These days the news is like Doctor Strangelove on steroids. Nothing is outrageously and cartoonishly awful enough that it can't be topped within the hour. Some folks have recently been sharing their countermeasures: Andrew Sullivan is reading W.H. Auden, somebody else looks to a forgiving character in Angels in America. Me, these days I'm happily ensconced in the 19th century.
Otherwise: We got through the Bush years with The West Wing. Now in our household we're getting through this with Madame Secretary, the CBS series now in its fourth season, though we are just finishing the first. Yes, intelligent public servants qualify as escapism.
Although it would be nice for a major TV character not to be CIA, ex-CIA, NSA etc. I'll never forgive the producers of Sherlock for turning Watson's wife Mary into an international hit man.
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Back for a moment to Strangelove on Steroids, the unavoidable series, as last week the antipresident went into Homemade Hitler mode by praising the president of China for declaring himself emperor, and suggesting maybe he'd like to try it himself. Not that he hasn't expressed his envy of successfully authoritarian leaders before. Somehow this isn't even as shocking as the entire US government remaining silent when China made this declaration.
The Homemade Hitler vibes have been zinging through the zeitgeist since then. Two columns in Monday's Washington Post alone referred to it "Fortunately, Trump doesn't have what it takes to be a dictator" by Michael Gerson, and President Trump is blessedly weak by Dana Milbank (though Eugene Robinson warns "The Trump presidency could cost the nation more than we realize," and Richard Cohen sticks with the antipresident theme: "Trump disrespects the presidency. So I don't respect him.")
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I've made one observation about the antipresident and his capability to achieve HH status that is somewhat close to cheering: he keeps making enemies. That's getting difficult in that he has few friends and allies, and almost no one who is neutral, so his pool of non-enemies to convert into enemies is fairly small. But he is winning at this. Now he's taking on his own congressional leaders on raising tariffs, and threatening a trade war likely to result in major inflation.
Now we're about to knowingly do this to ourselves. Not only does it cause a lot of anxiety and suffering for the nonrich, it has a much bigger psychological impact on the rich and everybody else than any mere downturn does, not even the Great Recession. I doubt that it's been studied enough, but it seems to me to be the key to the "greed is good" 80s. With inflation, greed is a survival skill. That the inflation was largely over doesn't pertain: it's the psychology that got rooted.
The fears instilled by inflation may also be seen as being underneath the lurch to the right of the 1980s, which has only gotten worse. Not because of anything real (though there's plenty of real disaster in it), but because of fear and simple answers to quell that fear. That fear is also likely why nobody seems to remember that aspect of the 70s. Down the old denial memory hole!
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I did not have a decent understanding of the opiod epidemic until I read this article by Andrew Sullivan. The facts he presents alone are stunning. Applying his experience in the AIDS epidemic is particularly revealing.
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A local note: listening to my favorite radio station ("The Lounge") I heard my first commercial since legalization for a purveyor of cannabis . It never mentions the word "cannabis" which is now the official term, or any of its historical terms either. It's referred to simply as "The Product." As in "please use The Product responsibly."
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