*This post will stay pinned at the top for a while. Please scroll down for new material. Thanks — digby
Holiday Fundraiser Time!
by digby
 |
| Holiday soother: a Scottish wildcat kitten |
Yes, it’s that time again. It’s the holiday season and I’m asking for your support to keep this rickety old blog afloat for another year. How time flies when the world has turned upside down. It seems like only yesterday that I was lying in bed with the covers pulled up over my head wondering how the country had finally gone completely mad and elected Donald Trump to be president of the United States. Actually, that was yesterday.
The last few years have been as tumultuous as I can remember in my lifetime and I’ve been around a while. I think if I weren’t writing seven days a week researching, observing, analyzing and producing this blog I might just lose my mind. I hope that somehow my therapeutic ramblings every day give some of you a little way to cope and maybe a little hope that you aren’t alone out there.
And for me, I can only say that your support means the world to me. I thank each and every one of you for contributing to this little project over the years. It’s not just the money, although that makes it possible to keep going. It’s the validation that what we do here is meaningful. I can’t express how grateful I am for that.
The world has changed since I started blogging but maybe not quite as much as we think. Back then we were all still reeling from 9/11 and observing our government leaders lose their ethical moorings and decide to invade a country that didn’t attack us. The president of the United States had been installed in a dubious electoral process manipulated by his own brother and a partisan Supreme Court majority. And that was on the heels of a dada-esque impeachment trial that ended giving the president a 60% approval rating. And then there was the financial crisis. Oh man.
Let’s just say we’ve been nuts for quite a while. But as wild as the last two decades have been, none of it really prepared us for the Trump era. This is unprecedented lunacy — everything corrupt, decadent, ignorant and ugly about our politics congealed into one giant ball of daily rage tweets and overwhelming ineptitude. It’s the last 20 years condensed into two on steroids.
People will say to me from time to time that Trump, at least, isn’t a war president. And I wonder what they’re talking about. Even aside from the fact that he’s escalated tensions all over the planet, and poured money into the military, his coddling of Saudi Arabia has resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and the war we have been engaged in for a decade and a half in Afghanistan shows no sign ending.
And the fact is that he’s started another war, a big one. It’s here in the United States, dividing the nation into his friends and foes and stoking every primitive hatred that exists in our culture. And the major front in that battle is at the border with Mexico where the government has put babies in cages and just yesterday we learned that this week our border patrol let a 7 year old girl die for lack of food and water.
He is a war president and the war is right here on American soil.
We are living through important times. I’m trying to document it, analyze it, keep my sense of humor and perspective even though it is anything but easy. And if you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year so that Tom, Dennis, tristero and I can keep the lights on for another year.
The paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.
As always I am immensely grateful for your continued loyalty and interest in my scribbles.
And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!
cheers — digby
Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405