It’s the futility. It’s too much like banging heads against walls, screaming into a void. At best, talking over and past each other.

How can we be at such odds, so far apart? Is it like this in other countries, or is it more the peculiar nature of this American experiment? We’re the opposite of a coherent beam of light.

Back in the mid-80s to early 90s, I helped make high-powered CO2 lasers for a living, the best job I ever had. Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation… Circulate CO2 gas and introduce high voltage under vacuum, in a tube equipped with highly reflective mirrors properly placed and aligned, and voila: stimulated emission, photons bouncing off those mirrors at a high rate of speed and eventually all traveling in the same direction, leading to intensely high energy levels.

The raw beam will burn a hole in a tree sixty feet away. It’ll blow a cinder block apart. Imagine what a focused beam can do. It can lase Jello, but works much better on hardened steel. That’s what happens when the beam’s component parts are all moving in the same direction and brought into focus.

I don’t see anything like this ever happening in America. There are too many moving parts, too many opinions, too many errant photons doing their own thing, bouncing all over the place. And maybe that’s as it should be? Anything approaching coherence would probably be viewed as anathema to the American ethos.

Most of us have been able to move beyond Covid-19 despite the initial incompetence and denial and scatterbrained effort, and also because a subset of enterprising and capable scientists had been on the same page in having developed the building blocks for a workable vaccine. The closest we’ve all come to being on the same page and focused on solutions in challenging times might be a war effort eighty years earlier.

Our current way of life isn’t being threatened much less than it was in the early 1940s, except now it’s mostly by forces from within, forces– including elected officials in “the party of Lincoln”– who are committed to doing their damnedest in making sure the mirrors are constantly misaligned.

Who pulls the strings at Fitch? Is it possible that the downgrading of the US credit rating is politically motivated- a way for Republicans to point to the lousy job the Biden administration is doing? Even though, by many accounts, things are looking better economically than they have in a while?

Couldn’t this just be a bald-faced cheap maneuver timed to make Joe Biden look bad? It seems to have come out of left field, taken a lot of people by surprise. What is the motivation here?

Please tell me it’s not just more high stakes dirty politics rearing its ugly head. We’ve all endured enough of that shit.

Indictment Number 3 has landed. Four counts, but they pack a punch.

Timing will be everything. Can the wheels of justice move quickly enough to keep a derelict from achieving his ends? Looks like we’re gonna find out.

Trump is a punch drunk hang nail, a runny nose, an ear ache, a bag of garbage that’s been sitting in the sun for way too long. He doesn’t possess the good sense to walk away—he’s not anywhere near that considerate or self-aware. Besides, it’s too late for that now.

He’s caused this country immense harm and he doesn’t care. He’ll look back over his shoulder at the carnage, and there will be a sparkle in his eye.

He was POTUS once.

Has it always been this way?

You watch Hannity, I watch Maddow. You think taxation is a bridge too far, I see it as an unsavory yet necessary means of collecting revenue from everybody. You apparently believe that all people are not created equal, I believe they are. You believe climate change is a liberal fever dream, I believe it is alarmingly real. You seem to think Donald Trump is all that, I believe he is a self-centered, bombastic idiot who sees this country as nothing more than his own personal ATM. You appear to have trouble with variations in color and sexuality, I’m good with all of that. You say you love Jesus yet your actions and words say something very different. I want to love Jesus but am just not sure he’s even around. You think a personal weapons arsenal is a necessity, I think such a stance is a sign of weakness and despair. You may think Stephen Colbert is a Communist. I think he’s clever and refreshingly honest and that he loves America just as much as you, and I hope he’s back on TV soon.

The list goes on. I don’t know exactly how this turns out. I suspect if resolution and bridging of differences ever does come, it will be preceded by much anguish and pain because too many of us are captive to ignorance and fear and our worst angels.

The local theater makes its marquee available to folks who pay a fee to have messages posted on it. The latest is a marriage proposal. Not sure if it’s legit or just kidding, but why would anyone kid about such a thing?

I’ve never understood why mostly men want to go this route when asking for a hand in marriage. I guess they must be ready to accept the consequences of putting their prospective spouse on the spot in front of sometimes thousands of people and even a nationwide or worldwide audience. Or maybe they haven’t thought it through.

In its purest form—if that’s possible—I guess the intent is to show this person that they’re so deeply in love that they want to shout it from the rooftops. Or maybe it’s less innocent than that. Maybe it’s just a love of spectacle. A crass, arrogant, cheap stunt.

Call me old fashioned, but a marriage proposal isn’t something the general public gets to share in. The occasion can be memorable and meaningful without the cringeworthy showmanship.

The Republican Party is such a shit show. It’s not really a collection of comedians—they’re not trying to be funny, as far as I can tell. They’re trying to be serious. And that’s funny, because their stances and statements reflect a certain hysteria that belies ignorance and provincialism and a general lack of understanding.

They’re fighting for an America that shouldn’t exist anymore. Actually, they’re not really fighting for even that. They’re just trying to hold onto power and something that looks like relevance.

Good luck with that, with the likes of Trump and DeSantis and McCarthy and Jordan at the helm. Great bunch of people they’ve got there. Real solid folks.

As we listened to the Maddow podcast Bag Man, one thing that struck me, besides the similarities with the whole Trump debacle, was the reaction of Agnew supporters, often women, to the news that their guy was being investigated for criminal behavior.

It was as if they were being told that God was on trial for bribery and extortion. And when he was finally convicted on a tax evasion charge and forced to resign, there was more of the same. Beyond disbelief, it came across as indignant, vehement denial, and it echoed strongly what we’re seeing today with Trump and his minions.

Stand back a ways and one might come to realize that the electorate– women and men– may not be all that savvy. They can be gullible, deceived, misled, lied to, and then adamantly refuse to believe they’ve been had.

This might tell us something about the validity of polling. What percentage of people polled on anything have actually done their homework and know something about the subject at hand? Or is it more like that old REO Speedwagon song?

…heard it from a friend, who heard it from a friend…

To be “woke,” according to Elaine Richardson, is to be politically conscious and aware. “It (wokeness) comes out of the experience of Black people of knowing that you have to be conscious of the politics of race, class, gender, systemic racism, ways that society is stratified and not equal.” It sounds like a way to warn someone to be aware of what’s happening, keep their eyes open and their ear to the ground, take the temperature, read between the lines.

But leave it to some high-profile Republican politicians with names like DeSantis and Trump, and others with a particular agenda, to corrupt the word and overuse it, to take the concept and run in the wrong direction with it. As Domenico Montanaro observes, “Republicans on the campaign trail are using it as something of a catchall to criticize anything on the progressive side of the political spectrum they don’t like, whether it’s teaching about racism in schools or gender transition policies or even books and libraries they deem inappropriate.” 

The “progressive side of the political spectrum…” There it is. There’s what many Republicans are really afraid of, quick to slap the “woke” label on anything that smacks of addressing oppression and making life a bit easier for people who feel constantly put upon and marginalized. And ignored, even vilified.

John F. Kennedy is quoted as saying, “If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people–their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties– someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal”, then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”

Can we lump it all together, or is it inappropriate to appropriate a word? Seems to me what Republicans are railing against when they cart out their disparagement of “wokeism” is their deep-seated fear of what many others view as progress, as fulfilling responsibilities, simply taking care of people who are in need of being recognized as fully human.

Maddow made another good point last night, regarding the upcoming 2024 election. She said it’s shaping up to be a referendum on choosing between indicted felon Trump and the rule of law.

What’s it gonna be, America? It could be this stark choice facing us next year. And if it actually does pan out that way, will we go the way of Turkey and Hungary and Russia—and now maybe even Israel—or will we finally put the final nail in Trump’s political coffin?

A predilection for autocracy may be on the rise, but so is a predilection for resistance, as Maddow notes. The resistance will need to be strong and relentless, because religious conservatism and white paranoia seem to be running on all cylinders right now.

We’ve been listening to Bag Man, the podcast from Rachel Maddow about the investigation and eventual downfall of Spiro Agnew, who ended up resigning the Vice Presidency in 1973, ten months or so before his boss, Richard Nixon, suffered a similarly ignominious fate.

Wow, what a duo. What a time in our history!

What’s not clear is how Agnew’s lawyers were able to make one of their demands stick—the condition that Agnew would serve no jail time—apparently because he was Vice President? This was a non-starter, from their perspective. What I’m not getting is how this was not immediately disregarded as a bridge too far, as something they could put on the table, but also something that could be easily taken off the table, dismissed or overruled.

Agnew and his lawyers were probably savvy enough to sense that Elliot Richardson and company were under a time crunch. Their first order of business was removing a criminal like Agnew from the line of succession to the Presidency, so some sort of plea deal, something that could be effected quickly, was almost an inevitability. Richardson was desperate, to some degree, and had to make the hard decision not to pursue to the fullest extent what apparently was a robust case against Agnew for bribery, extortion, and tax evasion (he was still taking kickbacks in the White House).

The parallels with Donald Trump are obvious and perhaps instructive, not to mention troubling.

How dare he drag us along for this drawn out, painful ride? How dare he? He has no shame, he doesn’t care, he’s just seeing what sticks, and what he can get away with. And we have to endure the whole painful fiasco because the press cannot let this go, cannot just ignore the bastard. This is news, after all.

Or maybe it’s just a strange, twisted carnival ride.

When all is said and done, Trump will be facing something approaching a hundred counts on at least four indictments, and he’s gonna avoid consequences for all of them, or at worst he’ll get what amounts to a slap on the wrist.

The Agnew case was a foreshadowing of things to come in this current encounter with a slimy politician, a slimy politician who is basically going to be allowed to walk away from doing time because the office he once held offers some sort of magic immunity? Because he was once too powerful to be prosecuted?

This makes no sense, and it won’t stop many from wondering: In what universe is such an outcome at all fair? Does it just come down to whose lawyers make the strongest argument or uncover some obscure technicality that makes a mockery of reason?

That’d certainly be in keeping with the whole Trump nightmare.