ICE agents shown up at your doors yet, fellas? Remember now, no screaming.
My maternal grandfather, a cotton farmer from Arkansas, used to just beam, “Ain’t this a grand country we live in!” And indeed, it was. I fondly remember our fabulous Bicentennial, way back in 1976, during Ford’s administration — the magnificent fireworks, the charged disco-party atmosphere, our united sense of confidence, Everyone admired Americans!
Next year, come July Fourth, 2026, we would have grandly celebrated the 250th anniversary of these, our United States of America. We ain’t gonna make it. Our American “experience” is over. We won’t see a 2076 Tricentennial.
And to think, even the Romanovs made it 300 years!
History will look back on Biden’s administration as being the frazzled last hoorah of a once-grand country, now diminished to complacency and capitulation. We voted for busting up the status quo, and President Musk has complied — with zeal! There’s a phrase for why we’re seeing all the billionaire boys’ club kowtowing themselves prostrate before L’Orange. It’s called “anticipated obedience” — enacting to predict and exceed expectations, in advance of any pressure to do so. It’s groveling minus incitement, in vain hopes of being spared down the road.
Hardly in veiled tones does President Musk — excuse me — President Trump cloak his true feelings toward our country’s 1.6 million transgendered citizens.
“Abominable” is the only way to describe the warp-speed at which our nation’s transgendered youths are now being demonized, ostracized and denied even basic health care access.
“Hypocrite” is too clean a word for the most amoral leader that our country has ever elected going on a rampage against the trans community’s morality. The benumbing of all empathy shall take far shorter time than four years, or even four months, to trickle down into being just another defining aspect of everyday America’s natural exceptionalism.
To L’Orange’s credit, George Orwell himself could not have dreamed up so sinisterly-cartoonish an invention as The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), nor Charles Dickens remotely attempt penning so perniciously comical a fool clowning the sobriquet Elon Musk. Believable literature could never bear up beneath such a weighty load as this shit. Meanwhile, a parade of dystopian “executive orders” just keeps on marching in. Who, in their wildest nightmares, ever dreamed Trump could scorch the entire earth barren in only a month?
It’s no longer even questioned when the likes of such MAGA celebutants as Marjorie Taylor Greene introduces, straight-faced, a congressional bill to carve L’Orange’s mugshot into Mt. Rushmore. Nary a Republican on Capitol Hill beggars to ask by what rationale, exactly, is this buffoon eligible for Rushmore? As the monument’s fifth, and only, Horseman of the Apocalypse? Please, excuse me a moment; the vomitorium is calling.
And who could have guessed that our government’s lead agency for humanitarian and development assistance, U.S.A.I.D., would suddenly simply evaporate? Any empathetic benevolence toward third-world nations is now 100-percent kaput — precedence given to ensuring continental Africa’s entire population be denied access forever forward to their HIV medications, and that the safety nets keeping future African diseases stamped-out be cast to the winds.
Welcome back, Ebola, Smallpox and Dengue Fever! Please let me introduce you to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., vaccine denialist, and our new Secretary of Health.
Also meeting the doomsday asteroid is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Our era of enjoying monetary safeguards has been obliterated; moreover, we’ve completely withdrawn from W.H.O. (the World Health Organization), and as a cherry on top, NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is being dismantled, all its climate-related grants canceled.
And let’s not forget L’Orange’s Valentine’s Day gift to the nation, when he accidentally fired 300 staffers within the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency tasked with maintaining our uranium weaponry stockpiles — having no clue of what the NNSA actually does. Oops!
Understand, this is the president of the United States of America. Not an autistic six-year-old diagnosed with ADD living in a border town.
One wonders which is worse: being on U.S. soil illegally or working for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which must now obligatorily submit the names of the entire federal workforce of 2.3 million employees who received less than a “fully successful” performance rating in the last three years (coded phraseology implicating all federally-employed African-Americans). Their livelihoods are ordered to be terminated. And swiftly.
L’Orange’s roadkill tally has already begun putrefying into a smoldering pile of meaningless initials. Take airplane crashes, for instance, which Trump has blamed on, of all blameless things, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, the very lifeline of Black-owned small businesses. Way back when dear Howard here was born, then-President Lyndon Johnson aimed for nothing short of unifying every American into a Great Society. All children born in today’s Bizarro America will grow up swaddled in the frays of what’s left from that era’s shredded fabric. They’ll never know what optimism felt like.
For those of you still pooh-poohing the notion that another Trump administration will approach nothing near the draconian hellscape warned of — just pull up Google Maps and take a gander at that big body of water flanking the western shoreline of Florida. That’s right, the one now labeled The Gulf of America. You can’t laugh for very long because the world as we knew it, just one month ago, no longer exists.
It will never come back. There is no restoration. Oh, and Trump’s paving over the White House rose garden, too.
I know it’s a lot to digest. The only analogy I can come up with is something akin to 1917’s Russia, when the Bolsheviks seized power. Flash forward 108 years. Replace Vladimir Lenin with Orangutan L’Orange. Off in the wings, awaiting his premeditated death, lurks the gray blur, Stalin — rather, Vice President Gomer. Connect all the dots, and that document you’ll now discover in your hands is a master blueprint for exterminating all gender fluidity and people of color: AKA, Project 2025.
Yes, Sir! Thank you, SIR! To quote Stalin, “Kill one person and it’s murder; kill a million, and it’s a statistic.”
—Howard Lewis Russell
Eventually, sweet readers, I’ll get back to taking your questions again — just soon as the rug gets finished being pulled out from underneath us all. Meanwhile, please do continue titillating me with your personal queries, at AskHoward@dallasvoice.com.