this american carnage

Along with a small handful of friends and family, my wife and I will be stepping out from our shelters to survey "this American carnage" today.  Some of us will be marching past the library of congress and picking up the books left in the war.  Some of us will undoubtedly survey the remains of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.  Others might walk the Freedom Trail in Boston and long for the good old days.

I watched the inaugural address yesterday.  I believe it to be a civic duty to watch if possible, just as I generally watch the State of the Union address.  I did not expect much this time.  No soaring rhetoric a la Obama, or inspirational appeals to our better nature as Americans, as in Reagan or Kennedy.  I held out hope that he would say something inspiring, even though he has yet to say anything of the sort since he announced he was running for president.  In the absence of inspiration, I hoped he would say something unifying, but I guess that is just not in his nature.  At least he did not call for us men to go forth and grab some pussy.

So now, we are left with the true American carnage, also known as the Trump Administration.  This is a land where the Department of Education is proposed to be headed by a person who is not an educator, but has made a fortune in publicly funded, private charter schools.  This a land were the Department of Energy is proposed to be headed not by a person who holds a degree in nuclear physics, but a man who barely passed his classes while majoring in animal science, once tried to call for the abolition of the department he is now nominated for, but failed to do so in part because he could not remember its name.  It is also a land where the person proposed to head the Environmental Protection Agency has spent a career suing the Department over just about every regulation he could think of that was designed to actually protect the environment, where the person proposed to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development said the day before he was nominated that he was not qualified to hold any such post in any governmental department, where the person proposed to head the Justice Department was previously rejected by a republican majority to be a federal judge on the grounds that he was too racist, where the person proposed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services has vowed to dismantle the health delivery system in this country without proposing a meaningful alternative, and where the person proposed to lead the Treasury Department has made a fortune helping people shelter funds from taxes in the Cayman Islands, and now claims he overlooked over one hundred million dollars in his own personal wealth on his disclosure forms because the forms were too complicated for him to figure out.

My friends on the right, and yes, I do have friends on the right, have urged me to put our differences aside and stand behind him for the good of the country, apparently just like they did for the past eight years.  I will take them up on that.  I will stand behind this charlatan just like they stood behind a truly dignified man for the past eight years.  For every e-mail, there will be a tax return.  For every Benghazi, there will be a Russian interference.  For every birth certificate, there will be a conflict of interest.  And for every "he's not one of us", there will be show of corrupt and blatant incompetence, and a nod to the very obvious fact that "he's not one of us".

I continue to hold out hope that he will prove me wrong and turn out to be a great president.  That hope shrinks by the day.  I will therefore be out there today, marching for my country, our country.

I can hardly wait to see what he tweets tomorrow morning.