2024 has been quite the wild ride. If the Democratic Establishment is to be believed, it featured an election that represents the execution of an existential threat to American democracy, with the Trump Restoration all but assuring, well, that. Mr. Trump managed to secure reelection either despite, or because of, the Democratic Establishment’s decision to time various criminal charges against him for maximum electoral impact, although only a New York County criminal prosecution over the Stormy Daniels “hush money” payments went to trial (and resulted in conviction). [As a long time practicing attorney in this city, albeit not specializing in criminal law, I can tell you that the likelihood that the conviction would survive a full appeal is “dubious”… but I digress.] I’ll quote Ben Franklin for no reason, who, in response to a question posed by Elizabeth Willing Powel [“Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy”] responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Perhaps the moment has arrived and we can no longer keep it.
Here in Stately Dog Manor, this has been a full-on year from hell, and I’m not talking about an election that just gave us, well, the worse of two almost certain to be awful outcomes. Those would be the Hobson’s choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Harris promised us Neoliberalism with a level of professional competence, where the minimum wage would stay at $7.25 an hour, a “health care” system ranked first in the world in cost and forty-something in medical outcomes (including life expectancy) where several hundred thousand people would file bankruptcy for medical bills, tens of thousands would still die from lack of access to health care would remain unchanged [more on this shortly], housing costs would remain unaffordable in most American cities (and virtually all of the ones with vibrant job markets), and the U.S. Supreme Court would not be expanded to provide justices who would reverse Citizens United or Dobbs. And with Harris it’s also probable that American tax dollars will continue to fund Israeli military activities (and/or human rights abuses) against Palestinians (and Lebanese, Syrians, or Yemenis) and Ukrainian military activities against Russia. With Donald Trump, we will get all of the above, plus some tax cuts for billionaires and a much lower level of professional competence, and some social media posts that the press corps (and only the press corps) think are entertaining. Plus we might get Robert Kennedy, Jr. as our next Secretary of Health and Human Services, assuring that in the event of another pandemic event, the Covid death toll will look like “the good old days.”
Where was I? Oh yes… here in Stately Dog Manor, the Loquacious Pup is still recovering from a horrible disease, but thanks to modern medical science (which we would expect the Trump Administration to try to undermine at every turn), the prognosis looks good; this was not true last spring. Unfortunately, last spring, we lost one of our 15 year old cats to a very similar disease. Many people in LP’s world have lost loved ones. The nation itself just lost the most decent man ever to be President, as well as the oldest, if not necessarily the most “politically successful” President, as Jimmy Carter finally passed away at age 100. Carter, like TD Father in Law, was born during the Coolidge Administration. It’s kind of depressing to think of the counter-factual, if the infinitely cynical Ronald Reagan had not defeated Carter in 1980 and put the nation on its current path to environmental, fiscal and social oblivion. But Carter was the kind of guy who wanted Americans to eat their vegetables and lower their thermostats; by contrast, Reagan told Americans it was ok to be selfish assholes– exactly the Donald Trump message. Indeed, Trump actually stole “Make America Great Again” from Reagan himself.
But all is not as dark as it might otherwise be; could we have a hero on the horizon? Unbelievably, despite its prominence as a national issue for as long as I can remember, there was almost no discussion of health care during the 2024 election (other than Trump suggesting he had “concepts of a plan.”) But alas, an X-factor came along, and got us discussing the issue with the passion it truly warrants. This followed the absurdly methodical murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, just as he was going to a meeting in a hotel. I have long posited that the nation would be willing to absorb an infinite number of gun massacres involving school children, or university students, or churchgoers, or shoppers, or co-workers, or quite frankly, any set of peasants, but a gun massacre involving a single Fortune 500 boardroom, or even a country club, would result in an immediate reaction from our elites (and the media the elites control).
And so, it seems, was the case with Mr. Thompson’s murder, where a 26 year old “tech bro” with tech degrees from the University of Pennsylvania named Luigi Mangione was arrested for the crime in Altoona, PA. It being a small world, Mangione is a friend of a friend of the LP (or at least an acquaintance of a friend). But because the crime involved a member of the one per cent, the local authorities, that would be N.Y. County D.A. Alvin Bragg (fresh from succesfully handing Donald Trump the martyrdom he needed to accede to the Presidency [again]), charged Mangione with murder in the first degree, usually reserved in New York State only for killing police officers, judges or other public officials. The United States Justice Department piled on to Mangione, with a federal charge of stalking and murder. Both of these incidents of “over-charging” are based on an extremely dubious notion of “terrorism” because, of course, THE ONE PER CENT AND ONLY THE ONE PER CENT is scared shitless that the peasants might realize that (1) public protest is utterly useless, (2) the political system is in gridlock, (3) the media is entirely in the grip of the elites and (4) life in this country is, as it now stands, hopeless for almost everyone who lives here, and, you know, some peasants might come to the conclusion that they have so little to lose that it is actually rational to start picking off selected members of the ruling class. Hence, the need for coming down as hard as possible on Mr. Mangione (after all, the health insurance industry demanded that Merrick Garland “do something.”) While one does not wish to condone violence, polling shows that Americans are as willing to blame the rapacious health insurance industry for Mr. Thompson’s death as they are Mr. Mangione. Plus of course, if Mangione is the killer (hey, can you believe he is innocent until proven guilty?) he has opened up a discussion of what is a really awful system.
And this is where we stand, as we start to close the books on 2024. Little has changed since I documented [the exceptionally shitty] conditions of life in America in my 2019 book, other than, I suppose, the environment [especially the climate], the economy and the social fabric of the country bearing the scars of five years worth of additional mileage on them (including a still not quite finished Covid-19 pandemic). And of course, we are facing another four years of King Chaos. But of all things, a single homicide presents some hope for the American peasantry against the machine– possibly the only legitimate hope the peasants have had since, perhaps, the late Jimmy Carter was President. I don’t know anymore. While I am probably more energetic than most my age, I am 62 years of age, and like the rest of the 99%, still have to go to work and devote the bulk of my waking hours to making a living so that I can continue living in Stately Dog Manor, and as I learned this year, so that I can keep up my really quite good employer provided health insurance. I am not different from most: the system is devoted to undermining my ability to assist in the revolution. Indeed, it is a signal American phenomenon to have the twin shackles of employment at will and not-portable “health insurance” that keep all but a tiny segment of the super-rich and perhaps the insane from being in any position to threaten the ruling class. But unless the ruling class are (or at least feel) actually threatened, we are all doomed, because as a class, our ruling class are psychotics who will giddily kill us all.
With that in mind, we can all look forward to 2025.
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