Tuesday, April 22, 2025
de Alvarado*
I’ve watched trailers to Tulsa King the new series by Sylvester Stallone. It’s about an older gangster who will break up an office or a car dealership or the salesman to make them offers they won’t refuse.
I’ve seen John Wick stuff and The Equalizer stuff. I’ve read that Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington are really nice guys in real life. However, in these movies they are killers. The idea being that those they killed deserved to die.
Remember 24? That was, I think, the impetus for Cheney and the W administration to create black sites out of the U.S. to torture people.
I remember Rudy Giuliani back when he was a New York prosecutor saying that when they were listening in on mobsters’ conversations they changed after the release of The Godfather. They had learned from the movie how they were supposed to talk!
Okay. Okay. Where does this leave us?
Well, let’s add in the far right rhetoric. They have ideas that the government is corrupt and full of goons and layabouts. They have been parroting solutions for decades. Well, ever since I can remember, and I’m going back to childhood. I remember Robert Welch saying Eisenhower was a communist. It’s why I don’t buy that grape jelly. (And it tastes terrible.)
There has been this continuous undertone of crazy stuff to do to “fix” the U.S. Remember John Bolton saying you could take the top two layers of the U.N. and not lost anything? Stuff like that.
Or Ron Paul, father of Rand, who advocated fixing the economy with diddling with the interest rates (called Austrian Economics – rejected by most mainstream economists – BTW.)
There is no end to this kind of crazy talk. Add to this orchestrated campaigns by various governments to stir up confusion. Hunter’s laptop? Right. The Italians found evidence of a high level politician acting criminally. Oh wait it was the guy who sent a Special Prosecutor and the Attorney General to Italy that they found evidence on? Oh well, forget that.
How many investigations, inquiries, and sub-committee hearings have the Republicans held that have alluded to crimes and misbehaviors by the Democrats that have been found to be based on nothing but innuendo and false assumptions? All of them as far as I know. This, over time, has an effect.
So where are we now?
The recent headlines tell us what is about to come:
We are on the verge of a recession,
Our withdrawal of aid to foreign countries will lead to the deaths of millions. Rubio and Musk will go down in history as some of the greatest villains of all time.
Our hollowing out of government will lead to less taxes collected, few services, and a military in chaos.
We are now taking people off our streets without arresting them and either putting them in detention centers or sending them to terrible prisons overseas.
Our research and educational institutions are being attacked and many will wither.
We are on the verge of the worst collapse the world has ever seen: economically, politically, morally, militarily and every other way. We are entering a dark age. Is there a way out? I don’t know.
*Many folks in the U.S. have probably never heard of Don Pedro. He’s kind of the embodiment of our bad habits. The dance, as far as I was taught, is kind of like the Mexican Hat Dance we learned in grade school.
