Panicky Rants about The Awfulness

Yikes. I missed yesterday's post.

It was a day in which I had already done quite a bit of writing work, partly for class and partly for a statement of purpose to a seminary. Sometimes I have days where it feels like I've written myself out already.

It was a busy day today as well, and I feel a similar sort of written-out-ness.

Alternately, I'm trying to avoid writing more about The Awfulness, which somehow continues to get more Awful. I'm losing the thread of whether the BlueSkySphere of panic/outrage has completely skewed my perspective--or whether things really are just getting dire.

I'm afraid it's the latter, but then that's what I'd think in the BlueSkySphere, no? 

And yet--even planning for recruitment to our grad program has become fraught. With NIH budgeting slashed/curtailed/stuck, our graduate teaching assistantship lines are  . . . in limbo? My chair suggested we just try to get everyone we can this year, as soon as possible, before we have all lines revoked. 

But then, would that even work? Lots of people at (or in projects dependent upon) USAID are right now out of jobs. A whole raft of already-funded projects across multiple agencies find themselves under re-review to make sure their proposals and reports do not contain the dreaded DEI verboten words.  I'm worried about us accepting students--particularly foreign nationals--only to find halfway through the summer that we can't fund them as promised. That would be a nightmare. 

Last I checked, it seems the Trump administration has chosen simply to ignore court orders to restore funding or refrain from cutting/curtailing funds. We do in fact seem to be heading into a Constitutional crisis. What Trump is trying is flatly illegal. What judges have ruled is plainly legitimate. But we're about to find out what happens if Trump and his cronies simply tell the courts to go pound sand. "Obey the terms of my restraining order? I'd prefer not to!" 

Who's going to stop him? Republicans in Congress so far seem to have sold their ethics in the name of avoiding Trumpian wrath. I have yet to see a Trump idea so utterly beyond the pale that Mike Johnson or other GOP lawmakers won't crawl over each other to get in front of a camera and declare how commonsensical and good this plan to, I don't know, turn Gaza into a resort development scheme (for Trump--not for Gazans, who will be forever forbidden from returning to their home).

Who's going to stop him? The Supreme Court has at least two members seemingly dedicated to entertaining and promoting maximalist views of executive power. The Overton Window is so far to the right currently that I'm not sure the plain text of the Constitution fits into it any more.

Who's going to stop him? The White House "adults in the room" have been purged, the guardrail structures in government tranquilized or euthanized. Elon Musk and his cadre of twentysomething hacker-programmers are doing heaven-knows-what to every database and digital system they can get their hands on. (As the viral quip goes: if he was looking for fraud, why bring in programmers instead of accountants?)

And there we are: another panicky rant about The Awfulness. 

I gotta do something else tomorrow.