Storytime in Washington

Things are going about as well as we think

Image: Grok

I didn’t watch President Donald Trump’s speech last night. I just didn’t have it in me to hear him bleat on about how he inherited the worst economy in history and turned it around in a year. Instead, we watched the first episode of Fallout season two. That was an infinitely better choice, as I got to hear my son’s delight at seeing how true the show is to the video game. Heads exploded; billionaires and oligarchs met in secret star chambers to plan how the world will go down in flames. The Ghoul sought his lost family; the vault-dweller and the Ghoul re-enacted a famous scene from “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.”

As an aside, let me say that the spaghetti western starring Clint Eastwood as “Blondie,” Lee Van Cleef as “Angel Eyes,” and Eli Wallach as Tuco Ramirez may just be the most accurate portrayal of the Civil War seen from west Texas, and it was shot entirely in Italy. I think some of that accuracy is in the fact that the Italians were able to dig up American Civil War era actual artillery and mortars, along with plenty of no-name extras and a drunk captain to die appropriately drunk.

One fiction of the a post-apocalyptic world filled with remorseless killers, radioactive waste, and conspiracies has an scene in homage to a fiction of three criminals in the 1860s American west (but really Italy), in a similar world, without the nuclear angle and power armor.

In our actual world, the president speed-read a teleprompter speech about how his Golden Age just needs more time to gel, as Americans have lost jobs while groceries and everything else just costs more.

I wonder why things cost more? We might explore a topic like why is iRobot, the once successful maker of the Roomba floor cleaner, filing for bankruptcy? The short story is that iRobot’s entire supply chain goes through Vietnam, and the Trump administration’s “roll the bones” tariff strategy has made those goods much more expensive. So iRobot’s Chinese and other competitors had a price advantage, and Amazon decided to pull back on its deal to purchase the company. The denouement: an American company that created a product that launched a thousand cat videos will now be owned by a Chinese firm, Shenzhen Picea Robotics. Score one for fixing the trade imbalance.

American farmers, who the government steered to produce soybeans, found success in selling those to China, which was the largest importer. But now, China imports essentially no soybeans due to the tariff policy, and the Trump administration gave $12 billion of our tax dollars to make up for it. In an homage to this one-act play, the president would like to give each American family $2,000 as a “tariff dividend.” Experts say the tariffs already cost Americans between $1,600 to $2,600 a year, so it’s one heck of a dividend to simply pay it back in cash.

Our military is getting a “warrior dividend” of $1,776 before Christmas, as part of the latest defense bill that passed Congress. We are ginning up a war in South America, ratcheting up the pressure on our most dangerous adversary…Venezuela. And we’re looking to sell $11.1 billion in arms to Taiwan, which China will not be pleased to hear. The leaders of the CCP don’t deal in fantasies. When they’re ready for war, it will be a real war.

The president wants to end the war in Ukraine, but neither side is interested in compromise. Ukraine is extremely unlikely to give up any land or retake the territory occupied by Russia. Russia is very unlikely, in the short term, to take the rest of Ukraine. Both sides would rather trade drone strikes against the other. The war is winnable by Ukraine, if the western powers would simply decide to win it (short of a nuclear war, which mad Vlad Putin has threatened). The war is winnable by Russia, if the U.S. decides to push the Russian side (we’ve flirted with it).

But the biggest sign that the world is in economic and social turmoil is the emergence of scapegoating on a global scale. And by that I’m talking about globalizing the intifada. When things get tough, blame the Jews. When the weather goes wonky, say the Jews control it. When Hollywood gets greedy, it’s the Merchant of Venice taking the pound of flesh. When Christianity has its holy tenets stolen by fakes, crooks and sex abusers, deflect the blame on the Jews. When Islamists are fine throwing homosexuals off buildings and forcibly raping women, trot out the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When a father and son massacre Jews on a public beach in Sydney, point to Gaza.

President Trump would like to claim victory in all these peace deals (he won the coveted FIFA Peace Prize, joining the ranks of…nobody else since he’s the first), when in fact the parties fighting have no desire to stop fighting. He’d like to claim victory over the economy, when in fact Americans just want stable jobs with decent pay, and affordable stuff. He’d like to claim victory in healthcare, oil, cars, and Christmas.

We’d do better to believe that there’s a cabal of industrialists and malicious capitalists plotting to drop a nuclear bomb on our own country to force us into global annihilation, so they can sell places in doomsday vaults to unsuspecting buyers who become participants in some of the most heinous, unscrupulous, evil experiments the minds of Bethesda Game Studios can invent.

But you know, Bethesda is hiring. Amazon Prime is rolling in the bucks. YouTube will begin airing the Oscars by streaming in 2029 (we’ll see how it fares against MrBeast or Ryan Trahan). Maybe there is a cabal of industrialists and malicious capitalists preparing for the world to go down in flames. But instead of doomsday vaults, we will all see it in real time, streamed to our handheld devices.

I went down quite the rabbit hole on that rant.

My point is, and please pay attention, that the president’s speech, which I didn’t watch, is fiction. None of it is real, except the blowing up of speedboats in the Caribbean, or the blockade against tankers heading to and from Venezuela. The rest of it is story time, unless you happen to be a legal immigrant, or even a newly minted naturalized U.S. citizen. The reality there is that you better plan your exit from these shores.

Now be a good citizen, and go plan how you’re going to spend your “tariff dividend,” and pretend it wasn’t your money the whole time.

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