2023 and Me

The persistence of Trump Derangement Syndrome and its shadow opposite made for an ugly, stupid, loveless year.

For most of my adult life, I never understood why people “retired.” Without the rush of real work, what was there to incarnation, especially if you’d renounced reproduction? Yet, 2023 was the year when I stopped pretending I was a worker of the world, let alone someone who could meaningfully, if manically, contribute to someone else’s dream.

People still sought me out. I was invited to join a successful DC lobbying concern. It was assumed that as a senior policy advisor and communications director for a high-ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, I would be a natural at DC’s oldest sport. But I couldn’t square my Nebraska principles of fiscal prudence and limited government with the lobbyist’s prime directive of getting the government to spend more. The counter-argument was that the Leviathan would waste taxpayer loot on somebody’s clients, why not yours? But that was just profiting from the existential threat, not resolving it.

For a while, I thought I’d return to being an Uber driver or high school debate coach, or, heck, run for higher office against the usual cavalcade of unqualified, uninspiring, unevolved pretenders. In the end, I returned to what I have done profusely, if imperfectly, since age 14 when I began penning long futile letters begging a family member to get sober.

My platform for the Crotty Farm Report is now Substack, which, unlike my previous gig at Forbes, does not amplify my posts or market them. It would be best, in this age of hyper-specialization, if I found an esoteric niche for my disquisitions, like becoming an expert on kimchee, vegan donuts, or sand (the world is allegedly found in a grain of the stuff), or the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose majestic 100 Years of Solitude––which I recently discussed at St. John’s College Winter Classics––is one of the must-read novels of the past 100 years. But I still have enough Whitman, if not exactly Hegel, in me to believe that I “contain multitudes” and can spit out chunks of wisdom across a panoply of disciplines. In an age of hyper-specialists, I am that rare and dying romantic––The Generalist!

One day my gaze could turn to an underappreciated film. The next day it could be a road trip. Today it’s that particular strain of mass hysteria that’s so deeply troubled quotidian life in 2023 that it classifies as a bona fide disorder: Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The more vociferously you deny it, the more likely you have it.

If I were to novelize this pernicious malady, Marquez-style, it would be entitled Love in the Time of TDS. Except this affliction repels love like it repels logic and due process. It has all the replication speed of COVID or AIDS, but with an added mutation that can only be construed as mental rabies. Sadly, in 2023, the crippling TDS epidemic showed no signs of abating––aiding and abetting bad art, abusive media, and collective anomie.

Since 2016, when I started serving the effective and unjustly pilloried, if recently redeemed, Ranking Member of the House, Jeff Fortenberry, I was routinely assailed for the mean Tweets by the Left’s designated bogeyman, Donald J. Trump––as if I was personally responsible!––though the impressive policy actions of our office had only a tenuous connection to the actions of the White House, let alone the late night bathroom posts of the mercurial Commander in Chief. Genuine tyrants—Vladimir Putin, the leaders of ISIS and Hamas, the mullahs in Tehran, the dictators in Caracas, Havana, and Pyongyang––earned no such opprobrium. Confronted with the violence, looting, and terror of AntiFa and BLM––not to mention the daily carnage on our streets and at our cartel-dominated border––the TDS sufferer shrugged.

Almost everywhere I turned for a respite from the Trump Derangement storm––in-laws, cousins, friends, classmates––I experienced nasty, shouting, threatening, foam-at-the-mouth TDS spewed back at me. Then there were the therapists, recovery groups, colleges, and universities, and in every possible cloister in which one could situate oneself––the disease found its way there too. There was no escape. No remorse. No apologies for bad behavior. Friendship, family, love, and community––which depend upon consistently applied standards of goodwill and decorum––were chucked out the window because that’s what the inner TDS voice commanded. In previous eras, sufferers of dangerous hysterical delirium were straitjacketed and shipped off to mental hospitals. In today’s world, TDS has so infected the psychiatric and mental health counseling professions that no objective help is possible.

I tried to online date out of the TDS madness, but the profiles were consumed by the same nutty typecasting: “No Trumpers! No Fascists!” As if the poster even remotely grasped what a genuine fascist was, let alone the grave real-world history behind the term. And forget the escapes of media, social media, books, and entertainment. They were infected by TDS too––not to mention its corollary, the racist, sexist Woke Mind Virus (WMV)––becoming conduits of further contamination.

If the original Invasions of the Body Snatchers were remade today, it would be focused on TDS, just as it was originally directed at anti-Communist hysteria. There is the same confirmation bias and groupthink, the same hyperbole driving further hysteria, the same Salem Witch Trial vengeance, and the same vile and violent Puritanical instincts that have driven outbursts of mass hysteria throughout American history. TDS is both a condition and a catechism, a sorting mechanism, and a power source.

Almost as bad as TDS in 2023 were the knee-jerk reactions to it. It’s as if the TDS Frankenstein birthed a Reverse TDS in which devotees of The Orange believed everything the former President proffered. While the 2020 presidential election was not entirely above board––Zuck Bucks, intel chief election interference, overturning of state election procedures without state legislative approval, ballot harvesting––Trump lost. Sorry, MAGA, but the fraud in the 2020 presidential election was de minimis; the enfeebled, corrupt, dishonest, and media-protected Joe Biden won, fair if un-square.

In fending off the sundry TDS-infused conspiracies directed at him––the Russia collusion hoax, the DNC-crafted Steele Dossier, the FISA court abuse, the paid censorship of Trump social media posts by State Department stooges, the collusion between Team Biden and former intel chiefs to deny the mere existence of Hunter’s laptop, the interminable and politicized impeachments and lawfare (only some of which was legit), the illegal spying, the lying–-Trump felt self-destructively compelled towards hyper-reactivity. Trump’s devotees fell in line no matter how preposterous his distortions were, allowing the TDS super-state to double down on its outsized abuses of power, as Trump bled moderate support.

It’s as if the whole country had been sorted into TDS pod people and Reverse TDS rebels, leaving a tiny coterie of uninfected Americans struggling to find camaraderie, sanity, and safety amidst the zombies. The continued persistence of Trump Derangement Syndrome and its inexorable opposite made for an ugly, stupid, lonely 2023. Like pleading with a drunk to stop, my calls to correct the lunacy have been futile. I am afraid that 2024 is going to be much worse, as the Resistance again throws billions behind its hypocritical “threat to democracy” canard. Wake me when it’s over.