We came across a plea for “civil discourse” this week. We don’t remember the source, honestly, because it made us fucking pissed.

People who plead for civil discourse don’t know what they’re fucking talking about. They think America’s political ills stem from the fact that we’re not nice to each other, that only if we’d talk and listen, listen respectfully, we’d discover our common ground and shared humanity, and like an After-School Special we’d all learn something and rejoin our productive lives, already in progress.

Fuck that. You know who used to teach us about learning from our respectful disagreements?

Bill Fucking Cosby.

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Donald Trump lies at golf. This is the word for it, as “cheats” implies a charming old coot who pulls a few tricks on the course. Donald Trump does not pull any tricks. He just lies.

This should not come as a surprise. Donald Trump lies about everything. We see ample evidence of this daily. His lies are most intense when his ego is involved, which is always. Donald Trump lies about everything, especially himself. Donald Trump has never been known to tell the truth.

In March 2016, long before we were all forced to endure Donald Trump’s lies daily, to live inside them, he took issue with Marco Rubio’s reference to Spy magazine’s immortal Trump characterization:

“Look at those hands, are they small hands?”

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In DC v. Heller, the 5-4 Supreme Court case that decided the meaning of the Second Amendment until Republicans are unable to steal justices, Antonin Scalia cites a 1931 judgment that argues for a very straightforward reading of Our Exceptional Nation’s founding document:

“[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.”

And then, just like any normal and ordinary reader, Scalia proceeds to sort the amendment into prefatory and operative clauses, the absence of grammatical constraint on the latter by the former, comparisons of sentence structure with other constitutional passages, and other normal and ordinary observations that strongly recall our first year as a normal and ordinary graduate student in philosophy.

Really, dude reads the Second Amendment more closely than we read Wittgenstein.

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Puerto Rico, we have learned this week, is a hundred miles long by thirty miles wide, which makes it roughly equivalent to the Willamette Valley, in Oregon, where we grew up. Its population numbers some 3.4 million American citizens, or a half-million more than our home turf. The distance to Miami is around a thousand miles, which will also get you from Eugene to Los Angeles. By air, that’s about two-and-half hours.

Of course, that’s via civilian flight. You can cut that time and distance in half from Guantanamo, in Cuba. We happen to have a naval base there. You may have heard of it.

Among the things our nation asks of its military is to lend a hand during natural disasters. A dozen years ago, Joint Task Force Katrina was created to coordinate efforts between soldiers and FEMA civilians. It was only formed after FEMA was shown to be tragically inadequate to the task, three days after the New Orleans levees failed.

Puerto Rico has been without power and water for nine days. There has been no all-hands relief effort.

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We’re having a hard time coming to terms with the obsessive cruelty of our nation’s leaders.

Which shouldn’t be that difficult, really. We were weaned on Vietnam and Watergate. We spent our early adult years under Reagan and Bush. Cynicism comes to us easily, because that has been the only rational conclusion throughout most of our life, given the evidence at hand.

But even cynicism fails us today.

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Back when we were learning our trade as a reporter, in the late Seventies, conversation would sometimes turn to the concentration of media, and the power resulting from it. In retrospect, the landscape we observed was simple: Three broadcast networks, three national news magazines, one-newspaper cities, multi-city newspaper chains. Not only were their audiences concentrated, reaching those audiences otherwise required an enormous capital investment. Freedom of the press, the joke went, belongs to those to who own one.

The media were the gatekeepers of public information. “News” was what reporters and editors (and owners) decided it was. There were “alternatives” — alternate weeklies, alternative magazines — but their audiences were small, and thus their funding and resources were limited. Advertising, then and now, paid the bills, and the larger your audience, the more attractive you were to advertisers.

The power that arose was the power to control the public conversation, as well as the power to avoid accountability and the power to stifle competition. And despite the revolutionary changes in media and communications over the ensuing forty years, we’re finding ourselves back where we started.

Perhaps even worse.

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