Dear Bum Diary,
LAST UPDATED:
04.22.2025
By Christopher Buchhanan
It is well past midnight in the California desert...
If you care enough to brave the sun’s brief neglect, the stars are set in prime view. Leashed backyard hound dogs blow their lungs at every interruption to the hushed evenness, but otherwise the whole place remains dead quiet. You can never tell if the Canine-Alarm System’s response has been caused by the passing sight of a possum or a burglar testing the waters: The pleas for justice are just as loud and ferocious in both cases.
I’ve always found that the loudest barkers—not only dogs but rowdy noisemakers in general—are most often lackluster at voicing the genuine concern of the masses… Only a fool would leave a three-star review on a product: Any three-star product you’ve ever seen is more likely a consequence of various one and five-star reviews that came together for a neat average than an authentic statistical outcome. An individual who received a product of true three-star material will move on in silent complacence, leaving the review to be handled by the adorers and detesters with the authority of overconfidence that is necessary for that type of public expression.
We rarely have the chance to consider the plight of the more subdued personalities; the dogs allowed inside come dark because of their nighttime docility. Big media lays out very clear requisites for an interviewee: They must be opinionated and ballsy enough to subject their words to editorial scrutiny, willing to have their name tied to a brief moment of frustration or joy that led them to speak with a word crook in the first place. Sometimes they aren’t fully understood, or are too worked up to understand what they think for it to come out with any real reason or logic—it is pure, unadulterated emotion. That is where you get your one and five-star subjects: Crybabies, racist vultures, pseudointellectual liberals and madmen obsessed with crisis actors compose not only a majority of the interviewees, but the journalists too.
Just today, I read a Washington Post and Fox News piece about the same subject that used the same group of people to illustrate two different viewpoints of the Republican party: “Many” Republicans' faith in the Trump administration in his first 100 days is, apparently, a simultaneously grave and magnificent display of presidential prowess. I have to say, living such a contradiction would make Trump a mystical president, at least.
Liz Peek, a finance and politics opinionite, says this of the composite Republican mood as of Day 99: “They will also applaud those promises that Trump is quickly moving to fulfill: expanding oil and gas production, rolling back destructive environmental regulations, eliminating offensive race and gender curriculums in schools, preventing girls from having to compete in sports with biological males and drastically reducing the flow of people entering our country illegally.”
Aaron Blake, a square political analyst from WaPo, sang a much different tune: “While Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (hereafter known as Republican-leaning voters) still overwhelmingly back him — and few express regret for their votes — many of them say Trump is going too far. And that might actually undersell how many truly feel this way.”
So, which is it? Are Republicans jumping for joy over the representatives' expanded executive powers? Or are they so goddamned fearful of social ostracization that they have finally surrendered their preciously-guarded First Amendment rights? Who the hell knows?… I know for good and certain that Peek and Blake don’t.
Our country has sadly developed a natural tolerance to the frenzied newscycle of Donald Trump and his administration. Fattened-up claims about illegals, nasty lies, cheeks turned toward macho-authoritarian leaders for smooches and other general whorishness are regular and recurring facts of a Trumpian reign. The press had a smooth transition into the renewed age, considering most of ol’ Joe’s tenure was spent performing groundbreaking archaeological experiments on the fossil president and pontificating over Don’s potential post Jan. 6. “The playbook from Trump's last administration hasn’t changed except in its speed and effectiveness,” is a quote so well familiar to front pages that I feel I wasted life-force repeating it.
In most instances, I refrain from play-by-play commentary on the Trump administration (I do enough of that at work) until the dust settles into small pores of sanity and a discussion can finally be had about the actual effects of the endless promises Trump makes. Thankfully, his cabinet dropped the ball early when their method of “move fast and break things”—a strategy torn from Mark Zuckerburg’s shabby letter to investors for Facebook in 2012 that prioritized speedy experimentation—was openly discussed as their political game this time around. I could wait out the madness with a few cigarettes and the patience of a contract killer.
130 Executive Orders later, it is undeniable that Trump has succeeded in disrupting the social and economic order of things. The outspoken leftist lunatics haven’t had much stake in deciding whether Abrego-Garcia gets out of prison, or if outdated tariff practices are allowed to go on, or if foreign students are allowed to become doctors and voice their grievances, or if the Supreme Court is working as intended, no matter how worked up they got. The question of fascism, or at least dangerously nationalistic isolationism, is suspended by a thin rope over every one of these acts...
The news makes everything seem so terribly grim. It is so sensationally packaged and distributed that you hear very little about how student visas were reissued, how the tariffs only accrued a half-day of profits before they were paused and tweaked for particular industries, or how the Supreme and lower courts didn’t even let the orders breathe before freezing them. Only about 90% of the orders signed have gone into effect! Failure all around. But this is not to say that Trump has not upended the roots of the American way—he surely has, and will be poked in the ribs with forks by Archangel Washington in the presidential afterlife for his sins—but playing the “Will they, won’t they” game in the paper is what I think really moves the gears of this administration.
Trump’s promises are grandiose and juicy enough for corporate media—of which I am a lackey servant—to latch onto like the dirty leeches we are; Trump says he will deport “homegrown” criminals as soon as next week. Far-out moves like this do seem to be Trump’s ideal Final Solution, but are hardly reflective of our political realities, currently. I say currently because I can’t comprehend madness gone further than this, but then again, I couldn’t have imagined we’d come as far as we have… Figuring out which is true has been one of those impossible problems. Trump is a bastard to cover.
The morning sun has painted the overcast sky a pale yellow color. The dogs have stopped their midnight yelping and finally retired, but there goes the songbirds to take their place. The relentless suspicion of darkness will soon settle in again: Another chance to air out those goddamned bugging frustrations. However, I think we should listen a little more closely during the day, so that in between the endless bustle we might hear what those three-star ratings and corrected pieces are really about…