A Shadow That Can Only Mock

And I am back! I wasn’t gone that long, but somewhere along the line I got addicted to these late‑afternoon blogging sessions, and any absence longer than a week feels like a small eternity. Part of the break was my seasonal affective disorder acting up — the garish summer sun loves to inflict cluster headaches on me. (Long‑time readers know my feelings about summer. Don’t worry, that rant is coming.) But I was also waiting for my new laptop.

Believe it or not, I’ve been doing all my blogging on a six-year-old Chromebook. A pre‑COVID Chromebook, mind you, back when they had the processing power of a determined potato and a three‑year expiration date before Google cut off updates. The fact that I coaxed it into lasting twice its intended lifespan is a minor miracle — one that required creativity, alternative apps, and the patience of a monk as I waited for my keystrokes to appear a full second or two after I typed them. What can I say? I’m loyal to my tech and allergic to the throwaway culture corporate America keeps trying to normalize.

But now I have my new Windows laptop — an Acer Go 15 with 16GB of memory and a Ryzen 7 7730U under the hood. I went with Windows because ChromeOS, while a fine system, is just too divorced from the rest of my tech world. After six years with my Chromebook, I’d recommend it to anyone who wants a simple-to-operate, inexpensive to buy, and reliable machine, something perfect for on-the-go computing. But for me? This feels like a long-overdue upgrade, like going from a clunker to a sports car.

And now, back to business.

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By now, you’ve probably heard about yet another Trump fiasco: the so‑called renovation of the Memorial Reflecting Pool. A stately national landmark, handed a rushed, no‑bid $14.7 million makeover — eight times Trump’s own estimate — only to devolve instantly into a pea‑green algae bloom of peeling paint and dead ducks.

Reuters

Much has already been said about this as a metaphor for both the Trump regime and the nation as a whole, so I won't add much. Just this:

When I watched this fiasco unfold in real time, I was reminded of a line from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.  It’s a moment in The Two Towers when Frodo reflects on the inherent nature of the Dark Lord's forces:

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”  

Annabelle Gordon, Reuters

If Trump's Reflecting Pool "renovation" isn't a mockery, I don't know what is.

Back in May, I wrote about how some in Trump’s base had begun whispering that he might be the literal Anti‑Christ. At the time, I dismissed it as fringe paranoia — but after seeing the Reflecting Pool ‘renovation,’ I’m starting to understand why Frodo’s observation hits a little too close to home. Of course, Occam’s Razor still applies: never assume satanic evil when plain incompetence will do. But the evidence keeps accumulating in ways that are… unsettling. 

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True to form, the response to this spectacular failure has been entirely dictatorial. Rather than owning a botched paint and filtration job, the Oval Office immediately conjured images of shadowy saboteurs and political vandals.

Now, National Guardsmen and park police patrol the perimeter. Security fencing has been hastily erected around what was once the people’s plaza, and loudspeakers blare warnings to 'move along' if you dare look too closely at the fetid water.

The whole display carries a heavy, paranoid whiff of the mid-1980s USSR. It feels exactly like those Cold War days when Western tourists in Moscow were assigned surreptitious security details, not for their protection, but to ensure they didn't document the cracks in the Soviet facade. 

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And it's not just the Reflecting Pool, either. Trump has trashed other sections of the nation's capital at various times as well, as this image shows:

Again, insert your favorite metaphor here: "This is America under an incompetent regime," or "Trump is the Anti-Christ revealing his dark works." Either one fits. But there is another possibility gaining traction in the press, one that looks past simple political incompetence to something more internal: the president's visibly fraying cognitive discipline.

It is an established reality that internal chaos breeds external disorder. When leadership is defined by a frantic combination of executive dysfunction, attention deficits, and acute paranoia, the surrounding environment inevitably begins to decay. As Trump is increasingly observed falling asleep during high-level briefings, exhibiting profound disorientation at public gatherings, and spinning into rambling, incoherent grievances, the physical state of Washington begins to make sense.  

This Trumpian mess is a mirror of the mind that ordered it: a chaotic, superficial rush job that can no longer sustain basic maintenance, surrounded by guards to hide the rot. The only remaining question is: Does it reflect America's mental state in the 21st Century as well? With Trump being elected twice now, the prognosis is not good.

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