Darknell

 I have been seeing video segments from all across trumpland of the slates of republican candidates all vying in upcoming primary elections.

It's hard not to invoke the cliché of the bar scene from Star Wars.

The first most unnerving thing - for me - has been how hard it has been to tell which one donnie has endorsed.

Endorsed or not, they all sound the same: they spew stupid shit mingled with fantasies of never-were bygone times and insert all that into a bullet-proof trumpian envelope of maliciously calculated hate.

And someone from among them, in every case, is going to win.

I don't mean win the primary; that's a given; I mean win the general election.

How do I know that?

I know that because I saw John Yang of The PBS Newshour interview a table-full of MAGAs in some brink-of-nowhere part of Ohio in that brink-of-nowhere's  premier salt of the earth diner.

The MAGAs were all about my age, really old, and they all had some kind of facial hair, and they all swore eternal allegiance to donnie.

And they seemed to be exceptionally stupid, which we have learned from J.D. Vance, the trump endorsed candidate for Senate in Ohio (perhaps a tactically astute choice: at least J.D. can read and write, he wrote Hillbilly Elegy) that "being stupid" is all an act; this apparently stupid Appalachian residue is really a cadre of latter-day descendants to the founding fathers. 

The interview proceeded.

I listened to what the Nuts of the Roundtable said.

To John Yang.

"That", I thought to myself, after hearing all of their thoughts "bodes ill for the rest of us".

It was a Tolkien moment.

I kept hoping to see Strider.

Lurking somewhere in some dark corner of that salt of the earth diner.

But all I saw was John Yang, looking crestfallen.

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I need something to hope for; but there is nothing.

To hope for.

 All is darkness; all is sadness; all is just super-anodized hatred.

As Pogo once said, "we have met the enemy and he is us".