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Pardon me?
No, no, I don't actually need a pardon. I wasn't ransacking Nancy Pelosi's office on January 6, 2021, or raging through the Capitol, or even in a hotel in Virginia awaiting a signal from militia leaders to bring weaponry to the scene. I'm serious, no pardons for me, not even in 2024 if our Wendy's burger of a former president gets" well, maybe not reelected but, with the help of his Republican cult, reelects himself in his own pandemic fashion (and to hell with the rest of us).
I was hoping instead that you'd pardon me for sending you into our future today, as imagined by TomDispatch regular John Feffer, the author of the thrillingly dystopian novels in Dispatch Books' Splinterlands trilogy. I don't want to be there myself and only hope that former Labor Secretary Robert Reich might be right that Donald Trump, or rather his recent wild antics extended into an unending future, could actually help the Democrats win the 2022 elections (despite their exceedingly poor polling right now) and then pull a coup not on us, but on himself, in 2024 by splitting the Republican Party in some wild fashion. Otherwise" sigh" pardon me but we could be living in Feffer's all-too-devastating future three years from now, one in which he would never be allowed to write an even more dystopian novel about this ever more bizarre, all-American world of ours. Tom
The Terrifying World of 2025
The Coming MAGA Cultural Revolution?
By John Feffer
I've just wrapped up my shift at BurgerBoy and I don't have much time before the weekly self-criticism session at town hall. This hour with my diary is precious, especially when I have to make a big decision. Writing used to be my job, but it's so much more difficult after eight straight hours on my feet. It's been more than a year since the disastrous 2024 election and I can't overestimate how much I miss my old life.
But I shouldn't complain. Some of my former colleagues from the newspaper have it so much worse. My editor, for instance, is picking tomatoes not far from here under the hot Florida sun, which isn't easy for a 45-year-old with bad knees. One of our former White House pool reporters is at a nearby chicken-processing plant. The few times we've met for a cup of coffee, I can't bear to look at her hands.
If I had a choice, I wouldn't be slinging burgers and dumping shoestring potatoes into a fryer 55 hours a week, breathing in that oil-clogged air and barely keeping up with the lunchtime rush. But it's not as physically demanding as working in the fields or chopping up chickens on a frigid factory floor.
We've been at these jobs for six months, which is how long the new Civilian Conservation Corps a name borrowed from President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal but with none of the social-democratic content has been up and running. At the newspaper, we all thought the new president was joking when he promised to revive the old Biden administration idea of a youth climate corps. Of course, he did so with a grim focus all his own and a new slogan that "everyone has to pitch in to make America great again!"
Left unsaid was the administration's plan to deport millions of undocumented workers and plunge the country into a desperate labor crisis. What's more, the president blocked all new immigrants from what he called "shithole countries" and somehow expected incoming Scandinavians to fill the vacuum, though Swedes and Norwegians were clearly uninterested in moving to America en masse to cut lawns and build skyscrapers at non-Scandinavian wages.
So, that left us, the former "expert class," newly unemployed, to do the work.
"We're going to send those reporters and other freeloaders down to the countryside to get a real education," the president insisted when he signed the Civilian Conservation Corps into law. "This is the first step in really draining the swamp."
After a lifetime dedicated to exposing the corruption, legislative double-dealing, and bureaucratic insanities of Washington, my journalistic colleagues and I never thought of ourselves as actual inhabitants of the swamp. We were the zoologists. We developed the taxonomies and performed the autopsies. So, we dutifully reported on the president's speech, never thinking it applied to us.
It's not as if we missed the early warning signs of this war on expertise: the reporters attacked during campaign rallies, the death threats against public health officials, the storming of school-board meetings. It's just that we didn't expect those rabid but scattered incidents to morph into an official presidential initiative after the 2024 elections.
On his first day in office, the president signaled his new policy by authorizing a memorial on the Capitol grounds to the "patriots" of January 6th and commissioning a statue of the QAnon shaman for the Rotunda. He then appointed people to his cabinet who not only lacked the expertise to manage their departments but were singularly devoted to destroying the bureaucracies beneath them, not to speak of the country itself. He put militia leaders in key Defense Department roles and similarly filled the courts with extremists more suited to playing reality-show judges than real life ones. In all of this, the president has been aided by a new crop of his very own legislators, men and women who know nothing about Congress and actively flouted its rules and traditions even as they made the MAGA caucus the dominant voting bloc.
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