Where were you when the fun stopped?
“I was throwing back at my countrymen — and particularly its elite — their failure to deal with how the dictatorship had devastated us ethically.” Ariel Dorfman, The Suicide Museum
Is the United States at war or merely conducting a military operation in Iran? Have we already won, as Donald Trump insists, or will Trump introduce Marines and soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division? Is Trump (or his crack duo of Steve Witkoff and Jared “The Ghoul” Kushner) negotiating with unidentified Iranian power brokers to end the war or was Trump’s social media post claiming that negotiations were going spectacularly well part of a stock market manipulation scheme?
Are ICE thugs being deployed to US airports to assist the thin ranks of TSA agents or simply to frighten, unsettle and desensitize people to their presence?
Who can say? Who can we trust? When the Iranian regime denies that any negotiations are taking place, I tend to believe them over Trump. At this moment, Iran has the US trapped and enjoys considerable leverage that I can’t see them negotiating away, at least not yet. Iran has shown its oil-wealthy neighbors, the smug Gulf sheiks along with the party people of Dubai, that relying on the US for their defense is folly. Iran has also demonstrated that it can make Israel pay a cost for its habitual belligerence. The entire power balance and dynamic in the Middle East is shifting, in flux, all because Donald Trump got his ego stroked by Bibi Netanyahu and Lindsey Graham, and a push from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole gets it exactly right in a piece for the New York Review (“Signifying Absolutely Nothing,” April 9, 2026): “Military might under Trump is all power and no purpose, all tactics and no strategy, all violence and no vision, all means and no ends.”
“These are not serious people,” said the historian Alfred McCoy on Democracy Now, referring to Trump, Whiskey & Jesus Hegseth and Lindsey Graham. No, they’re not, but then where have the serious people gone? Not to the Supreme Court, obviously, and surely not to Congress or the Department of Homeland Security, now to be helmed by one of the dumbest men to ever call the US Senate home, Markwayne Mullin, nitwit from Oklahoma. I blame Mullin less than I blame the voters of Oklahoma; same goes for the voters of South Carolina for inflicting the ass-kissing, feet-licking Lindsey Graham on the nation. Serious folks have certainly not flocked to the Department of Justice — that once venerable institution is as good as dead. Who represents “the people” in a legal sense now?
Nobody. We’re on our own in a country where the rule of law is losing traction and legitimacy. Likewise, international law is crumbling because a handful of nations thumb their noses at it. Looking at you Russia, Israel, and the US.
Unaccountable billionaires. The John Roberts Supreme Court. The corporate media. The Tech Bros. The entire Epstein Class of privileged white men. We have plenty of villains, but as a friend of mine is fond of telling me, it’s the voters, man. The Regime is waging all-out bureaucratic and legislative warfare against voting, an orgy of schemes to disenfranchise as many voters as it can. Women in particular. It’s as if the country is locked in a race to the bottom. Trump has been credibly accused of raping a teenager, and his name appears in the Epstein files more than any other individual, but Republicans and evangelical Christians are untroubled. So what?
I don’t get it. I never will.
How did we arrive at such a morally debased place that voters twice elected Donald Trump? What was the straw that snapped the camel’s back and made millions of Americans indifferent to cruelty, made us tolerate violent solutions to problems that violence cannot solve, and persuaded us that profound ignorance is something to be celebrated and rewarded?
When did we give up on representative democracy? When did we give up on ourselves? When did we not only give up on the future, but on the present?
As Hunter S. Thompson was fond of saying, where were you when the fun stopped?
