It is an odd feeling to gaze up at the summer sky and not be greeted by a bright blue dome with a glowing golden orb cheerily laying claim to all that it surveys, but rather by a surreal smoky-red abomination with an orange-yellow splotch dominating its realm with tortured malevolence. Yet, that is precisely what I witnessed this day, as smoke from massive wildfires poured down across the border as if Canada was exhaling after taking a long, deep drag on a tar-filled cigarette. Welcome to the century of global secondhand smoke.
We all tend to see the past through rose‑colored glasses, but I try to be objective about these things. And when I think back to my youth in the ’70s and ’80s, I can’t recall witnessing anything like this — not unless you count the day Washington state's Mount St. Helens blew with such force that its ash drifted all the way to New York, dusting cars and triggering a mini‑nuclear winter that made the following season measurably colder and snowier. In other words, it took a once‑in‑a‑lifetime volcanic eruption to produce something like this. Now, we get apocalyptic‑seeming weather events as part of the regular programming.
This is not normal, at least for my portion of the country. Yet, such days are becoming increasingly frequent as climate change drives global temperatures past record levels, increasing the number of days when it is both hot and polluted.
Welcome to the hellscape that is the 21st Century.
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And like any hellscape, this one is ruled by what Oliver Stone once called “the impossibility of reason.” You can see it in the statements coming from border‑state Republican governors, who have spent years denying climate change and now find themselves furious about the smoke blanketing their own skies from global warming-induced wildfires. Even President Trump, the man who has systematically rolled back both EPA regulations as well as clean, renewable energy mandates in favor of dirty and dated carbon-based fuels, is getting in on the act:
Madness. Yet here we are as the sky bleeds and the air burns, and roughly 50% of the American people exhibit an odd mix of studied ignorance and clapping-seal servility.
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The hellscape extends beyond the weather, of course. Last night, we were treated to an infirm and elderly man exhibiting psychosis on live television. I’m referring, of course, to Trump’s primetime address about his latest investigation into the missing strawberry ice cream… er, his 2020 electoral defeat. In my previous post, I laid out three possibilities for what the speech might contain. We now know that two of the three were accurate: while there was no announcement of an escalation in the Iran conflict, the rest was there — a self‑congratulatory opening followed by a wild‑eyed rant about election conspiracy theories so unhinged that only Lil’ Fox News (that is, the Ellison‑enfeebled CBS News) carried it live, with the other networks ignoring it entirely. Even Fox News itself was careful to note that it could not vouch for the veracity of the president’s claims, a caution no doubt mandated by an $800 million defamation settlement with Dominion. Apparently, you can teach an old, whipped dog new tricks.
Honestly, like the networks, I paid the entire sad spectacle only the most perfunctory attention — little more than letting the sound play in the background — because I knew it would be yet another waste of television pixels. And it was. In many ways, it echoed the release of the first tranche of the infamous Epstein files, when the administration, out of either malice or incompetence (probably both...as usual), dumped thousands of documents already in the public record while redacting new ones so heavily that abusers’ names vanished and victims’ names remained. The same dynamic seems to be at work here. Most of the documents released by the present regime were already public and reveal no grand conspiracy. Others are so heavily redacted that what they supposedly prove is impossible to discern. And most hilariously of all, some documents actually show that former President Biden was the target of a Russian influence campaign. Nice going, Team Trump — thanks for proving “Russia‑gate” was real! 😁
As one wag put it:
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As absurd as this hellscape appears, it is still, after all, a hellscape. Having the president of the United States knowingly spread misinformation of the sort Russia circulated during the 2020 election is… bizarre? Dangerous? Treasonous? You make the call.
Worse, it signals that the hellscape is about to become even more hellish. It is ironic that the man who attempted to steal an election on January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump, is bleating about election security as he lays the groundwork for another heist — not just by priming the insurrection pump and ginning up the usual basket of deplorables, but by seemingly weaponizing federal agencies, such as the bloody‑handed ICE, to serve as his stormtroopers on election day. And unlike the single, focused eruption of anti‑democratic barbarism on that infamous day, we may be facing a series of state‑level insurrections, this time with the insurrectionists enjoying fire support at their backs and a presidential pardon as their reward.
The last time the nation went down this path, this happened:
Not a cheery thought, especially when one considers that the current anti-Lincoln who occupies the partially demolished White House controls one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world. What could possibly go wrong?
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No hellscape would be complete without Khorne the Blood God getting in on the act, so now let's speak of Trump’s illegal war of choice — the one he dismissed as “a little excursion” — now grinding into its fifth month with no end in sight. In fact, the war is hotter than ever, with drones and ballistic missiles raining down across the region, critical infrastructure reduced to rubble, civilians killed, shipping frozen, and now at least three U.S. soldiers dead after increasingly effective Iranian attacks. But hey, I’m sure that’s nothing a shot of testosterone can’t fix, right? I don’t mean to be glib, but it matters that as a war with potentially devastating global consequences spirals out of control, America’s putative Secretary of Defense is spending his time
promoting crank medicinal theories while soldiers are being killed and wounded under his command.
Mind you, all this is happening after the (putative) Commander-in-Chief said that the entirety of the Iranian armed forces were destroyed. Wow! It's amazing what can be apparently accomplished with sticks and stones these days.
Also, have you seen Moscow lately?
I am sure that the capital of a nuclear-armed nation burning in flames due to a failing war will not at all add to the hellscape that seems to be swallowing more of the globe with each passing day. Again,
what could possibly go wrong?
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As I look back on what I have written, I realize that I inadvertently captured the spirit, if not the exactness, of the mythological Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. All that is missing is famine.
Oh.
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In The Lord of the Rings, Treebeard tells Galadriel: “For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.” Sadly, that is becoming my outlook as well. The world has changed — especially America — and not for the better. Things are rather dire, truth be told.
There’s an old adage about the frog in boiling water. You know the story: if you put a frog in boiling water, it leaps to safety; but if you put it in cool water and slowly turn up the heat, it will eventually boil to death. This is not true, by the way — frogs are not stupid. They know when their lives are in jeopardy. Sadly, however, people are stupid. As the world burns, both literally and figuratively, many simply accommodate themselves to the worsening reality. We saw that during the COVID years, when many Americans chose to believe that a global pandemic was either an orchestrated conspiracy or, if real, that the best course of action was to do nothing and accept their fate. Even a frog in a hot tub would have been smarter than that.
While that pandemic has passed, the stupidity that enabled it has not. The same mentality that doomed millions to suicide by ignorance is now at work as the world burns from warmongering, racism, avarice, and malevolent incompetence. As Albert Camus warned in The Plague, bad situations are often dismissed as a “...bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away...”
As I have been chronicling for almost two years now — indeed, as my muse Mary Boykin Chesnut chronicled during her own days of national fracture — things are “rattling downhill with no one to put on the brakes.” We are living in dire times that only grow more so with each passing week. I do not know where this ends. My faith commands me not to despair, but my intellect tells me such a dire state of affairs cannot but lead to disaster. After all, when the sky glows red, what hope can a mortal man have?
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