isolation now, honest. Everything’s copasetic.