Waking Up From the Nightmare

The last episode of the 80's TV show Dallas, had a plot twist that was successfully hidden from viewers until it aired. It might be relevant to our times.

I love the 80’s.

I love the music, the TV programming, the positivity. Hell, even MTV actually WAS Music Television.

Bookended by my second two favorite decades, the 70’s (except for disco) and the 90’s, I think those decades stick out in my mind for their optimism and the sense we were headed toward something really good in America.

It was the age of Reagan, Maha Rushie, and Miami Vice – and even CNN was not completely insane.

Even the hysteria around the “millennium,” the Y2K predictions of disaster, was a failure because we continued to party like it was 1999 (to borrow from Prince) – at least until the election mess. Bush v. Gore, the idea that Bush was selected, not elected, even though Gore wanted to count pregnant chads to discern the “intent of the voter” and three independent recounts conducted by independent, Democrat leaning entities, found that, in fact, Bush won.

Democrats in Congress were so pissed they let their animus flag fly, so they slow-walked all of Bush’s nominations and critical jobs were not filled.

Then came the morning of September 11, 2001, and everything changed.

America was attacked - and not just attacked - attacked on our own turf in the city that represented American power an influence. As we used to say in football practice after a nasty hit, it knocked our dick in the dirt.

And it changed us.

Forever.

Before that, terrorism was “over there,” and America couldn’t be reached – at least that was the idea.

9/11 gave every domestic and international America hater a platform to condemn us. As much as black American families were making better gains before LBJ (one of our most racist presidents) got his “Great Society” (a package of policies as ineptly named as Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act) across the line, race relations were getting much better pre-2001 than they are now – and certainly was better before 2008, when the idea behind CRT, Critical Race Theory, that racism is the explanation for everything white people do, believe and are (down to their DNA), began to be livestreamed 24/7/365 into the brain pans of every person in America.

Twenty four years of navel gazing, hate mongering and recriminations about everything from comedy and TV ads to economic policy and and how much racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and every other “ism” under the sun they contained and how much penance society owes what grievance group was offended turned America into a nation with less confidence and more paranoia that it had in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War.

As a result, we became a public weary of forever wars that could be won, but not without the will to do so – and our leadership clearly didn’t have it – so under Biden, they disgraced America and our war fighters by globally embarrassing America by running away – a replay of how the Vietnam War ended.

Trump’s largely unexpected 2016 election win kicked off 13 years or so, filled with bare knuckled fights over what America will become for the next century. Would America continue to “lead from behind,” controlled by globalist, oligarchical forces aligned with the belief that America was a force for evil in the world, or would we get back out front and reclaim the idea that what is good for America is good for the world?

Yesterday I said that Donald Trump would not have happened without Charlie Kirk and Charlie would not have happened without Donald Trump - and I believe that. From the association to Jefferson and Madison, to Lewis and Clark, to Procter and Gamble, to Astaire and Rogers, to Hewlett and Packard, and to Trump and Kirk – and even Trump and Elon, history is full of intersections of people who would never have changed history without meeting and teaming up.

But sometimes the loss of a partner reminds people that time is both short and finite and accelerates the timeline.

Time will tell, but given the current lineup of players in important positions and their intersections, Charlie Kirk’s murder may well be a turning point (no pun intended) of the magnitude of 9/11 – it may pull us back to the progress of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s and like Pam woke up to find Bobby alive and in the shower (the final episode of Dallas aired in 1986 – look it up), it allows us to wake up from our own national nightmare of the past twenty-four years.