Remember “Twin Peaks: The Return” two summers ago? If you had the patience to stay with it, you found yourself sitting through episode after agonizing episode of special agent Dale Cooper trapped in the essentially somnambulistic guise of Dougie Jones, doddering through life marveling at electrical sockets when his services were direly needed elsewhere. Week after week, you were wondering “when is he going to WAKE UP and MAKE THIS RIGHT?”
It’s ultimately a naive and doubtlessly oversimplified analogy, but that’s how I’m feeling about the Mueller investigation right now.
The Trump Administration is running roughshod over America — and has been doing so since the fatuous fucker was first sworn in. More to the point, with the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh yesterday, he’s actually fulfilling his promise and bringing his hateful, xenophobic and irresponsible vision closer to fruition.
Sure, there have been a few pot-shots that have rattled Team Trump. There’ve been developments, scandals and PR nightmares that seemed wholly poised to finally topple everything over — Stormy Daniels, the family-separation crisis, the Wolff book, the Woodward book, the Manafort and Michael Cohen busts, the anonymous mole in his own fold, that recent New York Times piece about his multiple tax schemes and his duplicitous ascendence into becoming the “self-made” businessman he’s ultimately never actually been and probably about three dozen other things I’m forgetting at the moment. But like bilge water off a sewage-slathered duck’s pungent back, nothing seems to stick. That Times piece already feels like ancient history.
The Kavanaugh confirmation seems like the most divisive chapter in American political history I’ve lived through in my almost 51 years. And that it has come to pass the way it has is beyond belief. Here in the largely liberal bubble of Manhattan, there is a palpable sense of incredulousness. This particularly awful episode really has felt like the Great Leap Backward into a crueler, more Draconian era.
To use another dumb pop culture allusion, I am reminded of a quote in the beginning of “Apocalypse Now” wherein Captain Willard is reminded that good does not always triumph and that sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Histrionic? Maybe, but that feels like an an entirely accurate summation of where we are, right now.
Yesterday, during a string of “victory lap” speeches, Mitch McConnell chucked about the fury from the Left and the discord of the protests, saying that “these things always blow over.”
PROVE HIM WRONG.
I snapped the image up top during the march in Manhattan in January of 2017. It rang true then and it rings true now. Don’t succumb to the gaslighting or the fatigue. Stay vigilant. Stay fucking angry. VOTE in November like the future of our Democracy depends on it, because guess what — it fucking does.
And somebody please wake Mr. Mueller up.
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