Persistent thoughts, July 2021

• Multiple books about the ex-domestic Dear Leader are dropping. The thing is, all the teaser stories are trivial: he was angry at Pence for hiring an ex-Donnie staffer; he complained about the low quality of his lawyers; he spoke favorably of Hitler; etc. Don't get me wrong: for any normal president (or any normal person, for that matter), any of these stories would be valuable, revelatory in all the wrong ways. However, the ex-domestic Dear Leader's reputation is so putrid that these new stories are frankly boring, amounting to inconsequential gossip.

  Publishers who want my dollars will have to commission genuine investigatory works that expose the corruption, incompetence, cruelty, and ignorance of his administration in pitiless detail. Such books take a lot more time and effort than gossipy tell-alls (which are essentially hardcopy clickbait) but a presidency as brazenly corrupt, stunningly incompetent (at doing helpful, useful things), operatically cruel, and pridefully ignorant as the ex-domestic Dear Leader's needs to be chronicled in all its fetid infamy as a warning to future generations.

  I hope and assume that professional journalists and historians are doing the hard, unglamorous work of uncovering the dirty deeds that haven't made the headlines, the dirty deeds that compromised our health (and not just with regard to the pandemic), our environment, our economy, and our national security. We know he did dirty deeds: he would sell out the nation in a heartbeat and there was a small ocean's worth of money sloshing around D.C. during his term, so dirty deeds were done, both by him and on his behalf. We don't know the details, though. And for our own safety, we need to know those details.

• How long can the far-right echo chamber of outrage sustain itself?

  How much money do the rubes who donate to these con artists have?

  How long can those rubes stay mad as hell without bursting a blood vessel?

  How many of them will wind themselves up so thoroughly that they'll engineer their very own mass-casualty incidents, and how many innocents will they take out?

  What will it take for them to ask why they trust the highly unreliable information sources they do?

  If they don't trust people who have spent years exploring a subject, why do they trust some random bozo on social media whose identity they can't determine?

  Some fraction of these folks will never emerge from their cocoons of delusion; the only question is how large a fraction. Already some of them have died of CoViD-19 while denying its very existence with their last breaths. It's tragic for their families and friends, of course, but also for the rest of us, because reality-deniers of all stripes are incompetent to help solve the very large problems humanity faces — and can worsen those problems immeasurably by preventing us from addressing them at all.