Here’s the thing: you would never, EVER offer to let someone wager against you on the flip of a coin that for heads you’d win $100 and for tails they’d blow your brains out, and then offer as your defense on tails “well I didn’t think it could actually happen.” And yet, come Friday, that’s what happens. After that? Through the looking glass.
There are a million places to see what the hell is happening so I won’t delve into it. Going on the internet these days is tough anyway, as there is one nano-millimeter between staying reasonably informed and driving oneself into a frenzy of terrified hysterics. The urge is to escape, to hide, to deny reality. After all, They got to this point through fifteen years of denying reality, why shouldn’t we indulge ourselves now? And the trick is that age-old Demotivations poster: No One Raindrop Thinks Itself Responsible For The Flood. One person who believes Obama’s birth certificate is fake is merely a delusional fossil. Fifty million of them can deliver the White House to that one person.
If I had to guess, that’s how the Baby Boomers’ final revenge will go. They won’t take responsibility for this, any more than they have for anything ever. The 1980s are back, and the 21st Century adaptation of the 80s doctrine of I Got Mine Fuck You is Silly Con Valley’s gift to the world. (Peter Thiel is already supposedly scouting out a gubernatorial run in 2018, and boy do we have to tool up for that, because for a gay vampire gazillionaire to buy his way into the Arnold seat is not at all unthinkable. Fortunately we know that already, but it doesn’t mean you don’t have to stake that bastard through the heart.) And in the end, they’ll somehow disclaim any responsibility for it, as if the demographics aren’t the biggest predictor of who went for Trump. Sing all you want about hippies and the 60s, the Reagan-Bush-Trump path was paved by the baby boomers and it’s led us right to where we are now.
So now we wait, and fight, and hope against hope that the Old Ones will be dead enough by 2020 to let us get someone else in before the damage is too badly done. But they never took the blame for Bush, and they won’t take the blame for Trump, and they’ll be let off the hook as if whatever the next four years of bullshit brings all happened immediately the day Cory Booker or Kamala Harris or Tim Kaine or God knows who puts their hand on the Bible, just like it did for Obama.
Immunity from the consequences of your actions. That’s the very definition of a charmed life, and it’s the mission of the GOP in 2017.
What are you prepared to do?