What the *Hell,* Man?

Gore Vidal once said that the sweetest words in the English language are "I told you so." Unfortunately, in spite of my consistent and vocal dislike of Donald Trump and his fascist policies, I can't really say that because the reality of the first...two, three weeks?...of his current term is so much dumber than I could have anticipated. And I don't just mean the flurry of executive orders attacking immigrants, people of color, and queer folk; I don't mean the blatantly unconstitutional attempt to destroy birthright citizenship and stop the flow of funds allocated by Congress. Those I could have called. What I didn't expect is that shadow president Elon Musk would stick around this long, long enough to start his own private little coup.

Make no mistake, these are bad people and they are profoundly stupid people. Watching them run around enacting their dictatorial little fantasies is a bit like watching the classic Three Stooges short You Nazty Spy, if the Stooges were less competent and more malicious.

(Apologies for the awful colorization; it's the only version I could find)

Mocking Elon Musk and his puppet president is easy and brings little joy. Mocking their deluded christofascist and white nationalist followers is about as satisfying. Still, it's life's little pleasures that make the whole rambling trainwreck endurable.

I don't have much to say in the way of conclusion, here; this disaster is very disheartening. I recently re-read The Odyssey for the first time in years, in Emily Wilson's translation. I grew up with the Fagles version; more specifically, I grew up listening to Ian McKellen's recording of The Odyssey. I've not quite done the kind of excavation needed to say exactly how this shaped my imagination and later intellectual life, but certainly McKellen's reading (of which I can find no clips on YouTube) shaped the way epics should sound to me.

Wilson's translation is a good one, I think; at any rate, it scratched that particular Odyssian itch I had. Reading it, I couldn't help but draw certain strained parallels in the state of Ithaca in Odysseus's absence and the state of DC in the absence of anyone with the will or power to stand up to these buffoons. Here's Telemachus to the disguised Athena:

As it turns out, of course, Odysseus does come back and the results are cruel and bloody; even the "good" suitors are judged to be complicit in the wrongdoings of the others. Justice is done; the good king returns and the goddess Athena steps in at the last moment to prevent a cycle of bloody reprisal. This is a fantasy, of course; the idea that bad and stupid people will eventually get what they deserve is one that only children and mystics have the convenience of indulging in, at least consistently. For the rest of us, especially those of us with little or no access to the levers of power, there is only the bemused horror of watching the genuinely least insightful people in the world given the power to force their obscene fantasies on the rest of us.