Really, the thing that upset the Trumpencritter the most about this week’s Saturday Night Live sketch was that Sean Spicer was spoofed by a woman? That was today’s takeaway? REALLY?
Given that, how many of us would pay good money and lots of it to see Alec Baldwin out and Rosie O’Donnell in for that newly iconic role next week?
But that’s not why we’re here. (Sorry, just had to get that out of the way.)
Catching up on today’s insanity, my brain went off on its own little flight (it does that) and suddenly I was looking at what might be the second-worst case scenario for the post-Trump world.
Of course, the worst case is a barren, radioactive wasteland from pole to pole. But hey, even there you can find an up side. Global climate change will start reversing itself almost immediately! The pitiful few who are unlucky enough to survive won’t end up with an even worse fate – being stuck in a real life really horrible Keven Costner movie!
But what’s the next worst case scenario?
Let’s imagine that our narcissistic man-child, who’s never been told “no” in his entire life, tires quickly of the reality that even he can’t ignore. Since it IS all about him and he doesn’t want to play if he can’t win every single point in every single game, he declares us all to be losers (we’re nowhere near as cool as Putin, for example), takes his marbles, and retreats to his dark tower in downtown Manhattan to brood and frown down disappointingly upon us.
We proceed to tolerate and survive a little less than four years of Pence. (Comments what what a disgusting waste of protoplasm he is on another day.) We made it through Nixon, after all. (Except for all of those killed in Vietnam, of course.) We move on.
Meanwhile, the fact that we dodged the worst-case scenario soon begins to be forgotten. In fact, a significant portion of the population takes the lesson to be, “That wasn’t so bad at all! Those overreacting leftist liberals were so worried and crazed and for what? The nutcase went away, we’re fine, where was the problem? They were just crying wolf!”
In a couple of decades, the next ignorant demagogue rises up. Or maybe he or she isn’t quite so ignorant, which would be much worse. And the sane among us start sounding the alarm again – only to be shouted down or ignored by those who will point back at Trump and scream, “He wasn’t so bad – why should we believe you now?”
You scoff.
Ask just about anyone about the “Y2K” scare. Our power grid didn’t crash. Airplanes didn’t fall out of the sky. ATMs didn’t start spewing $100 bills like confetti. Nuclear power plants didn’t melt down because some clock went nuts while buried down in a piece of equipment built in the 1950s.
Which ignores the reality that the “Y2K” bug didn’t crash society because someone saw it coming a couple of years earlier and started sounding the alarm. The “Y2K” bug was destroyed before detonation because billions of dollars was spent in looking for problems in critical systems and then correcting them before the world crashed.
Just like in our second-worst case scenario, where all of this screaming and yelling and protesting and gong-banging can help piss off the President with the shortest work day and the shortest attention span in history. And when he gets pissed off enough, he’ll declare victory and quit.
But society will be just like a toddler in a car seat going through a horrific, spinning, and tumbling car crash, coming out the other side with barely a scratch, clapping their hands merrily, and shouting, “Do it again!”
Remember how bad it is, how insane, how ludicrous, how disgusting, how horrific. Remember, so you can remind your grandchildren. If we’re lucky enough to miss that worst-case scenario and live long enough to have grandchildren.
Paulietics 