So, it’s been nearly a decade since I last used this platform, so please bear with me. Today, I’m sitting on the edge of entering middle age, and I’m quite a bit wiser than I was when I used to write screeds on Facebook.
A lot has changed in the last decade. Not so much in terms of technology or even politics or big affairs, but in terms of how I view the world and my family and people, and realizing how their views and actions have shaped both their lives and mine. And a lot of this has to be viewed through the lens of maturing into a stable adult, of the world around us, and of challenging our preconceptions of our parents and family.
My grandfather died 18 months ago, and I wish I could talk with him about some of these new observations. We didn’t always agree on the details of everything, but I always respected his willingness to learn and consider cases, with all of their nuances and facts and details, and the implications of those decisions. He was always learning, developing his mindset, and he was always solid and calm and reliable with his advice. I always admired him for that- and I noticed how it defined both his life and the lives of his kids and now their progeny. Stable, firm and consistent…it was the exact opposite of how I grew up. Not to say I didn’t benefit from the semi-feral “figure it out” way I grew up, but I idolized him from afar. No real mystery as to where he and my uncle learned it- they learned it from my great-grandparents, who viewed stupidity as the unforgivable sin.
My dad, on the other hand, has none of those attributes. I remember my Dad used to be considerate and nuanced and “smart”, beyond occupational experience. He would consider deeper implications, precedent, alternatives, and was able to project the consequences of actions with a reasonable degree of accuracy and credibility. He could communicate, analyze and teach us to do the same. It doesn’t seem like that can happen anymore. This isn’t to say that those abilities are gone, but they are severely limited now, and I can chart it to one particular moment in life … the emergency of Donald Trump as a national figure and our president. Since that ride down the golden escalator, I’ve watched his cognition deteriorate. First slowly, then with less effort, and now just shit-tilling in time with the “real news” he pulls off of interest-captured social media. He’s developed whataboutism, casual racism, a lack of ability to think clearly, and partisanship beyond all sanity. And that’s terrible, because it undermines everything family should be about. It’s also terrible because it’s something that we can’t defend.
For example, the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. Horrific (if predictable) event, but one that went essentially as predicted. Massive destruction, eventual containment, etc. Kind of a non-event, sort of like how we all expect a late-summer Gulf hurricane but don’t really ‘care’ about the people affected beyond the obligatory “___ strong”. But in the feverish DC dream of our newly (re)elected President, the LA wildfires were a direct result of California’s failures to “rake the forest” and “letting the water run out” and “DEI”. There’s plenty of things to criticize about California’s setup. (It’s objectively true that idiotic land-management choices made at the city and county levels rendered the city a tinderbox, and it’s objectively true that California’s state land management is challenged and over-regulated from the perspective of fire safety. However, this also ignores that a significant portion of California’s lands, to include its most fire-prone areas, are actually federal land and are subject to federal land-management policies.) It’s objectively true that local fire departments were undermanned, underprepared, poorly-led and underfunded so that large fires would be far harder to control. And it’s objectively true that there were immediate local water-supply issues (mostly stemming from the inability of municipal water systems to move enough water to suppress massive, widespread wildfires). So, a week later, when El Glorious Presidente ordered “water to be released and “sent south” and Central Californian dams opened, he of course blindly endorsed it. And here’s where I finally realized that my Dad is probably sliding towards the same mental and physical decrepitude that defines Joe Biden.
We grew up in Southern California. We literally could see the aquaducts and piping and pumphouses stretching through the desert all the way to the parched, stolen headwaters of the Owens River Valley. We’d sometimes hiked the streams of the Sierra Nevada (infrequently, given our free-range upbringing), but I’d had plenty of outside time and familiarity with California’s streams and rivers to understand that we lived in a desert with a pretty tenuous water availability and that water wasn’t free or easy. Along with this, we all possessed basic geographic awareness and the fundamental understanding that water flows downhill, in readily-anticipated pathways, down the path of least resistance, to sea level. I think that, objectively, if you’d have asked any of my family if releasing water from Central Californian mountain lakes (Lake Kaweah and Lake Success) to the Tulare River basin would somehow affect water in the Los Angeles basin two hundred miles (and the upper High Desert, Tehatchapi mountain rim and coastal mountain ranges) apart, we all would have roundly laughed off the suggestion, even as children. Why? Because it’s stupid.
But in 2025? Nope. Water released from the summer stocks of central Californian farmers into the Tulare River basin (a geographically-isolated swamp) is somehow going to flow uphill, across miles of solid rock (and then back in time), and magically fill reservoirs in the canyons of Los Angeles, because Donald John Trump commands it. And it’ll own the libs in the doing. It’s so blatantly fantastical that I don’t even have a cogent response. But my dad preaches it, because it’s Trump. And it “owns the libs”, because somehow the President commanding that water stores earmarked for summer farm irrigation be wasted into an inland delta washes the ineptitude out of LAFD. Dementia in action!
Part of me wants to make this a pithy comment, but people across the political spectrum have brain rot. It just happens to be a lot more noticeable in the Fox/OAN/Newsmax crowd, likely because they lack awareness and analysis capabilities. Where did they go? I have no idea on that, but now I’m stuck in the same boat as so many other people reevaluating their parents.
I can’t help but think back to my great-grandmother’s later years. I had concerns, and certainly there were moments to validate them, but my great grandmother in her eighties was sharp, mindful and was able to deliberate. She would not have entertained the concept that water could flow uphill and back in time.
I wish that there was a reversal agent for this, but the Trumpian brain rot isn’t a cause, it’s a symptom of a greater cognitive feebleness that will not resolve. Whether the root cause is physical decay, intellectual laziness or mental decrepitude I do not know, but I’m squaring myself with the fact that it’ll never get better. Changes and setbacks and challenges will only roll into the wider conspiracy theory. At some point, it’ll be functionally identical to memory care, just with more autonomy and hopefully less falls. Except that these people still vote.
I miss intelligence.
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