Twenty-One Months

Even as a gangster kleptocracy descends upon us, the clock is already ticking. Keep your chin up.

As the Boomtown Rats sang, I don’t like Mondays, and this coming Monday January 20th promises to be my all-time least favorite.

There is a palpable sense that we are entering a dark new chapter in American history, and there is good reason to feel that way, because our incoming overlords have gleefully promised it. The New Deal era is dead. It had a good run — 49 years — but the 44 subsequent years of the Reagan Revolution (a counter-revolution, really) unwound much of it, thanks to a relentless campaign by tenacious and deep-pocketed plutocrats, in alliance with cultural reactionaries (religious fanatics, racists, misogynists, John Birchers, et al), shielded by their increasing control of the courts (thanks, Leonard Leo!), and abetted above all by a massive right wing propaganda machine that now dominates mainstream American media.

So the dawn of Convicted Felon Donald Trump’s second term marks the Age of Roosevelt’s final curtain call. Oddly, in retrospect, his win in 2016 feels like only a preview, and the four years of Joe Biden a mere respite, like Adolf’s exile from ’23 to ’33, before a foolish citizenry and a hapless political system allowed him to retake power. Not to reach for too baroque a comparison, but it’s apt.