Clowns, Clowns Everywhere

And not a laugh to be found

I wish I could laugh. Sadly, our entire political menagerie are not jesters nor fools.

Court jesters were meant to be entertaining and occasionally funny. A true court jester is a comic actor who often entertains by poking fun at the important people who keep them from taking themselves too seriously.

Court jesters can speak freely without fear of punishment, although this is often a romantic distortion of historical reality. Shakespeare used jesters in his plays, recognizing the jester as often wiser than those who rule.

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Feste the jester is described as “wise enough to play the fool[12]

We do not have that problem. Jesters were also known as fools, but we don’t have any of those, either. We have to watch idiots who think they are being serious.

The closest we can get to humor is a poor rendition of The Three Stooges contending for Speaker of the House with the Republican Congressional delegation playing The Keystone Kops.

Unfortunately, slapstick comedy is humorous only if none of the idiots get hurt. None of the Republican delegation can even slip on a banana peel without evoking disgust; they intend to destroy the planet.

Not funny.

Which brings us to the current Trump clown show. We can differentiate Trump as a buffoon among jesters and fools.

. . . a buffoon is someone who provides amusement through inappropriate appearance or behavior. Originally, the term was used to describe a ridiculous but amusing person. The term is now frequently used in a derogatory sense to describe someone considered foolish, or someone displaying inappropriately vulgar, bumbling, or ridiculous behavior, which is a source of general amusement. The term originates from the old Italian “buffare”, meaning to puff out one’s cheeks[31], . . . . Having swelled their cheeks, they would slap them to expel the air and produce a noise that amused the spectators.[32]

I’ve included the above as it perfectly describes Trump and his MAGA buffoonettes, particularly now that the noose is tightening around the chief buffoon’s neck.

But none of this has any humor.

I wish I could feel pity for these people who have so successfully made buffoonettes of themselves, but there is no humanity or redeeming social virtue. Lousy porn is better than this.

This is truly a sign of cultural collapse, as we cannot even laugh at the idiots who are killing us. Even the Russians could laugh at Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. And just to be fair, even Joe Biden can do amazingly good things and make them look like a bad joke. No humor there, either.

In the autumn of the hottest year on record at the end of a record three-year run that just started, why do we have to look at idiots, none of whom are discussing anything important? The Climate Disaster can no longer be ignored, yet these idiots ignore it.

The complete lack of humor in our world seems permanent. There was a time that I can remember when the political discussion of building a wall to close the Mexican border was a joke. Now Biden is talking about it.

The Climate Disaster has already driven millions into refugee status, and the disasters have just begun. With global temperatures rising, where are the residents of areas that are being lost to human habitability going to go?

No, you will not bus them to cities you don’t like. Soon, there will be too many to fit in buses. Then what?

We have eight billion people, with at least four million living in areas doomed to become uninhabitable. This is a problem beyond the ability of complete idiots, particularly fascist idiots, to solve.

We have idiots advocating the military invasion of Mexico to kill the crime groups, making the US and Mexico border regions an unmanageable warlord zone.

The Republican candidates for president, The New York Times reports, have united around a common solution for the scourge of fentanyl and other drugs coming across the border: invading Mexico. Almost to a person, they are calling for sending our armed forces — chiefly, special operations troops — into Mexico “to annihilate the Mexican drug cartels,” as Vivek Ramaswamy recently put it. Source

That is so stupid that it is hard to comprehend. Well, maybe not.

But what caused that lawless zone? The Mexican government has been working to sue US gun makers for the unlimited flow of military weapons from America. Mexico argued that an average of 597,000 guns are trafficked into their country from ours every year.1

Harold Meyerson of American Prospect has an answer. Mexico would allow the US military into Mexico to eliminate the cartels, and the US would allow the Mexican military into the US to blow up the gun factories.2 Now that is a win-win; we would all be better off.

There is a certain very dark humor in that proposal.

It still doesn’t do anything that is not juvenile about our planetary climate disaster and the hundreds of millions of refugees that we will see increasing each year that must be handled. Folks, this is not an option. It must be done.

Just to end on a positive note, those refugees will destroy the nation-state system with its borders and antic paradigm anyway. Why not plan the change instead of waiting for it to happen?

Maybe those who are left would be able to laugh again.

1 https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=6150ccc6069bea6b5716254057a194ef.2365&s=0201bc7f7d024b5658cf3bad077ad702

2 Ibid