Laugh It Up

For the last year or so, we have, as a nation, been collecting our old car tires and shop rags, and sticking them out back, sort of figuring we’ll deal with them later, at the next Hazardous Waste Disposal Day, or something, if we don’t already have plans. I guess we missed the last couple of HazWaste days. The pile was getting pretty big. The neighbors were complaining.

Then right around January 19th or so, someone flipped a cigarette over there, and the rest, they say, is history*. Our national tire fire as been burning at a pretty good clip since then.

I lack the space, attention and emotional fortitude to provide a summary of the unprecedented shitstorm that we’ve seen over the last month (these folks do a pretty good job), but we’ve got a few highlights. In the last 24 hours:

North Korea tested an ICBM (on the heels of Iran’s test a week ago) and our Commander In Chief addressed it in a crowded golf resort dining room.
Michael Flynn made history by being fired as a National Security Adviser by two consecutive presidents.
Our national security apparatus has essentially concluded that Russian spies are in the White House.
Some millennial got in front of the entire country and explained, on behalf of the President, that the leader of the free world doesn’t understand the Constitution at a 7th grade level.

I wonder if there’s something to the idea of a career politician after all. You know, like, someone who knows how the government works. The President has consistently been baffled by the separation of powers, the scale of the United States Government, and his own job description.

Even if it’s the end of the world, it’s a helluva time to be in comedy.

Saturday Night Live is relevant for the first time since we lost Chris Farley. Late night talk show hosts aren’t quite sure how to handle all the material. Unique page views on this very blog have crept from “dozens” to “scores.” Even bathroom graffiti has moved away from racist epithets and ex-girlfriends’ phone numbers to something a bit more mainstream:

I’m not afraid to admit that this is pretty fun to watch. President Trump is failing at everything he was obviously going to fail at, and it’s terrific. The system built by our founding fathers to resist tyranny is facing its greatest test to date, and it’s not even breaking a sweat. The liberal elite smugness is rattling around the echo chamber and we’re all catching a bit of a contact high.

But then, I say this from a place of security: as an armed straight white male in a homogeneous western state. It’s pretty comfortable over here. And it’s easy to forget that as much fun as it is to laugh and gawk at this dumpster-fire-as-administration, this shit is very real for much of the country.

See because in the last week or so here’s what else we’ve seen:

It’s easy to laugh at the big stuff (like impending nuclear war) because it’s hard to imagine, and still fairly unlikely. But it’s easy to ignore what’s happening right now because it’s not on our block, and that is unforgivable.

So yeah, laugh it up. I’m going to. Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer is objectively hilarious, and imagining Trump’s ire at being portrayed by Leslie Jones illustrates the height of political satire. But you’d better stay mad, too. Mid-terms are right around the corner, and it’s easy to forget that even clowns are scary.

*Assuming that “history” is still a thing after a few years of this whole DeVos nightmare.