Roller-Coaster Days

 My mood roller-coasters. Today was a downward slope. I could tell by the number of irreverent and off-color jokes I kept making in my grad seminar. 

Why? Oh, I could do the [gestures at everything] move. But I guess a few immediate shots to my mood happened when I read one of my senators--deep, deep red--dismissing constituents' worries about federal workers as mere whining. So GOP representatives are getting booed and criticized in town hall meetings? The GOP solution: stop having town hall meetings. If you aren't a billionaire or a bully, they don't care to hear from you.

I had some hopes for some bipartisan action against the nightmarish budget proposal by the House Republicans, but those got dashed. Reclaim Congress's power of the purse from an overreaching executive branch? No thanks, says the GOP. Speaker Johnson seems to be curving his entire political will and power into one end: please Donald Trump.

And then there's RFK, our new top health official, cancelling the annual meeting to hash out next year's flu vaccine, dismissing the first measles death in the US in ten years, saying framing it not only as normal (it is not) but caused by the MMR vaccine itself (it is not). My other senator, supposedly the moderate-sane one, is a medical doctor. He approved Kennedy's appointment, promising that he'd watchdog Kennedy to make sure he didn't waver on promoting this tried-and-true lifesaving public health intervention. Where is he? 

And I saw the assembled presidential cabinet being hailed and addressed not by Trump but by Elon Musk, who still has no officially appointed role in DOGE but is still somehow the de facto president as Trump himself fades into senescence. I repeat my therapist's amazed observation: Trump defers to Musk in a way he rarely defers to anyone, save perhaps Putin. With Musk tweeting openly about wanting to go the way of El Salvador (getting rid of any judges that dare to challenge the executive branch, taking over the country by force), I wonder how much support he's winning from the armed forces.

I keep hearing from my lefty sources how even rank-and-file Trump voters seem increasingly restive about the mass firings and coming economic collapse. And the reaction from the administration only underlines how little the billionaire-bully krato-kakistocracy cares. But maybe I'm just stuck in my echo chamber? I do occasionally hear about non-AI-produced folk absolutely charmed by the wholesale destruction of our government. 

I wrote to my Representative--one of our state's few democrats--to complain about the GOP and thank him for his vote against the "big, beautiful budget." 

I suppose I'll call my senators' offices tomorrow, even though one at least has communicated as clearly as possible he does not care to hear from the likes of me.

It's . . . hard to keep going when the roller coaster is at the bottom of the hill.