I’m OK; America, Not So Much

My post-surgical status and that of the nation

I had the surgery. It was stressful and still hurts, but mostly in the expected manner. The prognosis is good.

Still, before superknee comes healingknee, a major drag and more importantly a slow drag. Life will be abnormal awhile. When the surgery team told me they’d see me in two weeks and then they might write me a back-to-work note, if appropriate, I thought, surely you jest — I bounced back from a pancreatectomy sooner than that!

I did not reckon (because, in my desperation for normalcy, I would not let myself reckon) on the effect of, reading from the record, an “intramedullary drill [used] to enter the distal femoral canal... carried out the distal femoral cut, sized the distal femur to the size listed above... then secured 2 drill holes for placement of the 4-in-1 cutting guide, secured that with 2 pins, and carried out the anterior, posterior, posterior chamfer, and anterior chamfer cuts respectively...”

Not to mention what happened when the surgical team “turned our attention to the tibia.” Nor the elevated soft tissue and skin flaps. Also I do not advise you look up “MCL pie crusting” if you expect ever to find yourself in my position.

I was asleep for all that, but now, over a week later, I still feel its effects. Also I recently overdid my exercise and was set back. The new pain is not terrible; what was terrible, a bit, was being stripped of that sweet childish feeling that I could always cheat a bit and win, like squeezing through concert crowds to the front of the stage. Not here and not now, I guess.

So please bear with the slow crawl back into position. I certainly missed you lovely people and your brilliant comments and crosstalk. Following the news last week without having a place to talk about it made me itchy, and hearing Tubby talk yet again about how the Iran Excursion was all but won was extra disorienting.

I mean how often do we get this…

…only to have it followed by a bunch of this:

I remember Kissinger saying Peace Is At Hand in Vietnam, well before the fact, and also other duplicitous diplomatic statements about our previous foreign wars of choice. (I understand this didn’t happen in WWII, which was more of a “blood, sweat, and tears” thing.) So give some credit to Trump, and to the Prestige Press that continually and credulously repeats his claims, for adhering to this norm, if not many others.

But Trump’s particular spin, as often, is to tell us not mainly about Peace but rather about Victory, which he claims for himself in grandiose terms; then the Iranians tell the world (the part of the world inclined to listen, that is, which for the most part does not include the U.S.) that he’s full of shit, and then Trump threatens to kill millions of people, and the cycle repeats.

This has happened several times in the course of this relatively short war. The Independent tallied 11 such pronouncements back on May 6, and since then people seem to have stopped counting or even paying attention.

But Trump’s Peace Is At Hand shtick differs from Kissinger’s, and others’, in three big ways: 1.) the apparent manipulation of betting markets by insiders for profits; 2.) his lurid braggadocio, which I assume he keeps up lest the headlines dwindle to “President says war won, again”; and 3.) the absolute predictability of the rinse-and-repeat cycle described above. In fact I don’t worry, as I write this on Sunday night, that my words will be mooted by a real Iran deal — not only because it’s unlikely but also because even if a deal were reached, we could count on Trump to fuck it up.

That’s inevitable because Trump’s goal isn’t peace or really any kind of resolution — it’s attention. Iran has been described as a distraction from the Epstein Files, but that doesn’t quite capture it. For one thing, it’s not as if people have forgotten the Epstein Files. In fact you’ve probably heard jokes about how the Epstein Files have turned out to be a distraction from Iran. But, really, each is a distraction from the other, just as his every stupid statement or social media post is a distraction from everything else.

The difference is most of his distractions are nothing but distractions. Is there any substance, for example, to an AI slop video of Trump tossing Stephen Colbert into a dumpster? The criminal conspiracy behind the Epstein Files, on the other hand, and the violence and disruption of the Iran War are meaningful events that are treated as distractions.

Because that’s all anything is for him: Everything from matters of life and death to memes is just another node in a network of attention-getting devices meant to keep everyone perpetually distracted.

If you wonder how that helps him when the price of everything keeps rising and everyone hates him, the answer is it doesn’t.

Those are real problems. He doesn’t have anything in his skill set that works on those.

That’s why an alarming percentage of people mistrust reports of assassination attempts against Trump. It’s not, as the thumbsuckers and headshakers suggest, that ours is a post-truth society. It’s that Trump himself has no relationship to the truth. People don’t wonder whether he plotted his own assassinations. They wonder what difference it would make if he did.

This leaves the country in a strange limbo. Trump could redirect some government money to voters or illegally suspend some of their taxes to win back their favor, but he’s so fond of stealing government money for himself and his stooges that he probably can’t bear to cut the rest of us in. (The public probably would see through it anyway and be ungrateful.)

Chances are we’ll skid into the midterms with many voters expecting him to rig them — though his regard for himself and contempt for his Republican vassals in Congress are both so outsized that he wouldn’t see the point. (Does anyone really expect a successful impeachment out of a Democratic wave election? He certainly doesn’t.)

This leaves Trump just there, not acknowledging the newly uncooperative Congress (just as he doesn’t acknowledge the current subservient one), continuing to violate civil liberties and the rule of law, pitch imbecilic excuses to the courts, and dish out distractions. In a world where other people and nations exist — that is, a world Trump doesn’t acknowledge and probably doesn’t think exists — this would probably be untenable. But if we imagined, back in January 2025, a situation like the one in which we now find ourselves, wouldn’t we have considered that untenable? Yet here we are.