Games called

I want to return to my Sportsball World. I really do.

 

It is my stock in trade, my area of presumed expertise, the assembly line where I earned a mostly joyous dollar writing about high school kids and college kids and the assorted triumphs and outrages of assorted minor characters on the stage of the World At Large.

 

And so this morning I want to write about What The NBA Will Look Like When It Starts Up Again. I want to write about whether or not baseball will happen this summer. I want to write about how NBA commissioner Adam Silver looks more like Nosferatu every day.

 

But then I scan my news feed, and I see what's happening in America, and I see the spiraling descent of the President of the United States into Sieg Heil lunacy. And Sportsball matters seem as silly as kittens on ether.

 

And so once more today the kittens on ether get put aside, as Sportsball World itself has been put aside by the Bastard Plague.

 

I will write instead about an America I no longer recognize.

 

I will write instead about an America in pain to whom its leaders offer nothing but more pain.

 

I will write about a Mad King whose solution to everything is bluster and threat and schoolyard taunts, and political theater so cheap and obvious only those he plays for fools fail to see it as such.

 

While militarized law enforcement used tear gas and rubber bullets to drive back Americans in pain yesterday, the Mad King stood in front of a church and held up a prop Bible, then proceeded to prove he is wholly unfamiliar with its contents. He offered no comfort or understanding, only threats. He said he was the law-and-order President, and he'd send in the military if the Americans in pain didn't quit hollering about all this inequality business.

 

America needed a president. Instead he gave it Training Wheels Mussolini -- who will have his law-and-order, by God, if he has to shoot every last one of us to get it.

 

It was tantamount to declaring war on his own people, and history tells us he will be the worse for it. The Brits tried the police state thing here 250 years ago. It didn't turn out so well for them.

 

But the Mad King, no student of history, consistently chooses dead ends that are well-trodden. And again he has done so.

 

That he can't legally "send in the military" because it violates the Posse Comitatus Act doesn't matter to him. What is legal -- and more to the point what is proper and proportional -- hasn't mattered to him since he took the oath 40 months ago. Why would it now, with his presidency almost literally going up in flames?

 

Some with a firmer grasp of history have said the Mad King is using the civil unrest spreading across the country as his Reichstag fire moment, scapegoating radicals as Hitler did to consolidate his power. If so, it is almost certainly not conscious on his part. It is merely the overarching instinct for self-preservation that has informed everything in his immoral and utterly self-absorbed life.

 

The Mad King is about the Mad King. America is down the list a ways.

 

I used to think America was immune to Mad Kings. I used to think a pure demagogue would never gain purchase on political power here, because Americans would see through him. I used to think we would never, in America, see a lone student standing in front of a line tanks, ala Tiananmen Square.

 

Now I could see it happening tomorrow.

 

Know what else I used to think?

 

I used to think there would be an election in November.

 

Now I'm not so sure. Because clearly there is nothing the Mad King will not do to save himself. 

 

He says, half-truth-edly, it's radical left-wing terrorists who are burning down the country. But you know what?

 

Donald J. Trump beat them to it.