Some thoughts on the next X years

These are from a long-time friend of mine who graduated from an elite law school at just about the worst time for that. He ended up joining the Judge Advocate General Corps, where I’m happy to say he seems to have found a fairly fulfilling and meaningful career, which, given the career paths of so many of his fellow grads, definitely counts as a win. I know him via our mutual fanatical devotion to the University of Michigan football team, and this is a post he put up on a fan board on the eve of Trump’s return to the presidency.

Couple pre-inauguration thoughts, such as I can muster right now.

1) Going to try to avoid news as much as I can til I roll back into the office in February and have to deal with the fallout from whatever nonsense they’re going to impose. That I’m not looking forward to this is an understatement. The mix of cruelty for cruelty’s sake (let’s kick out all the trans people), cruelty for religious purposes (abortion restrictions and eventually a punitive article in the UCMJ probably), stupidity (watching these people try to navigate the world’s largest bureaucracy will be a sight to behold), and corruption (which will undoubtedly consist of buying all sorts of half-baked AI solutions that will get a bunch of people killed) is too much to think about right now. But, think about it eventually I must.

2) For whatever anything is worth, I implore people not to get hung up on whether the things they’re doing are illegal vs legal but bad. The overall point/context/thesis is this is awful awful stuff. “Lawful but awful” is not a particularly meaningful distinction. I’m not saying it’s not worth bringing up, but what I mean is I’m going to roll my eyes so far they’ll come back around on the bottom if I read any op-eds/smart minds telling me “AKSCHUALLY, Trump can fire all the generals and replace with him stooges, it’s part of being C-in-C”. Like, sure, but that’s not the point (though, why would the punditry ever get the point? Like [Dudley Smith says to] Sgt Vincennes in “LA Confidential,” “Don’t start now, boyo. You haven’t had the practice.”). Eyes on the prize. Again, for all the good it does.

3) I have no real prediction for what exactly they’re going to do or how successful they’ll be, but in general it’s a lot easier to destroy than build, and since their zeitgeist is “government is bad,” I don’t think it’s going to be very hard to smash things. That it’ll rebound in many ways and make it harder to do certain things is small comfort. Also I’m very cynical about their being political consequences. They will run shit into the ground and probably this will piss voters off enough to win back the House in two years or whatever, but by and large we’ve oscillated between parties by a few points for the last quarter century; they run shit into the ground and thanks to their control of the judiciary and the Senate/states, and just being ahead of the curve politically vs the Dems, it’s a completely asymmetric world.

4) There’s a view, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, that things always work out in the end or it can’t get that bad. I think this is partly just wishful thinking, but also we’re sort of in a niche spot; being an affluent professional (as the mean poster probably is) in this spot in world and American history is as privileged as one gets. By definition, everything else that happened before “worked out” in the sense that we’re here now. Of course that’s absurd as a soothing argument: millions were killed by Stalin and Mao and Hitler or starvation or disease or what have you; it didn’t “work out” for them just because you and I can buy fresh mango in January for a pittance. And it’s not like there aren’t numerous examples today, right here and now, of societies that are Not Great. Granted, there’s a long way to fall before we’re sitting around a fire eating the remains of some Others we’ve found and bested in the Wasteland, but, as a poster on another board said, the point isn’t to survive, it’s to thrive. And whatever else happens we’re about to Not Do That. It’s bad, it’s ok to be worried about it being bad, you probably should be worried about it being bad; that it PROBABLY won’t turn into the Holocaust is not really much relief.

I dunno, man. That’s all I’ve got. I’ve obviously got other stuff I’m dealing with right now and I’m going to try to avoid news as much as I can for a couple of weeks (which probably means trying not to come to the board). This sucks, though.

It does, but these are good and useful thoughts I believe.