“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.” ~ Shakespeare
“You can always tell a pig by its grunt.” ~ Nikolai Gogol
As a defense mechanism against the current President’s attempts to re-create the Constitution in his own image, my recent reading habits have led me mostly to Shakespeare and the Russians. Which, in turn, has caused me to spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to make a buck off it.
Hence, I’ve come to the realization that my best bet is to put my money on the “Russkies” and let it ride. I’ll convert all my doubloons into rubles, take the points and Putin, and bet the Dacha. If only there existed a fantasy league for selling our country to the highest bidder, we could double-down and make a killing here.
With so-called Christians at the helm of both careening nation-states, it’s all “faith-based.” Corporate America will not despoil once-sacred and protected national monument lands for profit. Neither will they turn the soon-to-be-much-less-fairly-accessed routings of the Internet into their own toll road to an ever-expanding bottom line. Trust them! Have faith!
Roy Moore may have lost in Alabama but Jim Crow maintains his proxy. The Trumpians will get to the bottom of why so many non-whites were allowed to evade the carefully positioned German Shepherds and fire hoses on their way to the polling booths and then, that will be that. Trust me. Have faith.
The wagers, in the main, will more than likely involve stringing together a moderate slew of sure things with long odds. Like whether or not congressional Republicans will shut down any and all in-house investigations that appear to be closing in on the (gasp!) truth. Holding such votes in the middle of the night while their colleagues from the other side of the aisle are out of town, or sorts, seems to have a high probability.
The longest shot out there, of course, would be a bet that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will survive the onslaught of fake news directed at him by the Nazis at Fox and the West Wing. Vlad and the Donald won’t stand for it. They have too much to lose as it were. As Dostoyevsky once warned: “The formula ‘two and two make five’ is not without its attractions.”
My plans are pretty much downrange and all-inclusive. I’ll assemble my windfall from this Trump-Putin sports-book parlay and hide it under the new GOP tax bill umbrella. I mean, that’s a given. Why in the world would I want to pay tax rates that have been assigned to the middle class, or the “great unwashed” as the GOP likes to refer to them.
Actually, I find little reason to lose faith in the evangelicals within the Trump advisory groups. I won’t be slapping down any loot on whether or not they will be adopting real Christian values anytime soon, that’s for sure. They’ll be too busy shoring up the levees protecting corporate America from the waters rising against their continued assault on diversity.
And with Trump stacking his judiciary appointments with those flaunting a mental acuity somewhat equal to his own, having faith that the courts of the present and, especially, the future will atone for his excesses is fading by the day. I never once said these fools were dumb.
Then there is the philosophical cleansing going on within the Environmental Protection Agency and other cabinet-level departments to rid them of science-based personnel and monitoring procedures. Hopefully the diligence applied to the email-scanning of those who may have once voiced ecological understanding of the problems involved will be echoed by the office of the Special Counsel.
I no longer ask how we got ourselves in such a predicament. Looking to Shakespeare again, I find, if not solace, at least an internal roadmap: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Me and my kind are not totally blameless here. We must shoulder at least a modicum of responsibility for the emergence of Trump. Not that we should consider standing for it, of course.
Maybe I’m just finally getting to understand horror from the eyes of Lady Macbeth: “Out, damned spot!”
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years.