47 was sworn in yesterday. I despise that ego-addicted charlatan. He’s a Machiavellian mess, but I watched the Presidential Inauguration anyway. The decorum, the pageantry—I’ve always enjoyed watching America dress up, trying to embody its ideals with soldiers, speeches, and songs. It was too good and too much for a man who thinks it was all about him, when it most certainly was not. It was about America, but then again, I suppose it can be both. 

I didn’t vote for 47. I learned who not to trust when I voted for 45. I now worry America will start acting like the comment’s section: angry, intolerant, ignorant, and isolated. Trolls trolling in the streets because it makes them feel strong in the face of oppressive pronouns and D.E. eye dios mio! We are not what social media has taught us to be; we are not the sum total of misinformation, disinformation, and doomscrolling propaganda. We are more—and that more is not found on the internet. We are what’s found in the hearts and minds of it’s people. Some of it’s people. Some of them are just troglodytes hiding behind zip codes and nostalgia. 

America has a long list of sins that didn’t just start with 47. They’ve been accumulating since before 1, just ask anyone with more melanin, estrogen, or deities. Presidents, like all people, come and go, and so do their ideas and agendas. Presidents, love them or hate them, are not America in miniature. They are momentary— personalities we prop up for the time being while the rest of us look for someone else to prop up in a few more years. They’re all just props in a game that we all take too seriously, or maybe not seriously enough. I fear it can be both. 

I wish that lying asshole the best. I really do. To desire failure for an American President is to desire failure for America. Only fuckups and fools want others to fail because they don’t wear the right colors or are the right color or ride in on a horse of a different color. They’re the real lying assholes who lie to themselves, thinking if their team wins then all of American wins. Those myopic morons think their leader will be the country’s salvation, because the other’s leader was supposedly the country’s ruin. It’s all horseshit. Salvation and ruin don’t come from politicians. It comes from people that think that salvation and ruin come from politicians.

I’m struck by the irony that 47 refused a peaceful transition of American power four years ago and now basks in the beauty of a peaceful transition of American power. He stirred the tea while 46 offered him a cup. Class isn’t just for students. America was and is great, not because 45 is back, but because baked into our American ideal are a few key ingredients that allowed for a bully and a bullshitter to once again assume said power, ingredients he neither possesses nor personifies: decorum, decency, and dignity. They are why I watched the Inauguration of an Ego. America can bestow upon it’s lowest it’s absolute highest. It was a beautifully bent combination of fortune and what-the-fuckery. As in politics and in life, it has to be both. 

Americans are renown for taking the bad with the good. We are that way because America is famous for offering it’s people the best and the worst of itself. Poverty, race, pomp and circumstance. They demand all our attention, but that is all they can demand. Super Bowls and cinematic universes demand the same. It’s not what we do about it; that argument will never end. It’s who we are because of it; that idea is far better than a ballot box. We are bigger than than red ties and blue handkerchiefs. Some of us are. Some of us only shop in binary— it’s Federal policy now. But my American ideal is bigger than 1s & 0s, Ws & Ls, Fs & Ms, Rs & Ds. That’s now a view for the minority. But I’ve always been a minority. Binary bigots like to remind me. There is a benefit to living on the margins though; it means you can get around the whole page and all the places in-between. Between is a wonderful word because it means among. I love to live and learn among the many. Unfortunately, most of the lickspittles licking up 47’s spit don’t lick anything but his hawk-tuah. They love to live among the many documented lies he persistently documents. But to be fair, 46’s cult drank his Kool-Aid, too— red and blue have been nursing juveniles since 1776. 

Red and blue don’t care for American la jente; they care for what they want: American power. 47 now has it. 48 soon will. I want them both to bring down the cost of eggs and gas and mortgage rates. I want them to secure the border on buffoonery— the either/or thinking that says, “a vote for them is a vote for the enemy.” Never mind the fact that the economy still sucks, inflation is still inflating, and the fat fucks who voted for these old fucks will soon go bankrupt paying medical bills to get rid of the fucking fat. Someone, anyone, needs to do some real, practical, Monday-changing shit. Talk and postering has been cheating me out of all those previous promises 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, and 47 made for a better America. Any better (or worse) America will be made better (or worse) by better (and worse) Americans. We’ll soon see a revival for both. 

I will look to my neighbors (the ones that trust) for the good, not the cults of personality on parade. I will look to myself to pay the price of eggs and gas and my mortgage rates because 47 is in this for himself, and I am in this, whatever this is, for me and my family. I’m an idealist and a pragmatist; survival survives on such. America is an ideal, so 47 can’t injure it; he can only add to it with whatever maligned math he multiplies by. America is a practical place filled with practical people, and all of them deserve their leaders to be better than they were yesterday. 47 has a lot of terrible yesterdays, but so do I— so do we. Terrible yesterdays aim us at better tomorrows, or at least they should. And when a tomorrow isn’t better, we wait, and when waiting gets old, we work. Aiming and waiting and working are what practical idealists do. I hope it’s what 47 does, too, because if day one has shown us anything, it’s that renaming things is a top priority— a gulf, a mountain, the Ts and the Qs in LGBTQ. But my breakfast is still expensive. Maybe if 47 signs an Executive Order renaming my morning meal something really patriotic I’ll feel better about killing myself over something so fowl. 

47’s speech was a a lot of “me, me, me.” But he, he, he is no great light sent from above. He’s a ship passing in the night. We all are. Ships rise and fall not because of who is at the helm or who is in the hull. Nature and change take us all along for the ride. We can ride the wave or we can jump ship, but drowning in an ocean of doubt and despondency is for quitters. Quitters don’t make good shipmates. Political policies and prognosticating politicians pretend to know how to get to where we need be, but citizen-sailors will be the ones to man the lines of reason, and in doing so will successfully navigate any uncharted waters. 

Uncharted waters is all America has ever been; it’s the Great Experiment on the open ocean. Occasionally, we let some ill-fitting suit steer, but in the end, it’s the crew that sets the sails and the course. 47 can play pilot for now, and I pray he pilots acceptably, but the American people own the bridge. I know he doesn’t respect that (see 2020 for reference), but I take solace in knowing that he’s only renting the vessel. The people own the ship and God owns the sea— that thought alone ought to keep autocratic commanders chiefly in check. And if not, then it makes me smile to imagine the cell in Hell (or was it the Hell in a cell) that awaits that orange scalawag. 

47 raised his right hand yesterday, and I hope God holds him to the promises he made to this country and his conscious. He previously held up a Bible for a photo op, but yesterday he didn’t even touch it for his Oath op. Oops. I guess he’s free to break his promises now. God only watches when we mean it. A Presidential Inauguration should be a call to greatness, but I doubt he’ll answer. I just wish he’d try. Try to be something he’s not— better. An inauguration is an invitation to service. Too bad self-service wasn’t written out of the job description. Real governance (of one’s self and otherwise) points at someone or something above one’s self. Hubris isn’t honorable, and it’s hardly a compass. 

America may live up to its ideals in the next few years, or it may not. Leaders may guide by virtue, or they may not. People may open their hearts to those who they’ve been trained to heckle and hate, or they may not. Individuals may open their minds to ideas and others their culture closed out generations ago, or they may not. I anticipate an inbound for both. 

Whatever tomorrow or the next string of tomorrows hold, we will endure, or we will die. America will endure, or America will die. It all depends on its people and the beliefs they cling to. Yesterday was Inauguration Day, but it was also MLK Day. A belief I have always clung to from that beloved doctor is this: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Things in America have felt bent for a long time. I hope all that bending is sending us in justice’s direction. I know 47 won’t. He makes people look at other people and say, “you’re not my kind of people.” Immigrants looking at immigrants who are too immi-gritty for them. That’s some real unjust shit. That’s why the moral universe is long, because it takes a long time for those hypocrites to die. 

Yesterday was a victory in the eyes of Republicans and a loss in the eyes of Democrats. And all because their party’s puppet took center stage. America’s stage is set for a show, that’s for sure, and I hope the ending doesn’t suck. I also hope the fans in the stands wearing their middle-finger foam hands remember the spectacle is not for their own benefit. Its for Caesar’s. We don’t get championship rings to kiss when this game is over; we get to kiss the pavement as we keep walking and working and waiting on the long road of the moral universe, no matter how bent it or we are. 

47 gives me no great hope; he gives me no great scare either. I’ve met pugnacious pricks just like him before. There’s often one in my mirror. But herein lies the difference: he grabs pussies, frees pussies (who killed Capital police officers), and maligns Americans in middle America who were supposedly eating perros and pussies— they were not. I do not. He was born with snake oil in his veins, and he’s been selling it (and any number of worthless wares) to the needy for years. I do not. Not only that, I’m certain he sympathizes with Nazis. I most certainly do not. His Silicon Valley illuminati hail those who love to hate. They’ll learn. It’s only a mater of time before 47’s aristocracy bro-band overstays their White House welcome, and they, like everyone else who doesn’t drink deep from his impotent cocktail, will incur his Führy. Fuck the whole lot of them for being everything anathema to what the American people actually need.  

Nothing inoculates more than little doses of poison. We’ve been getting little does of 47 for years, and now we’re going for the full syringe. Once we do, I hope the lights come on and critical people start thinking critically. Bullshit has a longer shelf life than truth, but both spoil quickly in a short-term attention-span ecosystem. We need to pay close attention to not just what happens, but why. Greenland is green not because of the trees. It’s green because the estates of billionaires just got real. Imperialism looks good on paper but wears poorly on people. People (good people)—and a little moral sense— will get us through this Brave New World. 47’s cesspool of a word hole opens and idiots dive in. Words, Huxley opined, “can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything.” Even fraudsters. Our newly elected American fraudster and the shadow he casts doesn’t worry be all that much. I just needed to say it did. Venting feels good, like a fart after a full plate of Taco Bell. 47 is junk food for the masses. A value meal with no real nutritional value. A No. 4 when you’re high– it tastes good at first, but leads to all kinds of regret and acid reflux. And when you think about it, after all, he is only a number.