Introduction

I'm starting this blog in January of 2025, shortly after the second election of that one guy. It's become fairly clear that we're not just in an era of odd politics; there is a real moral breakdown in American society.

When I say moral breakdown, I'm not talking about Puritan scolding about pre-marital sex or tobacco consumption. The morality of a person is the skeleton around which the flesh of their life and decisions are constructed. It's a framework, a trellis, that is at least a little bit there when you're born, that solidifies as you mature, and then serves as a guide as you age.

The American right wing and it's manifestation in the Republican party has been undergoing a decades long moral breakdown that has converted that skeleton, that moral framework, into a gel that flops around in a tide of propaganda like a dead jellyfish.

It's tempting to think about our current predicament just as a function of propaganda, right media vs. left media, the replacement of Katherine Graham with Chris Licht. It is much deeper than that. The Supreme Court has made a lawless king out of the President. A Fox News host nominee for Secretary of Defense claims standards are too low in the military. A group with chapters across the country was formed to tear every mention of gay parents out of schools while the same folks say, literally, "there is nothing we're going to do" about school shootings. Perfectly normal people will lament the loss of the low gas prices from the Trump administration, back when the economy was ground to a halt and cities were assembling temporary morgues.

The title of this blog* highlights one of the key aspects of this moral breakdown, the complete disregard for the meaning of words and documents. I've read enough of the New Testament to know what it means and Conservative Christian politics ain't it. There is no way of any kind to interpret the writings of the Founding Fathers to indicate that the President of the United States should not be subject to the law. In fact, very much the opposite. Masculinity is not whining about every grievance while looking for an alpha to suck up to and it never, ever was.

Truth, integrity, honesty, morality. All of these words have a real meaning no matter what Republicans and their wealthy donors have been trying to feed us for the last 40 years.

*I know it's lame that my literary references are limited to senior English, but that's really all I got.