The poor shall eat when the desire for healthcare is abandoned . . . welcome to America, land of the deliberately divided, impoverished, and sickened. Stay strong . . . last night’s sweep felt nice.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I drew the above political cartoon after our President’s micro-penis military parade. A friend of mine called it “Jumping the Shart.” Of course, I had no idea the President would eventually communicate his interest in recreating this picture with horrifying precision.
I don’t write as much, as well, or as often as I’d like. And, lately, I’ve thankfully enjoyed some miscellany of distractible indulgence. Even still, there are epiphanous moments of shit-your-pants “goddamn!” when everything comes together amid showers or yoga (whence I prefer to organize my ideological . . . stances?) . . . or dangerously both at once . . . sometimes with wine . . . or beer. And, while the precise, effectual articulation manifests with flawless clarity in those moments of precarious Dandayamana under a scolding, artificial downpour, the divine revelation of self-perspective evaporates the moment I go to record it. Makes me wonder how Muhammed managed to remember all that shit from the cave.
. . . Anyway . . .
Beyond those miraculously Mohammedan moments of saturated contortion and existential clarity, though, single-task preoccupation is frustratingly ever elusive. Of course, this is on a personal level, and perhaps with only a handful of topical variables to organize. For those of us who struggle to quiet the torrential whispers of perpetually-distracting internal dialogue—an onslaught which erases one moment of profound clarity with another many times a second—recording any of it with the laborious gait of either pen or keyboard proves a nearly-insurmountable challenge . . . beyond the seemingly impossibility of task-initiation (if you know, you know . . . and I love you) . . . so, shoveling extra shit onto our camel to boot is stupefying.
This is magnified exponentially by the rapidly-fluctuating, multi-topical, absurdly-depressing ongoing socio-economic and political shit-show of degenerative subjugation we must not only consider, contextualize, and capitulate, for our progressively precarious participation, but also imagine a plausible endurance after its probably-dystopian, but ultimately unknown, eventuality. So . . . we’re fucked.
It’s just so much easier to distract to the point of wild abandon.
I mean, it’s honestly overwhelming to deeply consider every catastrophe dangled regularly before us. Daily, The United States of America shocks its citizens (at least some number us), the world, and the spectating Jesus and Aliens. The Trump administration—an overwhelmingly obvious ideological eventuality of the Reagan administration’s abolition of the middle class—loots the coffers of its increasingly-impoverished sub-elites at every turn. It’s subtle politically-performative permission for private enterprise emulation and the combined allegiance of both—THAT is fascism.
Liberating individuals of their wealth in tithe to the rich comes in many forms. A tax payer’s money may subsidize a farmer, who buys over-priced pesticides and farm equipment repairable only by the manufacturer, funneling the taxed-wages of an underpaid big-box retail employee to Monsanto or John Deere, until that farmer, for whom the subsidies were inadequate, since our trade war with China demolished our ability to sell soybeans (for example), and we bailed out the very country China is buying soybeans from now, must eventually abandon their occupational/cultural participation, selling their farm to an equity-firm with shareholders including our Vice President.
I’m sure you can come up with other equally-infuriating examples—Mike Johnson running cover for child sex-predators by weaponizing food and healthcare to avoid swearing in Adelita Grijalva, OR perhaps mothers ushered onto Onlyfans for adequate familial income and provisions (how dare they give up or supplement their inadequate 9-5’s with marketable services . . . only the elite can do that), only to be castigated as immoral sex-workers and opportunistic whores by the right [I think we all know who the opportunistic whores really are (and that’s barely an Erika Kirk joke . . . more like an AIPAC joke . . . but both work)] . . . OR “America First” and/or “christian” talking-heads condemning Universal Healthcare and villainizing empathy . . . seriously, there’re so many fucked up things.
The United States exists to harvest the remaining wealth of its consumer-citizens like batteries powering the light of indulgence. And when people protest, the President of the United States communicates his desire to literally shit on them.
Yoga and Showers really just don’t offer the time I need to consider how absolutely insane everything is. And trying to write down the hypocrisy in hillbilly dipshits bemoaning the relocation of Civil-Rights era Confederate Monuments while their cult-leader demolishes the far-older East Wing of the White House to build a Gilded Ball Room for Gatsby-esque galas before the Pedo-Protecting Republicans deliberately instigate food wars is befuddlingly overwhelming. I just don’t have the time . . . or the energy.
Cheers to all of you out there conquering your ADHD to participate and prosper in your own way, especially if it helps others or distracts them from whatever the fuck is going on out there right now.
God bless,
-Matt
Aftercare: Look, aftercare’s important after an onslaught of discomfort. So, just breathe . . . relax. The November 4, 2025 elections give hope. People are waking up, even if it doesn’t feel like it in your area (and it certainly doesn’t in mine). But, shit, Marjorie Taylor Green’s starting to appreciate that the political class does not exist to actualize the preferences of the voters, and if she can epiphany her way to “people should have affordable healthcare” and “subsidizing genocide is generally disagreeable to the citizenry”(hypocritical savvy self-service aside), then perhaps there’s hope for the other “christian conservatives.” Pray for them. They may’ve swapped Jesus/empathy for Kirk/judgement as their martyr/ideology of choice, and the admission certainly suits their preferential disposition better, but pay-for-play corporate politics are being too obvious and the class war’s progressively more overt. Reagan’s redirection of positional ire toward the poor and sick is finally failing . . . and we should be thankful (some are super-surprisingly pairing Revelation’s description of the Anti-Christ with their once Orange Overlord . . . now, that’s progress of a kind). Now, will this awakening permeate the paramilitary incel squad (can’t spell incel without ice)? Likely not . . . or . . . not until they or their families are directly impacted . . . and that may soon be a reality. So, good luck during the upcoming food wars and insurance depression.
