2016 - What Just Happened?

I mean WTF just happened? Between the untimely departure of many of my musical heroes and the complete demise of The American Dream, I feel like 2016 has been a non-stop gang rape of everything I believed was good and true.

Something about 2016 harkens back to 1915 and the Dadaists. It's not so much the art and anti-art that they created, or the anti-bourgeois sentiments. Rather, it's the complete absurdity of the socio-political environment, and the realization that our 250 year-old American experiment is fizzling and sputtering like a lab rat in its death throes. It's even worse to know that so many of our fellow-citizens don't give a shit about liberty and justice for all, and that they're perfectly happy destroying the planet so long as they can get a new truck, boat, snowmobile, motorcycle, RV etc. every couple of years.

Nonetheless, there are lessons to be learned. One is that the bubble we live in our here on the

Northern California coast really is a bubble, and a small one at that. Another is that the social media echo chamber in which some of us dwell is also a house of mirrors. And that the same is true for everybody: it's become almost impossible to discern opinion from fact, falsehood from reality, and if something enters our sphere that doesn't conform to the norms of our echo chamber, it gets vaporized like mosquito on a bug lamp.

I know this because many of us couldn't have been more wrong, and while we were telling each other how right we were, a revolt was underway. Who knew? Not the NYT, not the WP, not the SFC...Witness then the dangers of the echo chamber, topped with the foam off an orange julius.

So, what now?

First and foremost, we lost so FUCK THAT SHIT! As Tom Petty once sang "it's time to move on, time to get goin'." The federal government is shaping up to be a complete and utter train wreck for progressives, not to mention all the middle-class suckers that got conned by the Chump. So...to quote another song:

De do do do, de da da da

Is all I want to say to you

De do do do, de da da da

Their innocence will pull me through

De do do do, de da da da

Is all I want to say to you

De do do do, de da da da

They're meaningless and all that's true

Meanwhile, Merry Merry from the Hairy Family Singers. I suspect we'll muddle through 2017 one way or another.

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