CSotD: It’s International Barry McGuire Day
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Not sure either event is particularly “inspiring” except to the wrong people, but Brewster Rockit (Tribune) does a good job of choosing the finalists and summing up the year, and I think he made the right choice.
The election was like finding out your lover has been cheating on you. On the one hand, you’re suddenly disillusioned, having lost all trust in a devastating revelation. But, once the shock subsides and you have a chance to think things over, you realize that there were clues you chose to ignore, so that while it still comes down to “shame on them,” there’s a strong element of “shame on me” and of “how blind and stupid could I have been?”
Constant Readers know my favorite quote from Confucius is “In vain I have looked for a single man capable of seeing his own faults and bringing the charge home against himself.”
Though, given the response to the year just past, I suppose my second-favorite applies as well, in which he is speaking to a promising but over-eager student:
Tzu-kung said, What I do not want others to do to me, I have no desire to do to others.
The Master said, Oh Ssu! You have not quite got to that point yet.
Which brings us to the banana on the wall, which was sold for $6.2 million to a person whose taste we may question but whose wealth allowed him to not only buy the piece but then eat the banana in a grotesque example of conspicuous consumption. How does that test your forbearance?
Note that Diderot didn’t actually say “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” But it’s a lovely thought, and yet, having gotten rid of most of our kings, we not only tolerate billionaires but worship them and make them our leaders.
At least Brewster isn’t planning to tip the year that brought all this to the forefront, though the year certainly does have the nerve to ask.
Clay Bennett (CTFP) suggests a kindly old 2024 making way for a little fascist 2025, but, to go back to that cheating lover, I think we should all be beating ourselves over the head for not seeing the betrayal coming. It’s up to you whether you want to go further and assign yourself blame for having made it more inevitable.
And there are certainly a lot of “if onlys” being bruited about, not only questioning why we didn’t do this or that but also, as jilted lovers will, blaming those we feel should have been friends and allies for what they did or didn’t do.
Especially if blaming others takes us off the hook for not seeing it coming.
And the optimism award goes to David Horsey, grim as this cartoon appears, because we’re not facing a repeat of 2017, though I wish we were.
Those who voted for Trump may have indeed wanted a repeat, but they’re going to find that 2017 was on training wheels and 2025 has not only removed them, but taken off the brakes and loosened the handlebars, too.
To bludgeon the metaphor into submission, I’d note how many people warned us that Trump’s first administration had included a lot of people who provided guardrails and that they’ll be missing this time around.
I’ll modify it by offering the observation that the MAGAt/Musk squabbling suggests things have gone off the rails before Dear Leader was even sworn in, which you may take either as a hopeful sign that they won’t get anything accomplished or as a warning that we are in for a level of chaos that no nation can survive.
Ann Telnaes points out who is apparently in charge, and Trump’s reversal of his opinion of visas to match the muskrat’s is an indication that she has it right.
Someone suggested that Trump is in financial debt to Musk and so cannot defy him, but I would point out, for one thing, that he routinely falls at the feet of dictators and authoritarians, and Musk’s one who he doesn’t have to go overseas to visit, and, for another, as ridiculous as is his claim to have H-1B visa workers at Mar-A-Lago, it’s no more absurd and ignorant than his belief that exporters pay tariffs.
To start with, he’d be hiring H-2B workers for the sorts of low-skilled jobs available at a hotel, and, second of all, bullsh*t. Show us the paperwork, Donnie, like you showed us your tax returns, your college grades and your cunning plan to reform health care.
Perhaps his employees have a concept of a visa.
In Francis today, Leo ponders the story of Joseph and Mary fleeing with baby Jesus to Egypt to avoid Herod’s murderous officials, while Gabby ponders its real-world, current parallels. According to the paper in her hand, she is referencing Dear Leader’s plan to deport migrants in this country, but let’s remember that she herself is a refugee from an unnamed country.
Which is why she sees the crisis differently than Leo, whose belief is simple and naive. But even Leo should at some point recognize that the deportation of migrants is focused on low-skilled brown people, while those who bring high skills from Europe and Asia will be welcomed.
Because, as Lalo Alcaraz notes, while Musk and Ramaswamy claim that Americans are untrainable, H-1B entrants can be underpaid and exploited, with the threat of deportation constantly hanging over their heads.
And they hope Americans will agree to pick fruits and vegetables, though that hasn’t happened since the Dust Bowl. But if they shutter the Education Department and duplicate the Gilded Age economy, their plan may work.
Last Bits of Advice
F-Minus (AMS) suggests you screen the New Year before showing it to your children.
While Fiona Katauskas hopes positivity is the New Year’s Resolution she can keep.
Christopher Downes offers this advice, a great idea that might be hard to maintain as things unfold.
I’ll close with Joe Heller’s observation. I have always hated having my kids, and now grandkids, on the road at holidays. Your decisions are your responsibility, but there are drivers out there with none at all, and we’ll need you in the year to come.
Because we’ve been here before.
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