What a week.  The UPS man failed to show up at the store for a few days, so I was able to complete my chores, ship, and return to Liberty and the backyard, where I have assembled four flower boxes from the decking salvaged from my deconstruction.  Yesterday afternoon, I was able to finish the last one and stain them all with the green leftover from those I made for the Wife’s store.

I’d spent $1000 on a badly-needed master cylinder and rotors for the ’91 Toyota truck, so I tarped the fun machine, purchased and planted herbs, lettuce and onions in the Wife’s raised beds, which I rehabbed Saturday, picked up another 8′ of treated 2×2 I use to brace the boxes, and drove to Liberty.  That’s the thing about brakes:they work or they don’t.  After years of a mushy peddle, lurching to the left or right and downshifting, I’d developed a taste for the dangerous game.

Anyway, the stained flower boxes went perfectly into the back of the truck this morning and are there now, after I swapped it for the fun machine.  Last night’s storm hadn’t ruined the raised beds.  The warm weather is gone and the UPS man is showing up at the store, so I spent today shooting new items and putting them on the website, which is often a tedious job, as designers are notoriously difficult.

Predictably, the best thing I’ve read this week comes from Thomas Frank:

“They were willing to overlook some of the really horrendous things about the candidate who got elected,” she told me, “because he said a lot of other things about what they were feeling.” Specifically, things Trump said about trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and how awful they are.

JD Vance wrote a book, which lies on the trash heap of self-interested neoliberalism along with Atlas Shrugged, whereas Frank cuts you to the soul with this imminently compelling tale of desperation and hope in the hopeless.  In Trump, abides The Last Straw.

It’s not like (yes, I’m terribly drunk) the liberals have a better plan, after ensconcing Perez at DNC on behalf of Hillary, Obama, and more recently, Valerie Jarrett.   For god’s sake, they trotted out the Russians again to do absurd battle with neo-confederate, white supremacist and jughead, Jeff Sessions.  Apparently, Podesta, Hillary and Obama are unprepared to rattle the old ghosts in Session’s closet.

Meanwhile, the Orange One had a great speech.  I’m sorry, I was in a semi-coma after having spent the afternoon running a skilsaw, NTTAWWT.    But that was Tuesday and today I managed to catch Al Franken’s act in the Senate.  AFAIK, Franken never played Joe McCarthy on SNL, but did so today.  Imagine that: it is proof of God that the mighty are brought so low our wildest imaginings do not harbor such gifts.

OK, I’ve had dinner and am feeling more like myself.  If anybody is, I am a student of collapse and knew it would be incomparable to the past in many ways.  Still, even after having terrorized the pols and bloggers of Greensboro and witnessing the results of that terrible political vacuum, I remain amazed at the good fortune lain at the feet of a kid from Brooklyn who was never considered quite good enough. I never imagined dystopia would be heralded by such people as the Trumps.  Nancy Pelosi’s had skull actually cavitates with each more ridiculous pronouncement.  Meanwhile, Orange Elvis reduces everything to forlorn hope, with visions of puppies and kittens, while the remote sounds of deflation, climate change and utter chaos loom nearer.

I swear to God, if GM made an even more stretch version of Suburban/Escalade, most of North GSO would be driving one, even if it beggared the children.  The much required statue of Sheldon Wolin that will never be built as testament to Inverted Totalitarianism would inform Kunstler’s view that McMansions and new cars represent the greatest waste of resources ever.  Over a year ago, BoA pronounced the existing oil gut and reduced gas prices as the greatest economic windfall in history.  Did the meek save their money?  No, they all bought a pick up truck.

The myths of prosperity gospel and tribalism promote debt enslavement among those who might have otherwise made a material difference in their communities.  Whereas rural churches provide a final line against desperation, suburban places of worship typically serve the false god of materialism.  Not only have they ignored the gospels, the debt they embrace to enable their extravagances will be visited on their children.

Starting with failure to improve on Obamacare, Trump will begin his great fall, certainly not of his making, but a direct result of the calamity he has chosen to face.  By April, notions of Russians will be  quaint memories as the white knuckle ride to oblivion begins its inevitable acceleration into a final horizon.  The thing about Trump is we’ve always known he was full of shit, so his empty assurances won’t matter so much.

We are fortunate to be present in that seminal moment when the salary class is finally forced to deal with their ever more precarious situation, simply the latest meal for an all-consuming oligarchy and perps of the demise of the wage class.  The essential thing to recognize is that by birth, acumen or villainy, these are the sharks who swim in our water, and they are not prepared to go quietly.

I once posited that two weeks after the apocalypse, lots of poor people would be on the BBQ of your accountant or attorney.  These are your apex predators and they will adapt.  So, while you might be tempted to approach the privileged and entitled, never forget they are in better shape and much more desperate than you will ever be.  We can see it in the reaction of Libtards to the election.  They have yet to respond politically with anything but the most feeble reflexes. Cognitive dissonance weighs them down and they are neurotic, if not psychotic in disbelief.  Again, those who are in position to do the most good are out to lunch, as the gods of neoliberalism continue to defy Sanders, Ellison, the dwarfs, elves and hobbits.

Charming prince Trump was the answer for a social liberalism drugged to inaction by the failed would-be warrior queen.  And yet she is not vanquished among her own kind.  Apparently, Trump must go about his business while the opposition continues to debase itself on behalf of Wall Street.  Of course, the GOP establishment is no better, destroying whatever good Trump might have intended.

If there is good news, it is that what we are witnessing from the Left in reaction to Trump will serve us well as Right wing parties come to the fore in Europe.  We may complain about immigrants here, but we can’t comprehend what they are dealing with.  The Left has literally committed suicide with liberal immigration policies.  It is mass insanity on an incomparable scale.  Immigrants were welcomed for jobs we were no longer will to do, but they often committed the ultimate offense of thriving.  Thankfully, their offspring were just as indolent as ours, so that helped.  Still El Norte  looks better than the narco state many left behind, whereas Syria and North Africa beckon for the disaffected far from home in Christian Europe.

The notion of nationalism is lost upon right wing buffoons like Beck and Hannity.  The former comes on before Rush and the latter prospers at his expense.  Still, Hannity is an utter buffoon who has no opinions other than those he is given.  I entirely expect him to give Bibi a blow job soon.  It is not so hard to understand the Left wallowing in neoliberalism while the Right traitorously worships Zionism.  Beck claims to have read Dugin and so understands Bannon, but dissembles into the next on air ad.

Fascism rages on the Left with promises that it is coming from the Right, but it is the Left which abandoned peace, labor, trade and education.  Please excuse the party of business for appearing clumsy with such ideas.  Nationalism, unlike globalism, concerns itself with the good of citizens and stands in the path of nationless oligarchs, who control politics.  Trump the Eternal Insurgent, walks among them in the strange orange light conferred by the dispossessed and yet hopeful.  These are not the politically dead revenants of the welfare class, but relatively new victims of the salary class, who haunt the political landscape as yet unresigned to their fates.

I’ve decided we’re all in some very droll Stanley Kubrick movie.