Dear Bum Diary,

LAST UPDATED:
FEBRUARY 23RD
By Christopher Buchanan

There was an exhausted look about Los Angeles this past week, with pallor skies and uninspired winds. The package of days was equally dull. The only notable thing that happened to me was when I was attacked both physically and mentally by a mysterious vermin with some serious fervor. A vengeful millipede seems to have gotten tangled crawling around my brain, and in his confused rage burrowed deep in the slimy cavity that controls my emotions, and is making a fool of me with his parasitic fits. It’s the only logical explanation for my recent mean streak...

Not to worry. Next week is the time to get the millipede removed once and for all, but medical intervention is all too necessary in my case. I’ll probably need a heavy pharmaceutical drug or a mystical ground-up plant from somewhere deep in a South American rainforest… I’ve heard good things about ketamine treatments, too.

The two most prominent guinea pigs of the ketamine experiment aren’t good evidence for the magic drug's effectiveness, though. They’ve got the worst case of parasitic brain worms our scientists have ever had the chance to study. We should probably shelf this antidote and save some for the horses…

Donald Trump made grand promises on his campaign run… and I’ll be the first to admit that I hardly believed any of the mad pep rally ravings, even after the assassination attempt. I figured he was leveraging his big mouth for the new, desensitized voter. One I did believe, however, was that he would make good on his promise to end the Ukraine war… Putin and Trump have been real buddy-buddy ever since they were equally persecuted over voter fraud claims back during Trump’s first go at the presidency.

I’ve always thought that in some other life, the two leaders could’ve been lovers; their mutual admiration

for each other and to-hell-with-everyone attitudes would make for an intriguing dynamic… It was only natural that Trump made heavy concessions that weren’t his to make so he could please the Kremlin. You would think Trump could empathize with Zelenskyy – a former entertainer turned strongarm politician – but Kyiv’s leader just doesn’t seem to have The Right Stuff. The Right Stuff by journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe was my read this week, and he talked a lot about the unspoken Right Stuff among early astronauts and test pilots: an almost invisible, unquestionably masculine mental and physical quality of immortal confidence, courage and machismo in the face of life-threatening danger.

As far as Trump knows, he, Putin and a select few others bear The Right Stuff, and Zelenskyy, in all his charms, just doesn’t fit that mold of manhood. He’s a funnyman! Ukrainian Urkel… A character that just doesn’t jive with the Big Man because he refuses to fight back; reliance is weakness, in Trump’s eyes. That’s why he thinks Putin has The Right Stuff and hardly anyone else – Putin wakes up to a fight everyday, and I think to some extent, Trump wants to embody that fighting spirit. Ukraine can only hope Zelensky can shape up and finagle his way into the holy cult of the Right Stuff before Crimea is seized for good.

Our head guy also dumped the United Nations last week, albeit in a very unofficial manner. He’s almost like that boyfriend who doesn’t want to leave, but rather “take a break,” so he can taste some other nectar somewhere else. That place is Russia, and Trump is doing somersaults to appease Putin’s vendetta against the global get-together. Granted, the U.S. does contribute disproportionately to the UN relief budget, at 3.4 percent of our budget, but given our multi-trillion dollar military spending, I think we can spare some significant scraps… When Claudia Sheinbaum launches a full-scale attack at our southern border to take the blessed Gulf back for Mexico, who will be there to protect us?

Reporting from Southern California, near that border, deportation is ramping up by the day. The intention of the program, at least on the surface, was to rid our country of mean criminal masterminds from lands close to the equator. Little did some know, but our president’s definition of criminal is at best, loosey-goosey. Criminality was never the case: volunteers, longtime community members and even children are being ousted from their homes with little due process.

I also saw something from the official White House Instagram account this week that made the millipede scratch quite fiercely at my wits. I was nearly sick at the sight of non-citizens shamefully forced into planes, decorated with wicked prisonchain like dogs… The caption? ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight. And what better to immediately follow this post than a blaring, unflattering red portrait of Trump in an old English crown – likely AI – with the caption LONG LIVE THE KING!

Cruelty has been sown deep into our great land as of late… A pervasive, casual kind of cruelty that’s laughed off as the unusual, morbid humor of the cynical nonconformist; a kind that’s more a consequence of out-of-tune thinking than cruelty for the sick sake of it, but nonetheless cruel.

Albeit, there has never been a time in our short, fantastic history where cruelty was not a matter of cold, hard fact. The root was rotten the moment a miserable European seed fell on the stretching red lands of America and grew terrible branches that stretched from the old East to the far, new West. No Proud Boy or Neo-Nazi or Communist Freak or Racist Southern Separatist Devil or Liberal Gentrifier would tell you otherwise, though they likely would describe the aforementioned fact in very different terms.

It seemed, at least before very recently, there was a shared sense of knowing that the worst of our ugliness was far behind us: a knowing that our land was born cruel, but that we had seen the worst of it and would never be that cruel again, which is significant of progress, on some level or another. Even the famously individualistic, hardly sympathetic conservative sect of the 2000s thought the country was already dandy and unified enough to accommodate men of all colors and creeds, and seemed equally afraid to return to a time when America was that relentlessly brutish and wicked – to how we were before. A consensus had been reached that America’s horrific past of slaving, murdering and giving major shit to everyone who didn’t have the devastating idea to set up camp on top of the Native with the help of precious gunpowder, was a past we would never repeat.

That consensus, though, has experienced a total structural failure since the great, terrible shift of late January. It should have been easy to predict, given the fiasco a few Januaries years ago at the Capitol, but the not-so-silent majority came out swinging with fury this time around. I imagine that while Biden babbled four years away, there were underground operations and conspiratory think-tanks that rejected mass media's pleas for sanity and did the real work it takes to win an election the way they did. And I don't mean clandestine gatherings between suits and glasses, I’m talking sixty feet under the dirty earth in a bunker. Sheer, genuine manpower from a group of strange purple beavers living deep within the earth’s crust with a dam protecting them at all sides from the insane weight of the ocean.

Now, it is not uncommon to see some of our government officials subtly echoing the more unappealing parts of our collective past, trying less and less to deny their identification with shady historical dealings. Elon Musk, second in command, is on an app that he owns with 200 million followers trashing Muslim immigrants in Europe, reposting dog whistles so loud we can all hear them and polling his lousy community with questions: Should all federal employees be required to send a short email with some basic bullet points about what they accomplished last week?... He loved Big Brother.

A convenient conclusion for this development would be that Man has turned a lame, blind eye toward his brethren’s suffering out of a new, holier kind of self-interest: To hell with charity… Those commercials with the panhandling homeless dogs and sad little boys don’t work on us anymore. We are the enlightened, silent majority. I’m cashing my sweet check for a more heavenly bliss – I want a condo with a view to dig out all the rowdiness!

It’s a vindicating time to be on the right side of the aisle, it seems. Democrats doubtlessly failed a large portion of the country in exchange for a false moral high ground this last term. By many metrics, prices did go up, as did crime, illegal immigration and all the other points of grief for Republicans. Trump devised a simple enemy to bear all this grief just like all seedy politicians before him; the other. There is no need to take good Christian care of this subsection of society, because the big man said they were already too far gone. The delusion dilemma many Republicans face is simple: destroy this enemy, or watch your home be destroyed by that enemy.

Frustration has a way of coming back around in other disguises. After a few weeks of crippled inactivity, the Democrat front seems to finally be forming again. Widespread protest, a pretty strong show of force by blue state governments and an evolving online campaign strategy are all contributing to a rejuvenated party that may just have The Right Stuff. That’s not to say their platforms are any less shaky, but I predict they won’t bring a knife to the midterm gunfight this time around.

Maybe even after I let scientists prod at my malicious brain-bugs, the peculiar millipede will come and afflict me with its meanness again. This is the natural cycle of things, I suppose. I just hope that its grip is a little less tight next time around, now that I know my enemy well. Inhumanity on the scale we’ve seen lately is likely to attract more brain-eating pests, so we’d better train to kill.

Will this frustrated cruelty be the end of us? Or is it the only thing that keeps this machine moving?

Christopher Buchanan