While visiting my old stomping ground of New York City earlier this month — so magical a place during the holidays — I, along with a melting pot of multitudes, stood awaiting Rockefeller Center’s annually imported behemoth be grandly lit, officiating the kickoff of true Christmas spirit. Even the homeless looked jaunty. One’s cardboard donation box glowed creatively strung of twinkling lights, his puppy blithely asleep inside it ’neath a rain of quarters and tatty dollar bills.
Two importantly dressed suits clipped by, contributing nothing. “I like the lights,” deadpanned Suit 1, to which Suit 2 lobbed, “They light the tree tonight.”
The gray Manhattan dusk began sprinkling. Umbrellas sprouted. Lite-Brite pup began whimpering, a wet coin stuck in his ear. His mangy master coddled him ’neath the rags of his coat. On the sidewalk, adjacent to their life’s savings’ box, someone had written in purple chalk, “Think of all it took just to finally be here.”
Gradually, as chalk idioms are wont to do upon contact with raindrops, the lettering began bleeding away, revealing a different word altogether had been superimposed in yellow chalk over the lavender-worded “be”. The parlance now read, “Think of all it took just to finally pee here.”
Let’s just get all golden showers right to it, shall we?
Now, I’ve never exactly been one for introspection. A born Aquarian, I always look forward. The past, after all, we can’t repair, and the present is only as good as those employed to keep it moving.
However, with 2025 finally reaching its EXIT sign, reflection seems only too appropriate: Last year, this same time, everything more or less still functioned as normal — a normalcy so taken for granted that there are still individuals amongst us who sincerely believe our new world disorder is but a temporary aberration, that once Trump is out of office, things will settle back down again to the way they used to be.
Indeed, as the Walrus said, “The time has come to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”
Every country on Earth — excepting perhaps a few insignificantly tiny island nations such as, oh, Nauru, for example — seems to be all but convulsing with dissolution, revolution or convolution of historically record-shattering proportions. Just throw a dart at the map: Jakarta, for instance, the largest city on Earth (with an estimated population now approaching 12 million) is sinking so quickly beneath rising seas that it’s having to be relocated to higher ground.
Meanwhile, new coal plants keep coming onboard at record pace; the Paris Climate Agreement has turned to farce as Earth waved goodbye to a CO2 emissions cap of 1.5 ppm two years back. So long, penguins and polar bears. Whoever knew that zoos would become, within but one human lifespan, our wild kingdom’s only future refuge?
L’Orange, always gleefully doing his part to keep the myth perpetuated that our climate crisis is a hoax, finally resorted to forcing the EPA (Environmental Protection agency) remove from its website the fact that human activity is driving climate change.
And there’s no end game in sight. Every time that the dungeon floor drops, we think we’ve hit bottom, that it can’t possibly plummet any further … And then the next abyss opens. Folks, we’re not yet even one year into Term Two of Donny Horror’s dystopian, late-night double-feature picture show! But already it’s near impossible to find anyone on this entire planet who has not, in some form or fashion, been adversely affected by our marmalade-complexioned doughboy of destruction.
Was it really only just last Christmas that our governmental machinery still worked toward achieving positive outcomes for the betterment and greater good of all people? America, always, was like the entire world’s Santa — helming an aspirational sleigh brimming with dreams come true!
WTF happened?!
Did Santa’s North Pole workshop suddenly vanish ’neath the melting tundra, swallowed up by a methane sinkhole? Did unvaccinated Rudolph come down with a severe case of the measles? Did ICE agents seize all the elves and deport them to Alligator Alcatraz? Or, perhaps Santa’s entire delivery herd suddenly just dropped from the sky with black lung, having over-inhaled too much Trumpian-clean coal dust?
Last Christmas, DEI programs (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) had not yet mutated into DIE pogroms (Doom, Inequality and Extinction). And a benevolent, empathetic America was still generous as ever to those less fortunate, distributing USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) in the form of food and medicines the world over, saving millions from succumbing to AIDS and starvation.
DOGE had not yet entered the building. The Department of Education still existed. Foreign exchange students weren’t being snatched off campus grounds by hooligans in hoods.
The White House still stood wholly, of grandeur, rather than just some whored-out, gilded dump — its Rose Garden paved over, the Lincoln bathroom marbled under, and the East Wing utterly demolished for a flagrant ballroom ’roided-up large enough to gaudily accommodate all in attendance at Trump’s third term inaugural. And that’s no even mentioning the unspeakable, gigantically new “Arc de Trump” arising next year, commemorating (in theory) our nation’s 250th anniversary.
Oh, wonderful tariffs, what rapturously-stuffed coffers you have wrought!
The fabric of our American greatness has been irreversibly and irrevocably vandalized.
We’ve passed the point of things being fixable. Worse, nobody sems to care. The administration to follow Trump’s — no matter which party stands triumphal on the Capitol’s inaugural podium come Mondy, Jan. 20, 2029 — will neither be able nor have the inclination to return America back to its pre-Trumpian majesty.
Things don’t go back to previous norms. Ever. And certainly not following a civilizational cataclysm of the likes we’re currently going through. Just look at history.
Nobody in post-revolutionary Russia expected Lenin’s nightmare edicts to last, either. How preposterous to think some fringy, lunatic, baldheaded nihilist could simply decree one day that the ownership of private property and personal possessions are no more — and then to have the public just go along with it. “Loot the looters,” admonished Lenin, which to his astonishment, the public carried out with rapacious delight, thus instantly eradicating the middle and upper classes and reducing all of Russia, overnight, into a nation of peasants starving equally.
Dictatorships are always rhapsodizing to their citizenry about how much better their lives are getting. And if this year’s holiday season is any indicator of the jolly merriments in store for us next year, then most likely you’ll find me basking the sunbaked island shores of tiny, forgotten little Nauru, pondering out loud (whilst sipping something frosty from a coconut), “Think of all it took just to finally pee here.”
And a merry, merry Christmas to every one of you, my sweet readers! Catch you all next year on the other side!
— Howard Lewis Russell
A new year starts all over, fresh and rosy again next month, my January faithful. Send me your coldhearted thoughts to AskHoward@dallasvoice.com.