While I probably didn’t deserve to live this long, I was still hoping to have a generally happy, if slightly guilt-edged dotage. But while recently celebrating my 80th birthday I suddenly realized that the bulk of my post-2014 retirement years have been spoiled, mostly by one person, a captain of a ship of fools.
Wind back the clock to the turn of the century. The Cold War had ended and China had yet to ascend. We had just gotten through the Clinton presidency when the internet had become mainstream, the national deficit had been eliminated, and flip phones were a real convenience instead of an addiction. It seemed that science and technology were about to remake the whole world for the better, with America at the helm.
Boom! That all changed in 2001 with the 9/11 attacks. Then we had the ill-conceived war in Iraq and the great recession beginning in 2008. It was a painful start to the new century, but we largely kept to our course. My faith in America, and Americans, was undiminished, particularly after we elected Barrack Obama. It confirmed what I had always thought–that the citizens in this country possessed a collective level of common sense that could see through the political and marketing BS with which it was continually assaulted. That was the real strength of our ship of state, and the real hope for the entire planet.
But the idea of de-emphasizing our commonality and promoting our differences had been launched with Newt Gingrich’s zero-sum theory of political warfare, a divide-for-power mentality that was then adopted by our media amid its rapid digital transformation and converted to divide-for-profit. This cancer on our polity metastasized during the Obama administration, culminating with the unforgivable blocking by Mitch McConnell of a supreme court nomination. It was furthered by the escalator descent of the Orange Turd, and a full decade of my post-retirement peace of mind being lost while he’s worked to destroy our institutions and our very democracy.
The “deep state,” which is just the half-empty-cup way of looking at the collective experience and expertise of our federal bureaucracy, has been gutted. I no longer have any faith in once-sacred institutions like the Justice Department and the FBI, the FDA and CDC, the Supreme Court, the military, and even our fundamental system of elections. Who is now left to protect us from threats like cyber-terror, climate change, plagues, rogue AI, and our own greed and stupidity?
Most disturbing, I have completely lost any faith in the wisdom and common sense of the body politic. We fiddle with online gambling and vacuous social media, while never looking up from our phones, ooh and ahh over celebrity machinations and diluted streaming mediocrity, define reality in terms of movie clips, and, when we take the time, select only news which comports with our own delusions.
Oh, those few among us still sane await the mid-terms as our salvation. But do we really have any faith that a Democratic Congress is going to be able to lower prices, restore our institutions, and bring the justice deserved by those who have scuttled our democracy? All of that before the winds change again? I doubt it. It’s much easier to sink a ship than to pull it up from the bottom. And it wasn’t the construction of our ship of state that was faulty, it was those who sail upon it.
That American vessel has carried me a long way in my 80 years. Yes, there were some rough seas and occasional becalming. But there was always a sense that my shipmates could keep things in trim. Now most of them are re-arranging the deck chairs, leaving me, and a few others, retching over the rail as the deck angles downward.
©2026, David B Bucher
