Hispanic Fanatic

Politicians have long employed vivid metaphors to explain how they envision America’s future. Maybe it’s a New Deal or a Great Society or a shining city on a hill.

But according to our friends in the Republican Party, our country’s future can be summed up in the phrase “serf city.”

You see, conservatives see Hungary as the model for America. This is because they love its leader, Viktor Orbán, “a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country… while enriching his family and friends.” In turn, Orbán and other autocrats love “Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women.” 

Hungary is now the poorest nation in the European Union, and the government oppresses the shit out of anyone who isn’t a straight Christian (so you see the appeal to Republicans).

It’s a bizarre role model for the world’s most powerful country to emulate. But that’s the direction in which we are headed, because the current occupant of the White House “has grown more impulsive, more vindictive, and more anarchic” while pursuing his “witless, incoherent, and incompetently executed policies.” The truth is that “if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone.”

We will be Hungary, just larger and with fatter people.

What can we do about this slide into oligarchal incompetence? Apparently, not much.

As our befuddled, furious, demented president “takes a sledgehammer to the rule of law, intimidates and bullies those who stand in his way, hacks away at press freedoms, guts government agencies, and continues to demonize those whom he sees as ‘woke,’ who will dare to stand in his way?”

His hardcore supporters will love him no matter what. This is because devoted right-wingers are often “abused people who identify with power so they’ll never be hurt again.” Their approach to a wannabe strongman is “Big Daddy will protect me so that I’ll never be hurt again, like I was hurt by my real daddy.” Such zealous Trumpers “attack vulnerable people because they hate their own vulnerability.”

So don’t count on angry people who have voted for Trump three times to reign in a guy who is “going to war against America” itself.

We are suffering through a rapidly escalating series of “moments where malignant normality… somehow keeps getting worse as the country collapses into autocracy and authoritarianism.”

America is in a horrific situation where if Trump fails, “then we all do.” But if he’s successful, “our republic fails. That’s the historic situation we find ourselves in.”

Damn. 

I hope you like Hungarian goulash.

On more than one occasion, I have had the following thought: “Is this whole damn country on drugs?”

It turns out that the answer may be yes.

About 17 % of Americans aged 12 or older — or roughly 49 million people — are addicted to illegal drugs or alcohol. In addition, about 16% of Americans are on some form of psychiatric medication for depression, anxiety, or the like.

That’s a whole lotta pill popping, snorting, smoking, injecting, or licking.

We all know about the personal, societal, and cultural consequences of drug addiction. As if those weren’t bad enough, we also have the political ramifications to consider.

Because oh yes, there is a political side to America’s drug problem.

You see, research suggests that “the Democrats’ struggles in communities battling fentanyl addiction had little to do with economic theory or messaging.” It was more likely that in these ravaged slices of the country, the opioid epidemic was “easily exploited by politicians interested in racial demonization” and that rural Americans, in particular, were quick to “blame the Democrats.”

One could argue that “the opioid crisis is underrated as an explanation for Americans’ dwindling faith in institutions.” The epidemic shattered the country’s belief in “the greatest health care system in the world” (it’s not, by the way) and exposed the government’s flailing inability to safeguard its citizens. It also revealed that doctors, big business, and obscenely wealthy families conspired to benefit from “greed-driven failures,” which in turn “led to a national tragedy that has only been compounded by the failure to properly address the scourge.”

Lots of well-educated, supposedly respectable people raked in grotesque amounts of cash from the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of their countryman.

Does that make you proud to be an American?

By the way, if it is not drug addiction that is making America more right-wing, it is the sharp decline in literacy. It seems that American adults are reading fewer books on average than in any year on record, and that “the digital age’s modes of thought and discourse increasingly resemble those of pre-literate oral cultures.” 

This means that as “reading declines, the electorate’s commitment to pluralism, objectivity, universalism, individual rights, and the rule of law is swiftly receding.” People who don’t read are more likely to be vulnerable to “demagoguery, where falsely raised hopes and falsely raised fears trump reason and the capacity for reflective thinking recedes, along with its influence on rational, empathic decision making.”

If these theories are correct, it means that the opinions of drug-addled illiterates are more prevalent and powerful than yours. 

And America will continue to decline until more of us put down the pipe and pick up a book.

“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.”

— Criswell, Plan 9 From Outer Space

I have been predicting a World Series victory for my Milwaukee Brewers every year for the last decade. Clearly, my powers of prognostication are not as strong as they could be.

But you don’t have to be psychic to know that the future does not look bright for America. I’m not just talking about our crumbling institutions, vanishing freedoms, and shaky economy.

I’m talking about China, baby.

Yes, the last communist empire is getting ready to dominate the hell out of us in the coming years. Experts say “policymakers in Beijing believe they will benefit from the destruction of America’s global credibility,” and that China is “aggressively contesting the innovative sectors where the United States has long been the unquestioned leader.”

The result is that China is poised to lead the world in technology, economic strength, and sociopolitical power, leaving the USA in its dust.

But don’t you worry, the Trump administration is fighting back. For example, they are “gutting our national scientific institutions and workforce that spur US innovation.” And they are obsessing over “what teams American transgender athletes can race on, [while] China is focused on transforming its factories with AI so it can outrace all our factories.”

OK, maybe that is not so inspiring. In fact, if you were trying to throw the game and let China win, you would likely do exactly what the White House is doing.

Still, the Trump administration must have some kind of master plan to maintain America’s strength. They must possess a uniquely brilliant strategy, considering we have been told—over and over again—that they are the smartest, most competent group of patriots ever assembled. And the scourge of DEI is no longer oppressing them.

So what’s their approach to this geopolitical crisis?

No one knows.

You see, it’s unclear who is actually running this country. The Trump administration is a mishmash of morons, sociopaths, sycophants, and random dudes who just meandered in. We’re talking about people who don’t even show up for their jobs, can’t keep their conspiracy theories straight, and are woefully out of their depth. 

Nobody in the White House knows what to do, so their days are spent screaming “Illegals!” and threatening trans people. That’s it as far as insightful thinking and productive action.

This amalgamation of dullards and lunatics has prepped America for a future where the nation will be left “corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.”

And that’s if we don’t devolve into civil war.

No, it’s not the rosiest prediction. With such a grim fate looming over us, somedays the only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that this year, the Milwaukee Brewers will finally win the World Series.

You can count on that one. Trust me. 

If you’re confident that ICE will never grab you off the street, throw you into a van, and whisk you off to some filthy basement before kicking you out of the country without so much as formal charges, well congratulations on being white, because that is the best protection against such a fate.

And even that is not 100%, because ICE is now grabbing white people as well, which is an inevitable consequence of handing unchecked power to thugs and fascists who want all the power of governmental force with none of the responsibility to actually protect anyone.

Our favorite band of homegrown authoritarians “has opened a new phase in its immigration agenda, one that goes well beyond the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.” They are harassing academics, grabbing citizens for looking swarthy, and “targeting legal immigrants who have expressed views that the government believes threaten national security and undermine foreign policy.”

Basically, they are going after anyone who annoys them, under the pretense of kicking hardened criminals out of the country. 

So now we have mothers getting abducted in front of their kids, masked men who refuse to show ID as they manhandle people who may or may not be undocumented, and armored vehicles rolling down city streets.

Meanwhile, whole communities feel terrorized, most Americans are aghast at what their government has become, and crops in the fields “are rotting at peak harvest time.”

But don’t worry about that last issue. You see, the opening of concentration camps in America means that, in all likelihood, undocumented people will soon be taken to these camps, where they will either toil as “slaves to government projects” or be “offered to American companies on special terms: a one-time payment to the government, for example, with no need for wages or benefits.”

In the latter case, “detained people will be offered back to the companies for which they were just working,” and their imprisonment “will be presented as a purge or a legalization for which companies should be grateful.” Indeed, our American il duce “has already said that this is the idea, calling it ‘owner responsibility.’”

If this does not bring to mind images of black slaves suffering in the fields of the antebellum South, then you have no grasp of history.

It also exposes the hypocrisy of conservatives who say they want to deport all undocumented people, but really just want them to keep doing what they’re doing, but under even more barbaric conditions, so the economy doesn’t collapse.

And if there aren’t enough undocumented people to perform this slave labor, what then? 

Hey, was that ICE agent who is rolling past your house looking at you? It was probably just your imagination.

Probably.

Let’s take a break from the real-life horror show that we are living in so we can focus on the only place that horror belongs: on the movie screen.

I’m happy to announce that my latest book is now available from DieDieBooks, an indie publisher that, in their words, creates works “about scary movies written for horror fans by horror fans who approach their work from a smart, personal, and critical perspective.”

My first nonfiction book is about that classic of horror cinema, The Amityville Horror.

The book is an analysis of the movie, complete with insights into the cultural, political, and religious significance of the 1979 film. Plus, I make some sex jokes, provide snarky observations, and really get going about the freaky scene that takes place in the Red Room.

You can order my book, as well as other works from DieDieBooks, by taking part in my publisher’s Kickstarter campaign.

The book was a blast to write, and I hope you like it.

Thanks

Yes, I went on vacation while the world burned.

Before you get too judgmental, keep in mind that I rarely take time off, and I had booked this trip months in advance. So there was no way I could have known that the same week I planned to go abroad, the administration’s Gestapo-lite thugs would lay siege to my city of LA, or that the threat of ICE detaining me at the airport would become a distinct possibility. 

Nor could have I predicted that as I snagged a margarita in a foreign land, our illustrious commander in chief would embroil us in a war for vague, ricocheting reasons that grow more disturbing and contradictory by the hour.

In short, I picked a bad week to relax.

But of course, there are no good weeks in Trump’s America, and there is never a decent time to kick back while fascists prance around our nation’s cities.

Having said that, I enjoyed my sojourn to Mexico. I hadn’t been there in 40 years, and it was good to be back.

I highly recommend the country, even though Americans have been led to believe that it is just a sepia-toned wasteland of tattooed gangsters who will murder you for pure amusement. In my experience, it is a vibrant, verdant place where Mexicans work way too hard to keep Americans happy.

On our trip, my son and I swam in the underwater cave that the Mayans believed was the entrance to the underworld, and it was impossible not to feel the weight of history and belief and nature in that beautifully spooky cavern.

The next day, while we marveled at Chichen Itza, an American family joined our tour. The family’s sullen teenagers came to life when the tour guide explained how the Mayan astronomers — sans computers or advanced telescopes — made calculations that were within seconds of our modern observations.

One teen boy turned to the other and said, “Damn, those Mayans were crazy smart.”

Indeed they were, young man. 

But now I’m back in the USA, and instead of looking at ocean waves, tourists with six-pack abs, and plates of delicious food, I look at flickering images on my computer screen of monstrosity, inhumanity, and subjugation, courtesy of a corrupt administration filled with sycophants, goons, and thugs.

Clearly, I need a vacation from all this.

I live in Los Angeles. Let me assure you, it is no war zone.

It will only become an anarchic ruin if a certain xenophobe with authoritarian tendencies gets his way.

You see, LA is over 400 square miles. Right now, the curfew zone is about one square mile of that, and the jostling, shouting, and occasional flaming car you’ve seen on television are contained to an area slightly larger than that.

Yes, more than one LA local has pointed out that our city’s level of mayhem is somewhere between the aftermath of a Dodgers World Series victory and a random Saturday afternoon in the Silver Lake Trader Joe’s parking lot.

There is no anarchy here. There are only people trying to protect their neighbors, bored Marines wondering why they are here, a handful of troublemakers who want to mix it up with the cops, and the gloomy pall of an angry, hate-filled megalomanic whose whole existence at this point is making America suffer.

He is “intentionally causing chaos, terrorizing communities, and endangering the principles of our great democracy” in a floundering, heavy-handed, “unmistakable step toward authoritarianism. He is “trying to manufacture chaos and crisis on the ground for his own political ends,” while yelling the word “insurrection” so often that you could turn it into a drinking game.

As we all know, when California “has asked for needed federal help—during the wildfires earlier this year, for example—Trump has begrudged that help and played politics with it.” Yet he is now portraying himself as a great savior and “forcing help that the city and state do not need and do not want, not to restore law but to assert his personal dominance over the normal procedures to enforce the law.”

And do we really have to point out that Mr. Law and Order is fine with people bludgeoning cops, as long as those committing the assault are doing so in his name? The Trumpian philosophy is “Hit a cop, you’re going to jail, unless the president likes the reason you hit a cop, in which case you’re getting a pardon.”

Listen, even an astigmatic child can see that “by militarizing the situation in L.A., Trump is goading Americans more generally to take him on in the streets of their own cities, thus enabling his attacks on their constitutional freedoms.” This is stage one of his pathetically obvious plot to “create a national emergency that will enable him to exercise authoritarian control.”

After all, “mass deportation and large-scale immigration enforcement require nothing less than a police state, and the more of a crackdown you demand, the more obviously it will look and act like a police state.”

This is no doubt fine with the 20 percent of Americans who will support Trump no matter what and most likely love the idea of an authoritarian government. But most of America is not so enamored with the idea of a despotic king.

That is why as the Trump administration flounders and fails at everything it tries, as their “initiatives have stalled and popular opinion is turning against the administration on every issue, the Trump regime is trying to establish a police state.” But just every other project the White House attempts, they fucked this one up, because “in making Los Angeles their flashpoint, they chose a poor place to demonstrate dominance.” They could have rolled into “a smaller, Republican-dominated city whose people might side with the administration,” but in picking a fight with Los Angeles, they tried to conquer “a huge, multicultural city that the federal government does not have the personnel to subdue.”

The best-case scenario is that Trump gets bored with fighting us, withdraws the troops and his government gangsters, and then declares victory when the situation normalizes, thereby continuing his habit of provoking chaos and then claiming a win when total disaster is narrowly avoided.

The worst-case scenario, unfortunately, is that Trump follows “the logic of revolution,” in which aspiring tyrants find its not so easy to vanquish a nation, and after “each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier.”

The concern, of course, is that “if not stopped.. the Trump revolution will follow that logic too.”

In this case, Los Angeles will just be the beginning.

The Iraq War was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then Hurricane Katrina was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then Trump becoming the party’s nominee was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then Trump winning the electoral college in 2016 was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then the botched response to Covid was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then the January 6 attack was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then Trump winning the nomination again was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then DOGE was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then tariffs was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then…

OK, the point is that we are closing in a dozen death knells, yet here is the Republican Party, in control of all three branches of government and executing its maniacal agenda with incredible speed (although not with incredible efficiency).

Also, this theoretically moribund political movement currently enjoys a higher approval rating than its opposition.

But it hasn’t stopped political commentators from declaring, “This is really it. The death knell of the GOP is coming. We mean it this time.”

Yup, I’m sure this time it will be different.

In truth, the fight between progressives and conservatives will likely go on as long as this country exists. Of course, that might not be for very  much longer, but let’s be bold and optimistic.

There are many reasons to believe that the GOP is doomed in the long run, ranging from the dismal history of xenophobic political parties to the high death rate of the Republican base to the likelihood of right-wing implosion.

But even if the GOP goes the way of the Whigs, there will always be a remnant of lunacy in American culture. There will always be a large contingent of people who feed on fear, hatred, and ignorance. The objects of their scorn and the wars they declare will look different, but there will never be a time when progressives will sit back and say, “Everybody relax. We won.”

Consider that even if Trump literally destroyed America, 20% of the survivors would still worship him. Another 20% would turn on him, but refuse to admit that liberals were right. They would eventually go back to voting Republican (or the equivalent in a post-apocalyptic society that still allowed voting) in the next election. So even in a worst-case scenario, about 40% of Americans would continue to reject liberalism.

Clearly, there will never be a death knell that abruptly finishes off the right-wing mindset.

The fight is permanent and unending.

We all live in a state of delusion. 

Most of these misconceptions are harmless or even helpful to our daily functioning. They are along the lines of “My cat really loves me,” or “I’m happy with this mid-level managerial job being the pinnacle of my career.” These delusions help us carry on.

But it’s a different level of denial to have objective proof that you are wrong, to hear esteemed professionals present mountains of evidence that is easily accessible about how your opinion is absurd, and then insist you are right.

I knew a guy who insisted that smoking was good for you. He claimed it helped digestion or made your lungs stronger or something equally ridiculous. Anyway, he died of cancer. True story.

The point is that some people, for psychological reasons that range from the tragic to the pathetic, will respond with hostility to any fact that scraps off the thin veneer of their deep-seated delusion.

I’m talking about climate-change denial, the belief in an immigrant crime wave, the insistence that hitting your kids is beneficial, and myriad other opinions that have been proven incorrect — over and over again — and yet cling to our culture like barnacles of ignorance. 

Since the advent of social media, it has been easier for conmen, hucksters, lunatics, and bigots to spread lies that take root in the imaginations of those who want to believe. But that approach has likely maxed out.

So now we have a new tactic in the war on facts. And that is “the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.”

Conservatives have always viewed reality with suspicion, likely because it so rarely aligns with their vision of how the world should be. So they have spent this entire century attacking objective evidence, data, and reason. 

Under the reign of their hyperemotional, logic-free emperor, they have “launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science.” It’s not just because this is politically expedient — although it is, since “by destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior.”

It’s also because the right wing has a long-festering, overt hostility toward fancy-pants learning and so-called elites (i.e., anyone who went to college but didn’t become a big-business conservative). This mindset catalyzed with the election of George W. Bush, a man who famously felt it in his gut because his brain was barely functional. It advanced with the rise of Sarah Palin, when Republicans embraced her undeniable stupidity and lauded her idiocy as a virtue. And it has reached its apogee with the current king of misinformation, a president who doesn’t understand the Constitution, basic laws, American history, or simple economics.

Indifference to facts and anger at expertise are now foundational aspects of the Republican Party. Conservatives are trying to “annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed,” and it successful, America “could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.”

We already have a large segment of the populace that believes vaccines cause autism, airplanes emit mind-controlling chemtrails, and Jews have a space laser. A Republican-controlled society “will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us.”

Of course, we could just go merrily on our way, optimistic that everything will work out, insisting that our country will just snap out of this self-inflicted descent into ignorance all by itself with no real effort from us.

But that would be delusional.

Here’s a trivia question for you:

What’s the opposite of myopia?

Yes, it’s hyperopia. You have heard of the former because it’s more common, but hyperopia (i.e., farsightedness) is a real thing. People with either of these conditions just don’t see very well.

These terms are a nifty metaphor for our political situation, which is somewhere between authoritarian-leaning and full-blast oligarchy. We can’t be sure because we are living it, and people are notoriously bad at identifying the eras in which they exist. We need the perspective of time.

For example, baby boomers weren’t nostalgic for the 1950s while they were kids. It was only when they hit middle age that they proclaimed that those were the days and insisted on dragging the country back to this mythical decade that was vastly overrated, never mind the consequences.

So while it is perfectly obvious that the America of 2025 is a shitshow, it is unclear how much of a catastrophe we are enduring. We will have a better answer circa 2050, if the nation survives until then.

The effects of myopia and hyperopia exist on a political scale. People who are too close or too far from a situation often have a skewed perspective.

Consider the Y2K bug, that wacky relic of the Clinton years. I’m old enough to remember computer scientists who insisted civilization would collapse. They knew all the risks and potential for disaster, so they focused on that. At the other end of the spectrum, people who thought the fledgling internet was a fad and didn’t know the first thing about technology were busy stockpiling canned goods for their underground bunker. They didn’t understand how any of this worked, so they freaked out.

One set was myopic, and the other was hyperopic.

You can see the same results with the Iraq War, when experts smugly asserted that Saddam Hussien had weapons of mass destruction, while people who couldn’t identify Canada on a map yelled, “Invade somebody now.” Yeah, they were both wrong.

There are other examples throughout human history, and in our current maelstrom of misery, it is difficult to figure out who is overreacting and who is way too chill about all this.

Experts on fascism are fleeing the country. Are they too close to the situation or spot on in their analysis?

People who have no idea how tariffs work are saying everything will all be ok. Could this blasé attitude possibly be correct, or is their ignorance not just reprehensible but dangerous?

Is the right path somewhere in between, a concoction of justified anxiety mixed with Zen-like hope?

Again, we don’t know.

I will say, however, that my theory is not perfect. You know all those experts who said Covid-19 would kill a million Americans? They were criticized and ridiculed, but yeah, they were right.

Sometimes, the alarmists are absolutely correct.