Well, It’s 2025.

Yay.

Remember the dawn of the 21st Century? Those were the days, huh? It began – or rather it didn’t begin – with a bout of widespread societal idiocy, as everybody rang in the new millennium in the year 2000. The thing was, 2000 was NOT THE FIRST YEAR OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM. It was the last year of the 20th Century. This is because our calendar didn’t start with a year Zero. It starts with the Year 1, which supposedly marks the year Christ was born, except that it’s clear from the Biblical account that Jesus was actually born, supposing he was ever born at all, about four years earlier than that, but whatever. The first year was thus 1AD, or 1CE, these days, so you can do the arithmetic: if a century has a hundred years, and the first year was 1, then the hundredth year must have been, per force, 100, and the first year of the next century was 101. Right? And so it went, right up to 2000 being the last year of the 20th Century, but fine, we live in a culture of idiots, and the numbers clicked over to zeroes, so that meant we were entering a new millennium, and me saying different didn’t mean Jack to anybody.

Still, in retrospect you can tell that the 21st century hadn’t yet begun, because 2000 didn’t really suck, except at the end, when the Supreme Court handed the White House to that sombitch George W. Bush, a weapons-grade imbecile who nevertheless wouldn’t prove to be the worst President America would ever have to endure, though we all thought so prior to the arrival of Burnt Umber Voldemort. As the clock ticked toward midnight on December 31, 1999, we were all still enjoying a prosperous and optimistic decade, and I reckon most of us expected the good times to keep right on rolling, so long as all the computers on earth didn’t burst into flames upon being stricken with the dreaded Y2K programming bug. After all, the fundamentals were pretty damned good. Bubba Clinton, despite his gross personal misconduct involving a certain White House intern, had run a pretty good administration, creating 23 million net new jobs, and bringing the federal budget so thoroughly under control that it was running annual surpluses to the tune of tens and even hundreds of billions. Surpluses. The mind boggles.

There were the usual headaches abroad, yes, with Saddam Hussein still making enough trouble in Iraq that coalition forces had to bomb things at regular intervals, and there’d been that nastiness in the Balkans (in response to which NATO intervention was largely successful), but there were no really dark thunderclouds on the horizon, as far as most of us could tell. With the Soviet Union gone, America had emerged as the sole global superpower, democracy seemed ascendant all over the world, and the pundits and tank-thinkers were talking about “the end of history” and the “new American Century”. There were a few insiders, military officers, intelligence analysts, and those privy to the Presidential Daily Brief, who knew that it had become a matter of the utmost importance to locate and neutralize somebody named Osama bin Laden, but that wasn’t exactly top of mind on Main Street. Even when Clinton made a couple of attempts to take the guy out, none of us gave it much thought, beyond cracking wise about the abuse of the armed forces as a way to distract from the President’s domestic political troubles, “wagging the dog” and all that. It might have been a worrying sign when terrorists blew a hole in the side of the USS Cole in October 2000, but that happened way over in Yemen. What did we know? Osama bin what now? Life was good!

Yup, things were still looking perfectly agreeable that year when everybody thought the 21st Century was already underway. Then came 2001, and the Age of Maximum Suck began.

All right, OK, let’s not lose perspective here, it’s hard to contend that the last 25 years have been anything especially awful, considering that human history is positively rife with horrendously shitty times to have been alive (and not a whole hell of a lot else, really). Most of the time, most people everywhere persevere as best they can through screaming hell as a matter of course, and always have. Just look at the last century, with its two world wars, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, a number of genocides, and the first use of atomic weapons, I mean, that was pretty rough, right? Or how about the Black Death? The Inquisition? The Hundred Year’s War? You think folks were having a merry old time in Revolutionary France? You suppose it was all fun and games for the indigenous populations of North and South America when the Europeans arrived? Maybe you’d have liked it better in Stalin’s Russia, or hauling dung up the mountain for the glory of the commune while Mao kicked off his Cultural Revolution? Or you could be living in the Middle East, now, or pretty much any time since the Babylonians sacked the First Temple. Hey I almost forgot, boy oh boy, you should have been there when the Mongols were running amuck, that was a real shit show. They say the Pax Romana wasn’t so bad, so long as you weren’t, for example, Jewish (there went the Second Temple!), or one of the millions of slaves that powered the Roman economy; though you know, something like 15-20% of the empire’s population did consist of human chattel, so not such a great deal for them. I could go on and on. When you think about it, when and where, exactly, was there ever an unambiguously good time to be alive?

Well, I’ll tell you. It was right here in Canada, beginning around 15 years before I was born in 1961, right up until about my 40th birthday. I grew up, came of age, and built my career within an almost miraculous little political and socio-economic soap bubble floating across history’s violent, tumultuous stage.

Which popped.

Of course it did! It almost had to, just on general principles, so here we find ourselves looking back on a quarter century of what was actually, from a historical perspective, business as usual, starting with 9/11 and the Global War on Terror, progressing through an extremely dangerous and completely unnecessary worldwide economic calamity, followed by years of Republican rat-fucking and court-packing (giving us, in turn, a metric buttload of ludicrously pro-corporate anti-democratic jurisprudence), until we got Trump, a once-in-a-century pandemic, and an insurrection that almost ended 240+ years of constitutional democracy.

Fine, shit happens, grow up, you had a hell of run there before the turd hit the fan, I get that, but still, that ought to be enough for now, don’t you think? We’ve earned a break, wouldn’t you say? But nooooooooo. The American people – cretins – didn’t much care for four years of peace, order, and good government, and decided it’d be fun to put Donald back behind the wheel, this time attended by a merry band of goons, ideologues, and oligarchs keen to gorge at the public trough, a lot of them every bit as stupid as Fearless Leader, the rest a malicious wolf pack of cartoon villains who just can’t wait to get their grubbies on the levers of power. Honest to God, this bunch makes the first Team Donald look normal.

So, there’s really no telling how bad this is going to get. Look, they haven’t even taken office yet, and already its chaos, with Donald yammering about grabbing back the Panama Canal, annexing Canada, and seizing Greenland – the latter an obsession carried over from his first term, Jesus, who put that bug in his ear, and why? – and promising to slap steep tariffs on everything that Americans import, which, after designing an entire economy around globalization, free trade, and international supply chains, ought to tank things nicely. That, and deporting all the cheap labour that does all the economic scut work. Oh, and the price of groceries and such? Yeah, sorry, you know once those things go up it’s damned near impossible to get them back down, so whaddayagonna do?

I don’t know. Maybe they’ll overreach so outrageously that even the voting public gets pissed off. Maybe they’ll drive the clown car straight over a cliff. Maybe the Dems will bounce back in the mid-terms. It’s possible. At this point what isn’t? No matter what, though, it ain’t gonna be pretty, and goddammit, I didn’t deserve this. Probably you didn’t either.

I’m not sure how to proceed from here. This blog began as a series of rants about successive Trumpian atrocities – there’s always been other stuff sprinkled in, but the latest abomination from Donald and his GOP henchmen was the recurring theme – and that really doesn’t seem worthwhile any more. Nobody was listening, to me, or anybody else. Most of the nitwits never understood the first thing about what was going on. Given the chance, they voted him right back in, fair and square, and we can’t fall back on it being a fluke foisted upon us by Russian interference and the idiocy of the Electoral College. Trump is legit. It was a squeaker, but he won everywhere it counted, no cheating necessary. A majority (or at least a plurality) of Americans wanted this. Now we just have to suffer through it, and why should I keep hollering down a well, screaming look what he did now! every time the orange bastard does one of those myriad dirty things he’s going to do? Why should I throw fits about the inevitable idiocy in the Republican dominated courts and legislature? It’s all so drearily predictable, and it’s what they keep voting for, so good on ’em, I guess, and I kind of hope they get the multiple disasters they deserve, except Americans never suffer the consequences of their own missteps by themselves. No, we all have to suffer with them. That’s no fun. But is it worth talking about any longer?

Maybe this grumpy old needlefish should dive on down to the sea floor, and hang out in the dark until the storm blows over up there. Supposing it blows over.

Meanwhile, fuck 2025. And the horse it rode in on.