With due apologies to the great American composer, the late George Gershwin, we would, for contextual purposes, discombobulate the opening line of his modern-day opera, “Porgy and Bess,” by perversely stating, “Summertime and the stomach is queasy.”
At the “Summertime” of this writing, our democratic nation has been painfully experiencing an unprecedented array of challenging issues, generating an unsettling atmosphere of citizen discord, contention, and insecurity. The Trumpist, demagogic battle cry, “Make America Great Again,” has seen realization only on the red baseball caps worn by his adherents. This summer season, the Nat finds itself divided and profoundly troubled. The “living aint easy.”
The populist election of an outrageously unsuitable Chief Executive has emphatically validated the sage admonition of learned political philosophers to the effect that a Democratic Republic is systemically vulnerable. Sadly, the United States of America, once the venerated avatar of freedom, liberty, and the aspiration for universal equality, has suddenly been thrust into a deep mire of unprecedented and embarrassing inconsonance.
The extant situational, “livin” ain’t “easy,” evinces an awesome conglomerate of problems, including Ukraine-Russia-Putin, Epsteingate, autocratic reprisal-style “retribution,” against political opponents, inflation and higher consumer prices, Trump tariffs, vaccine conspiracies, elimination of utilitarian civil service agencies, the effective discontinuance of traditionally empathic programs of food and medicine to needy individuals, domestic and foreign, the decline of the revered legal system, including the Judiciary, the destruction of the democratically salubrious two-party political system, political corruption, startlingly including the President, in particular, and SCOTUS, the Gestapo-style private army of masked hoodlums detaining, arresting, and banishing to foreign torture prisons, peace-loving Hispanic-American residents, the ubiquitous Presidential disparagement of the Constitution and the Rule of Law, as well as the demonstration of his complete absence of societal moral compass, the curtailment of assistance, in terms of food and medicine to the needy, as well as the Presidential dedication to curtail social security and medicare, governmental efforts to limit the right of certain, selected citizens to vote, gross negligence regarding the Armageddon potential of “Global Warming,” and active support of the lethal fossil fuel oil industry (“drill, baby drill”); the latter proximately responsible for unpecedented tsunamis, seasonal irregularity, great fires, floods, tornadoes and meterological irregularity, civilization threatening promotion of “alternate facts” in place of empirical reality, autocratic attracks on traditional media, on higher educastion, on health research agencies, on programs to encourage constitutional equality, such as DEI, immoral and constitutionally forbidden Presidential acquisition of untold wealth, right-wing interference with the vote to favor Trump, disparagement and prejudicial statements and construed policies against the gay and disabled communities, Putin-like, delusional Trump statements of territorial, sovereign aggrandizement regarding Canada (“a 51st State”), as well as Greenland and Panama.
Most recently, the self-proclaimed High Emperor has egregiously seen fit to nationalize the Washington, D.C., National Guard for use as his army to fight (nonexisting) rising crime, in malign violation of law (Posse Comitatus) and the systemic and fundamental American character.
Porgy, this damn Summer ain’t that “easy” for nobody!
-p.
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