Making Sense of the Moment
- Mike Dickey
- May 22, 2025
- 4 min read
"Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future."
"I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks."
As I write this, the Big Beautiful Bill is being "debated" on the House floor. That the speaker brought it up for a vote means this is all a foregone conclusion, at least in the lower chamber.
Peg and I should be turning cartwheels--the state and local tax deduction will balloon from $10,000 to $40,000. We pay property taxes on three properties in New York, and P pays state income taxes here. We would now be able to write off all of it.
And under section 179 we could go on writing off cars and tractors and the like, to the extent we still make any money and require the deduction.
So for us, this has the potential to be a very good thing. Then why are we both so miserable?
I guess it's all part of the larger zeitgeist. Trump's about to start selling $5 million golden visas that, no shit, have his image on them.
The spending bill apparently includes a $1,000 per child (presumably white) "Trump Account" for each new baby born to a citizen in this country.
Meanwhile, our intelligence community is monkeying with the data to eliminate facts that contradict whatever bullshit he's peddling this week.
Yesterday's BS included insulting the President of South Africa with images of "white genocide" the Spray On Sun King found on a conspiracy theorist's web page. The only problem was that the images were from the Democratic Republic of Congo, not South Africa, and the corpses in the depicted body bags were apparently women sexually assaulted and murdered after a jailbreak. Not that Dear Leader would care one whit about any of that, with his enlightened view of women and all.
At least the South African in the room kept his sense of humor: "Sorry I don't have a plane to give you." That would be comedy gold in better days.
And the Justice Department is now hunting Comey and Cuomo and anyone else who's ever spoken out against Dear Leader and has a public persona worth quashing (rendering your author entirely safe). Those they can't arrest, they'll "shame".
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/us/politics/trump-justice-department-ed-martin-weaponization.html
After the Big Beautiful Bill passes, there won't be anything the courts can do about it. Did you miss that detail? It may be a spending bill, but they've included language that basically eliminates a judge's ability to hold the executive branch in contempt by forcing a party seeking an injunction against the executive branch violating the law to bond it.
Well, of course the American people are standing up to this madness, this coup by the White Christian Right.
Except, of course, they're not. In fact, as bad as Trump's polling may be these days, on closer examination one notes it's almost exactly the same as Biden's had been before the coup.
That we're generically unhappy with whoever's in charge, rather than raging at those who've stolen the republic, is simply outrageous. Our neighbors are largely okay with this.
The situation has made for an unhappy domestic scene here at Tara. How does one live out the balance of a dwindling time on earth in this stew of awfulness?
We've tried laughter, seeking out comedians' responses to the the crisis. But the jokes just aren't as funny anymore, and parody becomes impossible when the subject is himself a walking parody of a statesman and successful businessman.
We've tried nostalgia, spending evenings watching old movies as a way of teleporting to another time and place. But that's sort of depressing as well, seeing images of an America five or six decades ago that had its problems, but was still at its core America.
Time travel in the opposite direction isn't working, either. How does one plan an escape to someplace better with all this uncertainty? And where, exactly, is this "better" place?
Plus, let's face it, we're not at an age where it's all that easy to pitch everything and start over. So here we sit, frogs in a rapidly warming pot.
Baseball? It works for me, sitting on the porch with a beer in the evenings and enjoying the view across the park and the valley. But Peg's not a baseball person, and the Braves have been a bit of a letdown this season.
Booze is a simply terrible means of coping--P and I are early risers, and crawling out of bed with a muddy brain only makes things worse. Besides, unless one can convince oneself that Keystone Light is a quality drink, happy hour has become an extremely expensive proposition. And we need to be saving money to build that bunker for the Last Days.
So, what to do? We've done our best to create a dike around this lovely life we have together, but the wickedness of the world is slopping over the wall and fouling this space, this moment. Truly, I don't have the slightest idea what to do.
The headline tracker in the corner of my laptop screen tells me the Big Beautiful Bill just passed in the House. No surprise. But the grief wells up nonetheless.
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