And honestly, that’s just to start down a list — or do I mean to start into deep chaos? — on this distinctly crazed planet of ours. It’s generally growing ever harder to find any version of good news relating to the (yes, again!) distinctly (over)heating world we’re now living in. Under the circumstances, give China some credit. Admittedly, that country still pours more fossil fuels into the atmosphere than any other place on Earth, but in its imperial rise, it’s also taken something remarkably close to full-scale control over making (and selling globally) just about anything from solar panels to wind-turbine equipment that might effectively produce green energy or capture carbon. In fact, give China’s leadership full credit for realizing that the overheating of this planet could prove to be an imperial money-making proposition of the first order.
And yes, give President Trump credit as well. After all, in the end, he’s certain to lend imperial decline new meaning in a distinctly new age for Planet Earth. Can there be any question, in fact, that he’s intent on putting this country (and this planet, too) on the downhill slope of history, while offering China free rein (or do I mean reign?) to control the green energy market globally into what could be a distant (and, given the way things are going, distinctly devastating) future. Hey, hard as it might be to believe, he’s actually spending our taxpayer dollars to get energy companies to agree to cancel (yes, cancel!) planned offshore wind projects, so as not to offer any aid to what he’s labeled a “green scam.” And you really can’t do China a bigger favor (and the rest of us greater harm) than that, can you?
Setting Fire to Our Future
Of course, all of this would truly be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. After all, to add to the climate mayhem, as the New York Times reported recently, the president appointed “a critic of mainstream climate science to oversee the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change affects the United States.” And why not, given that (as he’s stated more than once) climate change is a first-class “hoax” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”? As for predictions about what climate change will do to this planet of ours (no less what it’s already doing), he summed them up this way at the United Nations late last year: “They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
Meanwhile, in the world of Donald Trump, even the Democrats seem to be in a distinctly climate-hushing mood as the November elections approach. You would think that putting the finger on him for potentially setting fire to our future would be a politically effective approach in any election season. No such luck, though, explain it as you will.
In fact, neither many of the Democrats, nor Donald Trump and his — and these days it is distinctly his — party seem ready to face the world that we’re truly in as the November 2026 elections approach. After all, as part of his campaign season, the president has reached not into the future (god forbid!) but into the American past of my childhood years by starting to call liberal Democrats “communists.” Yes, commies! At Independence Day celebrations on July 4th, for instance, he said: “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen.”
In fact, as the Washington Post recently reported, “From January to June, [right-wing influencers and Republicans] used the words ‘communism’ or ‘communist’ in an average of about 626 posts per week, up from around 439 per week during the same stretch last year — a 43 percent increase.”
In sum, how truly apocalyptic of both him and so many of the rest of us. Or perhaps it’s simply all too human of us not to want to take in the truly bad news on this planet of… well, I was going to say “ours,” but if it ever was, it really isn’t anymore, is it? And you can certainly give Donald Trump and, of course, those who decided to vote for him a second (or do I mean third?) time around significant credit for running this planet into… well, yes, the ground.
I mean, the very fact that Donald Trump was elected to run the increasingly (dis)United States of America (into the ground) a second time should still be a stunning reality on this increasingly strange planet of ours. Once upon a time, you simply couldn’t have made this up, could you (and if you had, who would possibly have believed you)?
I’m already sweating!
