The Witness Chronicles, 4/12/25

A bit of light in the darkness

Apr 12, 2025

two person walking in the middle of tall trees — Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

Transcending Our Humanness: We Are Stardust, We Are Golden

A message that is lost in this place we find ourselves

Yeah, those are Joni Mitchell lyrics but they struck me tonight.

Are we more than this? I need to think so but they are really making it difficult to remember that. We are better than this. Far better. That feels like an important message we are not hearing but it is there and it has power. It is incredibly easy to focus on how bad things are.

And yes, they are pretty bad. We have a lunatic in the White House, something more and more Americans are realizing, waking up from our collective slumber, if only for moments. This guy just chopped my savings in half, wtf?

I know, nobody wants to talk about Biden. That ended very badly, the denouement of the old school Democrats. They failed at the end. But they did very well in the middle, passing major infrastructure bills, including an assurance of semiconductor dominance, probably the most important national security act in history.

And they left the strongest economy in decades. Which Trump has managed to totally trash in less than three months.

I’ll give Biden this, he understood that semiconductor dominance was critical and used his extensive political experience to somehow pass those bills and they were a huge big deal. But the party failed to sell this achievement and Biden started descending into age, something we all face. Though the timing was terrible.

But, in hindsight, we will see those bills as the accomplishments they are, even as vindictive Republicans try to tear it apart, not because it doesn’t benefit their districts but because it came from the other side. That was the beginning of the end of sense in American politics. Good things no longer counted.

That’s not us. We are far better than that. To get back we need to do one thing, be decent to each other, even if the other is not in agreement. We are humans together.

This is a bit different from my normal writing, which is focused on witnessing the events we are being subjected to every hour right now, the greatest display of collective insanity at the highest levels in our history. But there is a whole quiet story that has been unfolding throughout our existence, our essential goodness over time.

Evil does not prevail. We did not go back to the garden, we grew up, but the garden is still in all of us. Maybe it’s just sitting outside a dive bar smoking with a stranger and making small talk. That’s humanity.

These days we may wonder about the fate of that stranger. Are they homeless? Have they been deported? Are their families ok? That is compassion, the single most important human attribute, but one this administration has no use for. They are not golden and they are certainly not stardust, and I question where their humanity went, when did they abandon it, and how do they live with themselves?

Historians may figure that out but I’m past that. The Trump loyalists are lost souls and good riddance when that catches up to them. They sold their souls long ago. There is always forgiveness, and that may be their deliverance, if they want it.

That is the fifty thousand dollar question.

Changing direction, the concessions have begun with Trump excepting iPhones and other electronics from his insane Chinese tariffs, a major gift to various tech billionaires who have donated millions to him. Quid pro quo.

Anyone who is paying attention knows by now that the entire tariff scheme is nothing more than a way of extorting favors from foreign governments, favors which directly benefit Donald Trump. Favors which, by the way, do not help any of the flunkies around him, who apparently do not get that they are also being scammed.

Take Treasury Secretary Bessent who has been the point man for explaining the unexplainable about this entire tariff scam. Visibly uncomfortable, and obviously lying, he says things we, and he, know are untrue, while knowing he has already ruined any reputation he might have had. Why?

We have had enough of Trump to know he discards people when he has used them up or they dare to push back. And those discards are damaged goods, never to be considered respectable again. That is the price of trading your conscience for a glimpse of power.

That tendency has always been the flaw in American capitalism, a fatal flaw for many. Too many writers have used the emperor’s new clothes metaphor lately, but for good reason. No one can tell Trump anything, or so we thought. But this weekm when a handful of billionaire business executives brutally criticized the man over the tariffs, he caved in immediately.

This was a lesson the Republican Party seems unable to learn, that the tyrant they unleashed is a weakling who cannot take a punch. Yes he defiantly raised a fist after being clipped by a bullet, a motion that may have won him his second term, but a shot from a banking executive (or two) changed his entire economic policy.

This weekend, hopeful liberals are raising the specter of impeachment as a way out of this. There are two things about this which are wrong. First, it will never happen with a Congress that lays down before a dumb fanatic like Mike Johnson, over and over again. Second, that would make JD Vance President and that would be a disaster. The man is a true zealot, the dangerous kind, and dumb as a stick, despite his Princeton pedigree.

The good news in that scenario is that Vance is extremely unpopular and utterly lacking in any shred of charisma or character.

I started this diatribe celebrating our innate goodness with Joni Mitchell’s lyrics as inspiration. But then reality intruded as I learned that Trump had started making concessions to the Chinese, who were smart to stand firm against his bullying. But I still hold that we are decent as a whole and not represented by Trump and the children around him in the White House.

Let’s hang onto that belief. We will get through this. After all, we are stardust…

The Witness Chronicles, politics decoded

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