National Eschaton

All cities, all states, all reigns are mortal; everything, either by its nature or by accident, comes to an end. And so a citizen who finds himself living in the final stages of his country’s existence should not feel as sorry for it as he should feel for himself. What happened to his country was inevitable; but to be born at a time when such a disaster came to pass was his own particular misfortune.

-Francesco Gucciardini

And all that I needed was all that I had

And it was good while it lasted

-Jason Isbell

At the farm today, which is about the most relaxing option for us, if it wasn't for all the mowing that needs to happen before we go back to New York. I'll hustle through some work that can't wait, then climb onto the fancy new zero turn mower to go knock down the weeds around the pond while Peg drags the finish mower behind the blessedly air conditioned John Deere tractor.

The pillow talk this morning followed a familiar arc, from whispers about what we thought we'd be doing or cooking today to the latest horrible, horrible thing that's happened in our country over the last several days.

Treasury's attempt to manipulate the bond market was a puny failure, because we all know the elephant in the room is the thirteen figure annual budget deficit and debt service that takes from our working class to pay the capital class. And the OBBL was like feeding chocolate cake to a diabetic (that's how my uncles and aunts killed my grandmother, for what it's worth), lowering federal inflows without any attendant benefit to anyone except folks like P and me who now can buy a new truck every year and write it off.

We've created a no kidding masked secret police roaming our cities. Our chief executive is engaged in brazen kleptocracy, interested only in building monuments to himself while an obsessed and mentally ill fan becomes his most trusted advisor. An octogenarian Elagabalus--how nice for us.

Measles has arrived in Steuben County, and our government has made it impossible from a practical standpoint to give childhood vaccines. Our food supply is now mostly poisonous--I never thought I'd see a day when P won't find a way to sneak spinach into my meals because it's just too dangerous, but here we are.

Our military is a shambles, and our adversaries have become emboldened by the knowledge that we have no allies and are too incompetent to present a coherent foreign policy. In case you missed it, Russia tried to attack Romania this week, sending an explosives laden drone toward an almost completed natural gas facility in the Black Sea. The Romanians shot it down, but hundreds of lives on the rig would likely have been lost had they succeeded. This would have been treated as an act of war at any time during my life pre-MAGA. Now it's just Tuesday's news.

We're living in the end times of our country, an eschaton arcing toward an incredibly dangerous and uncertain future. It's difficult to see how we survive as a functioning democracy, or more accurately resuscitate such a government, after giving the vandals the better part of a decade to unleash the four horsemen on their own citizens. Of course, that's not quite accurate because if you didn't vote for this they don't actually consider you a citizen--just look at the overt withholding of federal funds from certain cities and states for having the temerity to vote against the fascists.

It's comforting to think I'll be long dead before the ship rights itself--nothing I can do about it, so I might as well go hit golf balls and wait for the meteor to strike. At the same time, as Gucciardini observes above, it's also a little depressing to be old enough to remember the imperfect but functioning republic of my youth while watching it draw its last breaths. If you came of age in all of this, it's all you've ever known and doesn't seem all that horrible--hence, candidates like that Fishback nut who placed ahead of a bunch of folks in the Florida Republican primary for governor. Ten percent of the vote ain't much, but he did great on Florida's college campuses among those who were in middle school or younger when DJT descended the escalator. This is, for a whole generation, perfectly normal.

But P and I and our generation remember what was, so the horror of this moment stands in stark relief.

So our challenge as a household is how to live through all this with joy and purpose. I was always a patriotic guy, and that has been part of my DNA my whole life--right now I'm looking up at the framed front page of the Atlanta Journal dated January 17, 1991, with grinning Me giving a thumbs up from the cockpit of an F-15 on the first night of the war. This feels like a death in the family, but folks recover from those as well, I suppose.

Time to do a little billable work. Peg's in town getting a facial, and when she gets home my reprieve will end and I'll be ordered back onto the mower and into the sauna like heat to knock down a few weeds.