Off balance. That’s the condition MAGA Republicans and The Heritage Foundation want to keep us in. Always one or two steps behind. Reactive, distracted, not quite knowing which way to turn or which fire to extinguish first.

Never mind governing, never mind consideration of duties and responsibilities of elected office, never mind the expectations and needs of the people who put them there.

We’ve watched so many things get frittered away, programs and departments needlessly yet purposely gutted, rendered practically impotent and irrelevant. And the whole time, members of Congress are kowtowing, riding coattails and kissing ass.

I don’t know if we’re living in a constant state of shock, or just disbelief. We’re watching things happen that we may have never thought we’d see in a lifetime.

But there’s the thing—this attempt at a constitutional republic, at self-governance and relative freedom has never been a sure thing. It’s fraught with variables, vulnerable to assault from without and within, along with the still unevolved penchant of human beings to default to survival mode, to stay stuck in old thinking, to indulge our worse angels, to get lazy and give up on floating more boats than one’s own.

What’s been unfolding for the past 11 years or so is perhaps something we somehow still can’t believe is real. After all, how could someone so clueless, so self-absorbed, so driven by vengeance and base urges get elected—twice—to the highest office in the land? Someone so unabashedly and obviously unfit?

I don’t know. But it has happened. It is unfolding. And it seems highly unlikely that there is any change of heart in the offing. Besides, it’s too late for that.

Donald Trump is a sniveling, devious, dishonest 4-year-old who tells himself that he’s strong. So, somehow dangerous nonetheless.

We need more details regarding how we can be talking about the end of the human race at the hands of artificial intelligence. Are the warnings based on sincere concern, or just the next round of fear-mongering hyperbole done for some marketing purpose?

Logically, one might think that since AI began as an idea initiated by human intelligence, there would be certain safeguards in place to avoid such an eventuality.

I suppose it isn’t far-fetched that such technology could reach a point where it thinks and acts independent of human control. It’s more a giant disappointment that we could let it get that far without a kill switch at our disposal.

Eggheads and scoundrels. Will there ever come a time when there won’t be so many of them? Will we ever see a day when all pretense is dropped, and everyone knows and names a jackass when they see one?

Currently, deception is a prominent theme. Gaslighting is all the rage, and Republican leaders appear to stand behind someone they must know is a disaster of a human being. They want a second chance to deliver on promises they can’t or won’t keep, and they constantly claim they are doing great things for America while most of the rest of us wonder what the hell they’re talking about.

Shamelessness abounds, lying is breathing, and power is the holy grail.

My wife brought home the first volume of John Lewis’s book series, March, and eventually went back to the library to get the other two. The three are all written as graphic novels and depict Lewis’s early life and the journey he took in the 1950s and 60s as he engaged in sit-ins and marches throughout the deep south, interwoven with scenes from Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009.

The series brings home a remarkable period in Lewis’s life and in the life of the nation, as the deep south is brought kicking and screaming to a place where black people are given any seat on a bus, service in diners and restaurants, tickets at movie theaters, and most significantly the right to vote. The books depict the travails and dangers and sacrifices, the strength and courage it took to win the day.

This, in tandem with finishing the first—and only?—season of The Gray House, has opened my eyes wider to the penchant humans have for embodying tall tales and holding onto lies with a death grip. I realize the writers and producers of The Gray House probably employed a certain dramatic license, but the core of the message is a familiar and likely accurate recounting of the long slog, of what it took to bring an end to secession and slavery in this country. And how entrenched many were, how firmly they held onto a “way of life.”

Between the books and the streaming—and the current administration’s insistence on returning to the “good ol’ days” when people knew their place– what has become painfully obvious is that colorblindness is still a long way from a certain universality.

Though maybe colorblindness has never been the goal. Maybe it goes beyond that, to a place where we simply carry on without making a big fuss over our different hues. To where we simply, finally understand that our intrinsic value has always been more about the intangibles and way less about skin-deep pigmentations.

The problem with our current political reality is that the Kennedy Center nonsense is only the tip of the iceberg. A symptom. A metaphor for the other thousand things that give us reason to scream and roll our eyes and maybe utter angry, spiteful things under our breath. Or totally out loud.

The MAGA base and most Republicans in Congress cannot be convinced that there is anything wrong with being in bed with the Heritage Foundation, with making mountains out of mole hills and inventing media frenzies out of thin air, with betrayed allies and stupid tariffs and a costly, unnecessary war and 4^th grade fights with longstanding trading partners and incompetence and kneecapping critical personnel who once kept tabs on weather and diseases, and ignoring environmental damage while kowtowing to the fossil fuel industry’s billion$ and tearing down the East Wing and building a totally unnecessary ballroom complete with bunker, and holding fucking MMA fights on the South Lawn and a Formula 1 race through the streets of D.C. and trying to dictate what kids can read and who they pray to, if anyone, and taking away a woman’s right to choose because they refuse to grasp the concept of separation of church and state, and weakening higher education because they can’t deal with a populace that can actually think for itself, and undermining health care and trying to start his own federal banking institution and grifting to his heart’s content and the constant misdirection in service of running from what’s in the Epstein files, and making fun of a physically challenged reporter and inciting an insurrection and pardoning the January 6 offenders and berating Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and firing the chief of Labor Data and cutting Medicaid funds in the “Big, Beautiful Bill” and saying white refugees only need apply and sending National Guard troops untrained in police work to Los Angeles and springing ICE goons on unsuspecting populations in various urban areas all over the country and putting many in “detention centers”, and taking nepotism to new heights and trying to ban TikTok and approving a pipeline through Native land and wanting his bust on Mt. Rushmore and his name or likeness on everything else, and the glib, uninformed wise-ass commentary, and lying through his teeth, and…

Making fun of the reporter should have been all anyone needed to see. As good an indicator as any of the overbearing, obnoxious, insensitive, shallow, immature, useless, empty pretender we’ve had to put up with for 11 years and counting.