What the Last Decade has Done
- Mike Dickey
- 6 hours ago
- 3 min read
"...if the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded."
12.17.25
A heat wave arrives in the Southern Tier, just in time for Christmas.
We awoke to 37, have been promised a high of 47, and several more days like this. So much for a white Christmas. Enjoy those snowy hills while you can.
A little dread in the pit of my stomach thinking of the pretrial I'll be attending by Zoom in about two hours. The judge will be angry and frustrated, the parties miserable, the case likely to sit in limbo for another several months. So much unhappiness.
For a time I told myself it was a matter of my own perception, this gloom. Or maybe just how I'm wired. Or perhaps it's just a function of joining a profession that exists to deal with human failings and conflict.
Sure, all that. But to the last point, part of the reason the practice of law has gone from sort of unpleasant but intellectually stimulating to objectively horrible with almost no time or opportunity to show one's chops as a legal thinker is the sheer depth and breadth of bad behavior we as a society are dragging through the courthouse doors these days. I think actual court filings have been pretty static over the last several years, but the nature of the players has changed. The lawyers are mostly from downstate, and play a much meaner game than my mostly collegial panhandle cohort. The parties seem burdened with at least a plurality of the Seven Deadlies, and carry unrealistic expectations about how long this all will take and how much it will cost. They all ride into the courthouse thinking like they did in 1914, that we'll be home from the war before the leaves fall, while their lawyers see the static trench lines and years of attrition as the actual battlefield.
Stepping back and taking a still broader view, I think the last decade of MAGA has done permanent damage, at least for someone my age, to an American's view of the country, our neighbors, ourselves. And it bleeds into everything.
One of my favorite bloggers wrote this morning about the personal struggle of feeling that he'll be elated when the inevitable news arrives, whether tomorrow or in another decade, of Trump's death.
Wishing another person dead reflects a loss for the person feeling that way, brings a questioning of whether the experience of this extended, abusive relationship is wrecking who we thought we were.
Over at the NYT, Bret Stephens had similar thoughts.
Not so much about wishing Trump's demise as reflecting on what can't be fixed when this nightmare ends.
But the damage that cuts deepest is never financial, legal or institutional. As one of Smith’s greatest contemporaries, Edmund Burke, knew, it lies in something softer and less tangible but also more important: manners. “Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us,” Burke wrote. It is, he warned, through manners that laws are either made or unmade, upheld or corrupted.
Right now, in every grotesque social media post; in every cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing; in every classless dig at his predecessor; in every shady deal his family is striking to enrich itself; in every White House gathering of tech billionaires paying him court (in the literal senses of both “pay” and “court”); in every visiting foreign leader who learns to abase himself to avoid some capricious tariff or other punishment — in all this and more, our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized.
I wonder if we are ever getting them back.
Good question. I reckon not, but this is the moment in which we all find ourselves, red-eared with shame at what our country has become, what we are doing to ourselves and the rest of the world. And it's the only moment we've got---I haven't found a credible offer of some cryogenic chamber where I can rest until an 80-year-old Pete Buttigieg is finally sworn in. How does one endure all this without descending into despair?
Speaking of which--I need to go find a collared shirt and get ready for a morning of Zoom misery.