Front Page  »  

America’s daily shitstorm

March 17, 2025

Dell Franklin,

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.

 


Loading...
Subjects:     
Related:


23 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

A cleaner article title might be more effective, in my opinion. One person’s negative perception might be positive in another. Bottom’s up, Dell!


5

During my youth, growing up on the California Central Coast (Los Osos/Morro Bay), I naively subscribed to the notion that powers were hard at work ensuring that not only would we have measurable progress in our daily lives, but stability would be maintained and that at some point in my life, returning home would be a viable proposition. Efforts were made to remain, applying for an intern position at the now-defunct Morro Bay power plant, at that time operated by PG&E, where I found myself 1 of 1,000 applicants, and one of 999 who received bad news, and other opportunities which did not bear fruit.


Nine months following my 19th birthday and a little over a year following my graduation from Morro Bay High School, I found myself on a destroyer bound for the Middle East out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, reluctantly. In my “globe-trotting” over the next 20 years, I never found anywhere nearly as beautiful nor as pleasant than the California Central Coast, and at a minimum, an annual “pilgrimage” of sorts is made from my current residence in the American Southwest to savor the beach and reminisce in a childhood and an innocence bereft of life’s more unpleasant realities.


Had Dell Franklin spent any time at an overseas detention facility as a guard, he might have been informed, as I and many others were, by those folks we had in our charge, that the “fantasy” we were going to be sold did not necessarily reflect what was truly occurring. In my youth, I was quite aware that the “womb” of our “consensus reality” did not necessarily mirror the greater truth, yet there was no indication to how much larger it would present itself considering various advances in communication technologies, which as of now, are bi-directional, contrasting sharply with the one-way medium of television and radio.


Recalling in 2010, being informed that the “world I knew was gone” by a member of management, it can be confidently stated that our political system has not done well for us, and that the “devil we knew” historically, appears much of an improvement of the “one we do not”, specifically, the one that we are dealing with right now.


Dell, irrespective of the various information streams we are presented with on a daily basis, I would strongly encourage you to enjoy and savor your “place in paradise”, for many of us can only look through a metaphorical “window” following years of toil in support of a structure which was unable to manage stability in the long-term, and a return to an indecipherable landscape.


When the CIA Station Chief responds with “You are not joking” following a statement of “Ignorance was bliss”, you know you have problems… But who knows, maybe we are all just “data points” in a larger paradigm, and consequently, quite disposable, and just as irrelevant.


4

Spot on, gp. And, I might add, well written. An enjoyable read.


5

I don’t think it’s helpful to keep viewing our current national situation in such stark, black/white, good/bad terms. What I mean by that is that BOTH parties have let us down over the last 35 years. Mr. Franklin places all the blame on Republicans, but it was Bill Clinton who admitted China to the WTO and began the process of shipping our productive industrial jobs over there (a lot of the physical plants were actually dismantled, shipped over, and reassembled in the PRC). Biden DID throw open the border and let 20+ million people in without regard for the second- and third-order effects. We could go on at length about bipartisan incompetence over the decades. Both parties have given us career politicians who somehow magically end up rich on a public employee’s salary. Does anyone really believe that Paul Pelosi is such a skilled investor that he and Nancy consistently crush Warren Buffett’s rate of return; Mitch McConnell and Chinese shipping money? Come on! I’m an observant independent, and I see plenty of malfeasance, corruption, and perfidy on both sides of the aisle. Donald Trump is, well, Donald Trump, but what I will say is that he has never put on airs or pretended to be anything else. Love him or hate him, what you see is what you get, and I think a lot of Americans at least appreciate that. We have better uses for our energies that idolizing one side or another. Both sides are deficient. Everyone try to calm down. Peace.


24

For the most part, I agree. However, the part about the border needs a fact-check, as it is a very highly inflated number. They also highly inflated the number of criminals at large, listing all those no longer held by ICE over the last 40 years, without any facts about their incarceration in prisons, as ICE is not a prison facility.


If the current regime were so wonderful, they would not need to constantly lie about just about everything of which they speak. That is the mark of grifters and fraudsters and those with the intent of making people so frustrated that the top caring about the truth.


As for the black & white aspect, it is Constitutional and democratic, or it is not. The current regime is not. They have zero respect for the Rule of Law, the balance of power or our Civil Rights. They are currently defying a direct Court Order and have dissolved whole agencies illegally. They are attempting to privatize the Post Office and our Social Security, so they can be as insufficient and unaffordable as healthcare became. SS will likely just “disappear” in some stock market “volatility” into the pockets of all those other MULTI-BILLIONAIRE “philanthropists”.


-15

You’re entitled to your own opinion. I disagree with many of your assessments, and you prove my point by saying you agree “…[f]or the most part…” and then going on to list all the things with which you do not agree. If you prefer the Donkeys, that’s fine, just say so. I can tell you how I look at it: being ruled by the radical Left is like having Ebola. One hemorrhages from every orifice until one expires. Being ruled by the Right is like having Hep C. It’s gnawing away at you, but you can still enjoy a reasonable quality of life. I do not have any expectation that either party will give us ethical, decent, servant-hearted politicians. Ever. Once you get rid of all that pesky hope and optimism, you learn to adapt to the dysfunctional hellscape that is American politics. Stop expecting anything good from any of them, it’s an exercise in futility.


5
1 2