The Show Must Go On

“And as the morning light comes streaming in you get up and do it again, amen. – Jackson Browne

As we all live our lives it sometimes seems that the radical changes and disruptions in our society that the Left has instituted must overwhelm the system and everything will come apart at the seams forcing us to abandon normalcy once and for all and take up a new existence as 21st century hunter-gatherers living off the released zoo animals and other feral survivors of a better age.  As we struggle to survive, the weak will go to the wall.  When cannibalism reappears the hopeless, like John Fetterman, will be the first to go in the pot.  And he may have his finest hour as soup or stew.

But what I notice is that despite the almost unending downward spiral of our world, people get up every morning and throw some water on their faces and figure out how to put food on the table and fuel in the oil tank.  And somehow, they do it with a laugh and a joke.  Now it may be gallows humor for sure.  But they still manage to make the joke.

And they’re right.  You can’t get through life no matter how bad things get with your teeth perpetually gritted.  You can do it for a while.  But if you keep it up too long, you’ll go mad.  Sure, when the latest atrocity occurs, you’re got to rail against it and shake your fist and maybe say terrible things about your enemies.  And maybe some people finally crack and go berserk.

But if you’ve got a wife and kids or even if you don’t, somehow you have to make it to Friday and you have to do all the things that get you there.  And more than that you have to somehow find some joy in the world.  Unless you’re a Dickensian villain like Uriah Heep or Ebenezer Scrooge grinding through your entire life clutching at thorns without a friend in the world is a fate worse than death.  Even a man on death row probably talks to the guards sometimes just to break up the monotony.

And that’s something I rediscovered recently.  After the 2020 election I was morose to a remarkable extent.  Other than family I couldn’t see what was going to keep this world going for me.  Disillusionment with our government was total.  I had little interest in day-to-day events and the news from Washington was nauseating.  And I think this had a deleterious effect on my peace of mind.  Apocalyptic thinking was becoming routine.

But even though things have continued to degrade in our day-to-day life I have had a chance to reflect.  Rather than thinking that the world has truly hit some all-time low, what I realize now is that we were formally living in a kind of golden age.  And through the foolishness of malicious people, it has been stamped out.  And in reality, most of mankind’s existence has been under conditions much, much worse than even this.

If we’re not as free as we once were, at least no one has branded us and sent us to work in the salt mines.  We may not be middle class Americans anymore but we haven’t reached North Korea levels of starvation.  We’re no longer proud of our leaders and our government but so far inflation hasn’t reached triple digits.

We live under a banana republic but so far, I can still make fun of Dementia Joe and the Keystone Gestapo he employs.  No one has dragged me off to the gulag yet.  And I seem to have rediscovered my sense of humor.

So yeah, things are bad.  As Howard Beale said “We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy.”  But when things are crazy you still have to live and maybe you can laugh at the crazy once in a while, even if you laugh while cleaning up the latest result of the crazy.

The Best Part of Living in a Banana Republic

There are lots of really terrible consequences of living under a tyranny where none of the protections of a free society exist.  And when you happen to be a despised minority in that country it’s even worse.  At any moment you can be stripped of your privacy, your dignity, your livelihood, your possessions, your freedom, even your life.  You have to watch while those in charge break their own laws and suffer no consequences while innocent men are persecuted and hounded out of public life just because they speak the truth.

But one great advantage of living in clown world is that you get to laugh at all the clowns.  And what an array.  Joe Biden.  Now there’s a rich vein.  Any and every day that he’s on video is comic gold.  Will he fall down, break into gibberish, wander off stage because he’s befouled himself?  Or will he just lie so outrageously that his handlers will have to pretend that he didn’t say what he obviously said.

Or how about his press secretary?  That vacuous nitwit who has to deflect half the questions because there’s just no sane answer that doesn’t include admitting that her boss is a crook.

And what about Hunter Biden?  A man who beds his dead brother’s widow and smokes crack on video while being serviced by underage prostitutes while acting as the bagman for the influence peddling of his corrupt father.  Oh, and he gets like a half million dollars for his finger paintings too.

Or how about the voters of New York City or LA or Chicago or any of the several dozen big cities that have voted in mayors and district attorneys that are now reducing those cities to crime-ridden hell holes in the name of “equity?”

And how about Anthony Fauci?  That’s the best one of all.  Here’s a man who could switch from swearing that vaccines were a panacea to admitting vaccines protected no one at the drop of a hat.  He could say that there was no chance the virus came from a lab and then say there was a very good chance it did.  This man is a consummate liar and he even does it with a smile on his face.

So, this is the silver lining in living in the gulag.  You don’t have to pretend to believe any of it.  Not one thing.  If someone defends the dear leader or talks about the great economy we enjoy or cheerleads for Ukraine there’s one universal reply.

Laughter.

It’s as simple as that.  No anger, no denial, no argument.  Just derisive laughter and walking away.  Nothing else speaks as clearly and powerfully as that.  It’s the perfect retort when a patently absurd statement has been made.  Obviously, it is being made by a partisan hack.  It’s like when that CNN stooge started talking about how family values were a cornerstone of Joe Biden’s political persona.  This was being said about a man who showered naked with his teenage daughter and raised up Hunter Biden to be a crack-smoking, stripper-banging scumbag.  When someone says something like that, derisive laughter is the only reasonable reply.  Well, at least short of violence against the perpetrator which isn’t allowed in a banana republic against one of the regime toadies.

But there are limits.  If the one making the statement is an FBI or IRS agent you might want to keep a straight face and remain silent.  After all banana republics have notoriously dangerous dungeons where enemies of the state sometimes end up.  But if the regime toady is just your neighbor or some rando you ran into then have at it and enjoy yourself to the max.  Let a few tears leak out and slap him heartily on his back to show you appreciate the hilarious joke he’s just uttered.

Yes, that is our only pleasure.  And they say laughter is the best medicine.  We’re gonna need it.

 

Life Imitates the Babylon Bee

My state has one upped this gag.  We have bridges that have been declared dangerous for decades but the state mechanism for repairing them is completely impenetrable.  Eventually the state will have to be permanently divided along the lines of all the small streams that traverse it.  Soon regional dialects will develop and eventually mutually unintelligible languages but the bridges will just become place names that adorn maps as we stare across these small bodies of water that will forever divide us.  Damn you Mayor Pete.