I remember...

I remember when the world seemed to make sense.

I remember when one person with a decent job could afford to keep a family. Maybe not in luxury but in a half-decent way. Seems now that it takes two or three jobs just to get by, wages get cut all the time because "it's the economy, stupid". Weird thing is that the bastards at the top with the money and the power, they don't seem to be taking a hit.

I remember when the good guys didn't use torture, not as a systemic policy anyway. I remember when there was more of a difference between good guys and bad than the colour of the uniforms too.

I remember when the worst thing we had to worry about was a president's unusual method of flavouring his cigars.

I remember a time when my prime minister addressed his thoughts to the Commons instead of the press and didn't even bother running them past the Oval Office for approval first.

I remember a time when a man who talked about wings taking dream would have been a comedian, not a president.

I remember when I didn't sound like a bitter old fart.

I don't remember but I'm told that there were once reasonable Republicans, sensible men of fair mind who believed in things beyond personal enrichment and the pursuit of power. I remember when they had a sense of shame too.

I remember a time when you could be assured of a fair trial, so long as you were white and/or middle-class or better. I remember that trials used to be the preserve of courts and the rule of law instead of tabloids and I remember when the media actually dealt in news and current affairs instead of being an animated gossip column.

I remember when "class war" was a good thing.

I remember when millions of people took to the streets to protest an unfair law and the legislators backed down. I remember when politicians wouldn't have dared call in the troops on their own citizens too.

I remember when you could say unflattering things about the president without the Patriotism Police having you strung up.

I remember when outing covert agents was the kind of thing that brought down governments.

So many dreams have died in the last six years that it's difficult to believe it's only been that long. When the Long Night came in 2000, I don't think any of us thought it was going to get this bad but when a bunch of criminals smacked a couple of planes into an office building, everything changed for the power-hungry. Suddenly, they could get anything they wanted but for those of us down here, we're having to run harder and harder just to stay in place. Jobs are lost, families starve, empires come and go but the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. We got told a million stories about why it was getting so hard. We got told that massive tax breaks for the rich would trickle down to us. But they didn't. We were told that stopping frivolous lawsuits would result in things getting cheaper but they didn't. The greedy bastards at the top just pocketed the difference and gave us another bunch of stories about how things would get cheaper, so cheap that we wouldn't notice that we were working harder than ever but the value of our wages were still falling.

Seems like we've had a dozen wars for freedom and democracy and mom's apple pie and puppies over the years but any time you look, it's always the same bastards who end up on top. Know what the difference between rich businessman and poor criminal is? Vision. The guy running a three-card monte game out of a suitcase on the sidewalk is a criminal but if he learns how to do the same trick with whole banks, he becomes a pillar of the community. If you don't have any principles, you're limited only by your ambition. The law's no problem. If you get away with it long enough, you even get to make the laws. Somewhere around the world, petty con artists are looking at the current president and thinking "maybe, just maybe" because power, real power, obscures all faults. Look at it a certain way and everything makes sense. If a resource's price is determined by supply and demand, the best way of driving up the price is to restrict supply and if you're a sociopath with power, you might well think that the best way to do that is to plunge a major source of that resource into chaos. If you're a sociopath with power, your reaction to a major terrorist incident might well be to exploit it to further extend your power. Down and down the list we go and every single time, without exception, the admin has looked at the dozens of options available and without exception, they have picked the one which causes the most harm and the one which advances their own interests.

This is what you face now. You no longer have the option of pretending that your president is incompetent or just plain stupid. He is neither. He's a monster. The 2000 elections (whether rigged or honest) gave the leadership of the free world, the most powerful position in the world to a man with no scruples, no moral compass. The man sitting in the Whitehouse is, in another world where he doesn't have such money or a different surname, sitting in a federal pen. True evil is something most of us don't encounter too often so we don't always recognise it when it shows up but sometimes, it can wear a nicely-tailored suit and make speeches. And real, genuine evil like that has no brakes, it doesn't stop. Don't expect him to abide by the law or anything Congress decides. Don't expect him to surrender power until he's forced to, maybe even at gunpoint. Don't put anything at all past him because a man who will do what he has done will think nothing of torture, he will think nothing of imprisoning or just having killed anyone who disagrees with him. Don't trust him to abide by his word for the same reasons you wouldn't trust the cannibal just because he has nice table manners.

I'm going to go to sleep now. I realise I may be asleep for quite a while but if someone could wake me when the Long Night ends and the world starts to make sense again, I'd be obliged.

But remember.......It's always darkest before the dawn. Right? Maybe? I hope.

Night night.

Hugs,
Your emotional twin

I believe America is in one of it's very darkest periods...

We -- all of us with awareness of evil -- have been subjected to immense stress witnessing the destruction of this country. The subjugation of citizens here in this country, and those in countries we have levied war upon, is both immoral and repulsive. May this cabal not plunge us any further into the darkness.

And for a mouthy broad like myself, THAT'S really saying something.

Absolutely speechless.

This is beyond well-written commentary -- THIS is political poetry.

Many of your essays have produced similar reactions in me. And now, I'll shut up, lest this turn into a total glowjob.

Damn! Kicked and recommended.

men and women understood, as a matter of course, that this wouldn't meet the boundaries of decorum and good taste (let alone the boundaries of sexism) and had no place in such an essay:

I remember when the worst thing we had to worry about was a president's unusual method of flavouring his cigars.

Sorry, I couldn't get beyond that. It just lost all appeal to me. And don't read that as any defense of Clinton, either.

Poor taste, perhaps but sexist?