2020 Be Gone |

Minneapolis and America 2020. Photo by Julio Cortez/AP

An unfond farewell to this relentless, exhausting, heartbreaking, God-awful year of grief and loss and fury, a year of helplessness and hopelessness mercifully strewn with rare moments of faith and promise. We will be rid of the monster and his mob of cretins, but Adam Schiff was appallingly prescient when, pleading with the Senate a year ago to impeach the motherfucker, he asked, “How much damage can Donald Trump do between now and the next election?” and answered, “A lot. A lot of damage.” After a year of “the Trump era on steroids,” even a Fox News poll ranked our impeached, delusional, criminal loser an unprecedentedly bad president who’s done little in four years but abuse, destroy, steal, play $150 million worth of golf, tell 25,000 lies – now 50 a day – and knowingly kill over 346,000 of us because he’s a sociopath who took a job he can’t do to get back at the black guy who dissed him. As to his heinous henchmen, British-Indian novelist Hari Kunzru bids persuasive adieus: To Bill Barr “you vast pompous pus-filled bladder of casuistry,” Don Jr. “you scabrous single-nostriled unloved elephant-murdering human wreckage,” Jared Kushner, “you vacuous dainty preening overpromoted nub of mediocrity, squeezed like an entitled smear of toothpaste into a silk suit bought with tear-stained dollars wrung out of (your) suffering tenants,” Stephen Miller, “you weeping pustule upon the social body, you dreg, you homunculus, you noxious slime felched from the gaping cavity of Jim Crow,“ and staffers “so eager to crunch your way in your shiny new work shoes over the bodies of the poor and powerless, I smite you and cast you out one by one.”

Proving one last time he deserves to be added to the loathsome pile is arrogant sycophant Mike Pompeo – “you bubble, you booby, you flatulent zero” – who marked the new year by declaring, “We’re so much safer today than four years ago” and said he’s going to “lay out the huge wins” for us – a breathtakingly clueless claim that prompted people to respond with “GIVE US A FUCKING BREAK,” indecorously bringing up Iran, Putin, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, neo-Nazis, cyber attacks, black people extrajudicially murdered, people jobless and starving, kids in cages “just waiting to become the next generation of people who hate the USA,” “Oh. AND THERES A FUCKING PANDEMIC SPREADING UNCHECKED” with almost 350,000 dead so “Go fuck yourself.” Also, “Mike! Thanks so much for reaching out! ICUs are full and we are sheltering in place without widespread access to the vaccine. They called the National Guard in to remove the bodies from county hospitals because there were too many! Happy New Year!” Her rage is common among us. In a letter to the editor of a small paper in Florida’s The Villages, Katie Schnessel notes to her Trumpian neighbors “our bewilderment at your descent into madness.” “Know that these scars aren’t going away anytime soon,” she writes. “We won’t be reaching out, and we won’t be mending fences…We’ve seen your truth laid bare, and we’re horrified.” Still, we look forward. The Washington Post asked readers to assess the year – exhausting, lost, chaotic, a year of challenges “drawn out like slow-motion car wrecks” – and asked for their hopes, which they miraculously still have: To “finally exhale,” to see renewed sanity, morality, belief in science, “a spirit of decency and kindness (as) powerful as any vaccine.” For now, we mourn the inestimable losses – John Lewis, John Prine, RBG, Breonna Taylor and the rest, the fires and hardships and pain – and look to the light.

“Our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible.”

W.S. Merwin, “To the New Year”

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