The Devil's Only Friend
It's going to be a helluva funeral pyre
“Fire is the devil’s only friend.” Don McLean, “American Pie”
Coming off a couple of down days, working-class blues, worried about what Musk-Trump are doing to Social Security and Medicare, programs I’ve paid into my entire working life and rely on today. Read a couple of news reports about massive layoffs and closure of Social Security offices. This has more to do with cruelty than efficiency. The world’s richest man gleefully attacks the best social insurance program this parsimonious country has known. Social Security is ninety-years old now, as old as my own mother. Musk wants to destroy it simply because he can. Damn the human consequences.
How many of the 77 million people who cast their precious vote for the Felon wanted the destruction of Social Security and Medicare? They may have voted for deporting undocumented immigrants, scapegoating trans children, and reinvigorating white supremacy, but that’s not all they will receive. A level of self-delusion is required to believe that a vote for a felon-criminal-traitor and his egomaniacal bagman will usher in an age of peace and prosperity, on top of lower prices for eggs, bacon, and gasoline.
Trump-Musk are poised to torch the last section of the social safety net. Get back to work, old people, toil until you drop dead! Disability my ass, to the meat packing plant! Can’t pay your rent, grandma? Tough shit, build yourself a cardboard house!
MAGA, headquarters of cruelty.
What’s particularly galling is to consider the sacrifice made by a relatively small number of Americans after 9/11 — those who served in our failed wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq. Did they die or return home broken so a bunch of billionaires could stage a revolution? What a betrayal, and yet many Trump supporters are veterans or active duty military. Is it hard to live with blaring cognitive dissonance? Does the con artist’s mark ever admit that he or she has been played, duped, fooled?
To believe that a man who called fallen soldiers “suckers” has your best interests at heart is like expecting mercy from Lord Valdemort. Trump wants to hold power over our country until his final breath; Musk wants to rule and run the world like a king. These men are sick with terminal avarice.
For most of the 20th century America fought a Cold War against communism and the Soviet Union. Billions of tax dollars were spent, lives of people suspected of being communists were destroyed, and the threat of nuclear war hovered over everything. But look at us now, aligning with Russia because the Felon-in-Chief is a compromised kleptocrat who will steal or sell our national assets to make himself as rich as the men he admires: Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, Elon Musk. Perhaps we didn’t win the Cold War after all.
It’s hard to watch a world order come into being that poses hazards to my children, the institutions that make our lives a bit safer and more predictable, and the environment upon which life itself depends, and just sit quietly, accepting it as normal. It’s not normal, it’s perverse and dangerous. Part of what dragged me down was a feeling of uselessness. Collective action is needed, but I can’t find a collective to join and the clock is ticking. The coup is moving fast and we are moving slow. The longer Trump-Musk are able to steamroll and corrupt our institutions, the harder it will be to recover, to escape the Tyranny of Wealth that has us by the throat.
Decent, well-meaning people are going to be hurt by the stupidity of others they’ve never met. It’s hard to accept that the American experiment will end by the hand of an unscrupulous, lying, career criminal, a few hundred elected cowards, a handful of greedy, entitled, and grandiose billionaires, and 77 million voters who fell to their fears. Is there anything worse than a self-inflicted wound?
For reasons I will never understand, we gave the devil unlimited access to blow torches and jet fuel. It’s going to be a helluva funeral pyre.