The shut down won’t materially hurt the public, either, because the perps can’t allow that shit show to last, lest it put their own hides at risk. It was a pure act of dysfunction, okay, but how is that a surprise? Our government does nothing but rip us off with both hands when it is running.

Then there’s the goat’s nest of our Syrian tarbaby that a few deranged flacks still describe as policy. Once the U.S. had an objective. Dishonest, shameful, dirty, sure, but an objective: Assad must go. After Obama lied unctuously and bullshat his way through 11 sorry iterations of that cynical saga--spooning ISIS, Ahrar al-Sham, freelance killer Jihadis and Wahhabi assassins--the Russians, weary of his arrant incompetence, went all in and spiked the fantasy. Jabba the Trump ran his cost/benefit analysis, declared victory and bailed, whereat the Imperial Politburo explosively crapped itself.

But, again, how does this affect us hoi polloi? Is there a single conscious American outside the Nomenklatura for whom killing myriads of Syrians is, or ever has been, an appealing idea? Should it fill us with despair that we are going to stop murdering people wholesale in one small corner of our ever-expanding Middle Eastern Slaughter Fest? Is there some way that continuing the sick horror show redounds to our general national benefit?

All this is so deranged, so morally unmoored, so intellectually untethered that it compares favorably with the signature piece of airhead dingbattery that formed a meaty part of Trump’s MAGA pitch: his “Beautiful Wall!”

In a long history of queer, unworkable, crank American ideas floated up out of the dung soup at the bottom of the gene pool, this one takes the trophy. America is not a hog farm--not yet, anyway--though it does have many of the characteristics of an insane asylum. No rational soul, which excludes most of our electorate, could endorse as sane the fencing in of a country. Since the Sons of Heaven’s porous wonder and the Maginot Line’s useless bulwark against the Hun, the idea of boxing ones country has been a bad joke, and the idea that this is the answer rather than clear law and serious enforcement is too bughouse to entertain, so, it’s gratifying to see Trump hoist, bare raging face hanging out, with his own moron’s petard.

The upshot of all this sturm und drang that the press, the Dems, and the Commentariat are squeezing every drop of profit possible from is that we commoners are actually not any further into the Empire’s Iron Maiden this Christmas than we were before. Not from these alarms and eruptions. Of course, that’s not to say anything fundamental has changed in America.

We live in a classic, but adapted and evolved, fascist state, in which the whole force of government is devoted solely to the interests of Imperialist Capitalism. Behind that system, as deeply entrenched through its near absolute control of public information organs as dogmatic religion, towers the formidable military and police apparatus that, as always in absolutisms, is the blindly loyal and morally neutered enforcement arm of our tyranny.

Like so much of the deceptive character of Exceptionalist America, like our vicious, amoral roughhousing of most of the poor and vulnerable world, this incredibly effective system of control and discipline is calmly explained to us as being our nurturing and defending shield and refuge. In fact, it is our prison, and allowed to continue, in the end it will be our tomb.

Never mind. Not now. Merry Christmas, fellow inmates. Let your hearts be light. For a change, for a respite... Love what is close and dear to you. And work for the light. Let nothing you dismay.