I think I’m safe in presuming that the majority of Americans would agree it is a hot mess in the good old USA. I get up, listen to the news and fight crawling back into bed and pulling the covers over my head. Wake me when this is over! If it wasn’t so true, it would be almost funny as in “you can’t make this shit up”. In fact it is not funny at all, it is demoralizing, anxiety provoking, and just plain scary. There is a pervasive sense of dread that is not easy to overcome. We have just a few days to go to Election Day and I fear it will still get worse before and after the election. It is no secret that I hate Donald Trump and his minions, and it is his lack of a conscience that scares me the most. He has no limits on what evil he is willing to do. I believe that someday we will look back on the Trump years as we look back on Covid, an awful time we survived and learned from, and pray it will never happen again. I pray sooner, much sooner, not later.
So I’m going to lean into this situation and explore how many ways we have to say this is really bad! I may even smile as I do this research . Some slang for a bad situation like “pickle,” “tight spot,” “mess,” “quagmire,” and “snafu,” all fall short of conveying how dire our situation really is. It’s like a lukewarm compliment like “it’s not bad”. We are experiencing more than a snafu, it’s a crisis. I did not know that snafu is short for “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up”, did you?. Fiasco, a word I love, means complete failure or complete disaster, so indeed our current state of affairs is a fiasco. In case you are wondering, fiasco comes from 1800’s Italian theater slang and meant a complete performance failure. I’ve had too many situations that turned into fiascos because of my poor decisions and lack of self awareness. In fact, the slang “train wreck” has my name on it, and is also a great description for Trump and MAGA. My mother often said: “Things are going to hell in a hand basket.” Not sure where that came from, but the gist of it is things are falling apart and we’re headed for disaster. Why the mode of transportation to hell was a handbasket is unknown. If you put crap and fantastic together you get “craptastic” a term that means a situation is so awful it’s amusing. I’m going to find a way to use this clever word.
Of course, most of the slang I use to describe current affairs are deep in the profanity closet. It’s a real “cluster”. Will I ever stop swearing like a drunken sailor? I have a refrigerator magnet that says” Somedays the supply of available swear words is insufficient to meet the demands.” Certainly, profanity is the best way to describe Trump, i.e, “o donaldo: a dildo with a bad combover”. I admit, this does make me laugh, and laughing feels better than crying which is my first inclination these days. Have you ever heard anyone say Trump is a nice guy? Even his supporters don’t think he’s nice! What comes to mind for me are words like thug, villan, evil, and corrupt dictator. There is so much that is f*cked up. I can’t just focus on Trump. I think of Hitlers/ Trumps generals who may not have cyanide capsules, but they do have pardons. Historians will be incredulous of the reality of the Trump era. What was in the water? How could MAGA happen? I’ll let historians figure it out.
I have choices, I can rage or cower in the corner, laugh or cry, obsess or ignore, doom scroll, or limit my news exposure. Am I more resilient as I’ve gotten older? Sometimes I feel very fortunate to be able to say “ Been there, done that.” As I and olders often say, I have seen a lot. Though I’ve never seen anything quite like current affairs, I do have some useful experiences to give me a bit of perspective for today. “This too shall pass” gives me a sliver of hope. So have we hit “rock bottom” or is this “ the final straw”? I don’t know, but I do know it’s all craptastic!
