Fuck this year

Everybody is doing their annual wrap-ups, cataloging the ups and downs of 2025, celebrating the rise of the resistance, predicting success in the midterms in November, trashing Trump and MAGA.

Fine. I’ll go along with all that, as far as it goes.

This year reminds me of the YouTube show “Fuck This House” created by comedian Deric Cahill, whose perpetual need to repair the baseboard beneath the kitchen sink resides at the front of his mind like the Supreme Court – it’s going to break your back, and still you can’t fix it.

That’s the way I feel about the whole year. Even the wins weren’t really wins. Every time a district court judge issued an injunction against some outrage by Kristi Noem or tried to stop the firing of several thousand civil servants from a damaged governmental department like Education, the Supreme Court would use its fucking rocket docket to dump a bucket of shit all over rationality and the rule of law.

Look out the window. We have masked Nazis running amok in our streets. Did you grow up thinking that one day, we too would have our own Gestapo terrorizing an entire population of people just because they’re not walking around with proof of citizenship? I thought we were done with stop and frisk. Now it’s stop and throw on the ground and stomp their necks and toss them in cages.

Overseas it’s been no better, in some ways, even worse. Israel quite literally bombed Gaza back to the Stone Age. Russia is still rocketing kindergartens and maternity hospitals and murdering civilians in their beds in Kyiv. If another war breaks out in Africa, the continent will detach itself and drift south until it hits Antarctica.

Vladimir Putin seems to be aspiring to evil heretofore achieved only by Hitler and Stalin. And Donald Trump? Don’t even get me started. His hands appear to be falling off, and he’s going to have to install Ted Nugent in a Vegas-style residence at the Kennedy Center if he wants the place to continue to provide “performing arts” as its purpose was envisioned when it first opened in 1971. If he adds any more gold leaf to the White House, they’ll have to jack the place up and drill holes for new concrete piers to keep it from subsiding into the land-filled coastal floodplain that it was built on.

I swore to myself at one point in my career that I would never write anything with the word “dystopian” in it, but that pledge is out the fucking window with this column. This country has dumbed-down and red-necked itself into a level of promiscuous depravity and dishonor that would have been unimaginable to my own parents and grandparents, not to mention my ancestors who were not only present at the country’s founding 250 years ago but helped to provide something that now seems almost quaint: moral principles.

We have work to do. That’s the best I can say. We still have enough good, thinking, reasonable people that we can get that work done. We are not yet doomed, but a lot of our fellow Americans want our dream of self-government to fail, and they’re coming close to making that happen. Our love of this country can save us, but we’d better get busy spreading it around.