Dispatches From The Bunker: Rome has Fallen and the Visigoths are Running The Show

I can only assume there is - or shortly will be - a Trump family brand of coffins to sell to rubes and sycophants.

For the price he'll charge you might expect them to be made of something like mahogany or walnut but after your loved ones are dead and the National Guardsmen in hazmat suits are trying to place their corpses into a lime coated pit with thousands of others, it'll turn out to be made of that cheap backboard IKEA puts on their Billy bookcases, snap apart, and splut. Down goes some plastic-wrapped granny into a mass grave with all the dignity and grace of the office of President of the United States.

I mean, really, what in the good God damn is going on?

For a newshound like me who has been stocking up on nonperishable goods since January, the last month has been like watching a line of people playing chicken with a runaway freight train. Each person thinks they will jump out of the way in nick of time. Every single one of them fails.

And yet, every one of them sees the idiot ahead of them fail but thinks "Ahh, but that won't happen to me!" and when you ask them why, they reply "because I'll jump out of the way in time!" One could almost admire the audacity if the body count was theirs alone, and if Donald Trump didn't seem so eager to push the United States right back on to the tracks for reasons that escape even the most skilled shitbag whisperers. Fun and malice, I guess.

We are a species of morons, by and large. Dumb lumbering brutes with no effective sense of self preservation who would be perfectly content jump into a woodchipper if someone promised us a free soda because, Jesus, that sounds so much easier than doing something hard.

Nobody has truly been able to act in time, except maybe Iceland. Even here in Canada we aren't as smart as we love to say we are and for all of our pleas from smart experts and officials stressing the need to stay the hell apart and self-isolate we are still a nation with more than enough Boomer snowbirds who think all of this shit just happens to other people (like Natives or Mexicans) to overwhelm even the most robust of industrialized healthcare systems.

Watching a parade of brain-dead administration officials, conservative hacks, and Republican leaders talking up how noble it would be for the elderly to sacrifice themselves in a vain attempt to stem the hemorrhaging stock market and how 2% of a country of 320 million people isn't that much to ask to have a shot at reelection is total mind fuck. I've spent the last 48 hours wondering if I woke up in a parallel dimension where the only religion is a post-apocalyptic suicidal death cult, and everyone wears fetish gear and eats live babies. Nevermind that when the US goes continues on it's worse-than-Italy trajectory the fatality rate will be more like 10%, and not just among the olds. It's an invitation for the country to light itself on fire.

These are the same goons who used to try to scare Americans away from Obamacare reforms by claiming the healthcare systems in the rest of the civilized world had nefarious death panels. Boy golly, wait until next week when these fuckers get to see what battlefield triage looks like.

Any country that could avoid the deaths of more people than all of their wars combined 23 times over by just standing slightly further apart for a few months but can't even be assed to try that for more than a few days isn't truly meant for this world, and while personally I wouldn't have believed people would stand by a President who is fine killing 32 million of them out of a frothy combination of ego and dementia, I wouldn't have voted for him in the first place.

Apparently I'm supposed to be putting together a decent End of Days soundtrack, so here's your entry for today:

Did someone give you something to help you ease the pain?
Like the liquor in the bottle, we watched you slip away
And I feel as if I know you through the bars of a song
Always surrounded, but alone

But no goodbyes, you'll always be Miss America
We watched you fly but nothing's free, Miss America
And as you fall apart we just call it art
Was it so hard to breathe?

Wash your mangey hands you goddamn beasts.

Dispatches From The Bunker: Continuity of Operations

The publisher wishes to inform you that, due to inactivity on the author's part and the need to consolidate bandwidth in the face of ongoing global developments, this space was scheduled to be deactivated some time ago. However, when informed of this intention the author immediately - and over a considerable number of increasingly vulgar emails - demanded the space be retained.


In the middle was a big cauldron that they were stirring, stirring,
And there were trees around that they kept burning, burning.
I asked a toothless man who all these people were and
he said, "The soapmakers, and we are working, working."
So are we all fucked or what?

I mean sure, most of us probably aren't going to die. Most of us probably won't even get very sick. Still, it's hard to shake the feeling that in a matter of weeks we'll all be medieval peasants - either toiling in fields with donkeys that have all manner of clattering pots and pans strapped to them or dead and buried in unmarked mass graves. At least we're hotter than the original breed of diseased medieval waifs, or at least most of us are.

It seems that it is critical at times like these to make sure to panic as much as possible. Really just go hog wild and get it all out of your system. Make flagrantly irrational shopping choices and strain all of the parts of the global supply chain that really haven't been pressure tested for this kind of thing to the breaking point because, honestly, a toilet paper shortage is never actually conceivable until we all turn into idiots lumbering around grocery stores like panicked cows.

Alas, I've trapped myself in my Emergency Command Bunker - which is normally reserved for elections and any time we're landing something on Mars - with enough nonperishables and toiletries for a siege, enough fruit and vegetables to watch rotting away for weeks of entertainment, and enough booze and cigars to live out my own delusional Prince Prospero fantasy.

Wash your hands and stop touching your face and remember that mo End of Days is complete without a good soundtrack, so enjoy.