America! Fuck Yeah!

I've got to wonder if people are immune to irony. This country elected (okay that is arguable) a man who has demonstrated from the very beginning that he does not really care about the well being of the US. There has been blatant lying, cheating, stealing, and evildoing. We have a situation where the health of our economy is further jeopardized on a daily basis, civil liberties are dismantled with the kind of support only fear can muster, and on and on. Health. Care. Crisis. Climate change. The public denial of these realities! There are no pre-rehearsed presidential appearances. This man will not take questions that he has not approved! Yet there are people who drive around in their giant trucks and stick stickers on them that promote war and injustice and greed. It is business as usual here--the only evidence we have that our country is at war is the news. Which is hard to pay attention to because of the commercials. And Tom Cruise.
It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's book Cat's Cradle, in which everyone on this island practices a religion which is illegal. The religion is practiced in secret, but everybody knows that everybody is doing it. At the end of the book, the world freezes because of an invention created by a man who had a hand in building the first atomic bomb. The narrator of the story meets the illegal religious icon of the now dead islanders. They are the last two people living on earth. The religious icon prepares to touch a puddle which has in it this all-freezing substance: he is ready to go the way of the rest of the planet. He tells the narrator that he will be thumbing his nose at god.