America’s daily shitstorm

March 17, 2025

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” and “Life on The Mississippi, 1969” are currently on Amazon.

Just turn on Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and any other national news outlet at any time of day and witness the nonstop brain-bludgeoning, guaranteed to disrupt your life and, according to who’s in the winning column – conservative Republicans and zealous white Christians – there is rejoicing and gloating and a feeling of resounding victory while hogging first place. And if you’re in the losing column – liberal Democrats and woke fiends – you’re getting your noses rubbed in the dirt while gasping in horror at a life once worth living and now, according to the great George Carlin, some twenty years ago, “A life Worth Losing.”

It’s like the 1980s when the LA Lakers and Boston Celtics played for championships, and the hatred between the players and the fans was beyond palpable. It was fucking all out war with no grudging respect or mercy. Kill or be killed.

But today, the news is irresistible entertainment after four years in which Joe Biden emerged from a cave every six months or so to slur up a speech in a somnambulist’s trance, making him a bull’s eye for the venomous opposition that made America appear to be a horrible victim of carnage when actually it was doing better than any other country in the world.

Now, in a near daily spectacle, the ubiquitous orange Messiah, ensconced on his throne in the White House, surrounded by his mean looking and mean acolytes and lackeys and henchmen, as well as his human buzz saw, billionaire Elon Musk (clad in medieval hangman attire and wielding a chainsaw like the grim reaper while perched upon his shoulders is a  miniature clone of himself), the Messiah smugly toys with the press and issues scowling decree after decree to not only obliterate every democratic norm in the country, but further torture anybody who didn’t vote for him and hates him and can’t do a fucking thing about it now that the Dems are scurrying around like a bunch of desperate, needy souls trying to find a voice.

Turn on the news any time of day, and hopefully as soon as you get off work, and the rubbing-it-in is at an all time high, as you get to witness the powerful overpowering the powerless, and the powerless lib pundits squawking with those defeated resigned expressions on their pusses.

What to do if you’re a lib and watch your now tepid MSNBC and CNN that, along with various once courageous metropolitan newspapers, buckle under the emperor?

Well, don’t get drunk, though I stayed that way pretty much during the Reagan administration. Fight? Naw. Give it time.

Instead, sit back on your recliners and enjoy the hilarious shit show. There’s never been anything quite like it. I mean, you’re witnessing a terrible businessman and amateurish TV personality give the greatest performance in political history as he juggles the future of America as well as the world in a wallow of lying and corruption as he dismantles what used to be a pretty good deal.

Cheer him on, MAGA people. The media is the enemy – hoorah! Disobey the judges – hoorah!

Take over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Canada – hoorrah! Government employees getting Elon’s meat ax – hoorah, and tough titty swamp critters! Abandon an ally amid a brutal battle and suck up to a murderous war criminal and communist dictator – hoorah!

Oh, the human comedy. (Think the movie, ‘Network.’) The asinine hubris and absurdity is a belly guffaw. The marching orders of the MAGA caps and flags prevail. It is their America, and it is about them and only them, and no goddam sharing their wealth and their massive military ordnance.

“Go, America! Go America!”

It’s time to show all these leeching countries that it’s time to pay up. We’re only good to you if you kiss our asses and understand we’re extorting you for money, motherfuckers. Money money money. And, if it means your suffering, so be it.

My freshman year in college, 1962, we had this very stimulating political science teacher Mr. Cohen. We studied socialism, communism, totalitarianism, etc., and he once said something to the order that “Democracy works very well now, because we have a thriving middleclass, but there is always the danger that capitalism will overwhelm democracy and we will lose our humanity to greed, corruption and materialism.”

Oh, if the prof could see what is going on today in America. I’m not sure he’d be laughing, but at this point it seems to me we can’t lose our sense of humor at the scary sight of human folly at its most extreme and frightening.