…Well, not everyone. 

But it certainly got your attention, didn’t it? 

And that’s because it’s difficult to engage with the news – which these days includes any forms of media, including the social kind – and not be slapped in the face by the type of seething rage I did my best to run away from as a little kid.

The kind of foaming at the mouth anger a bully or mean girl expressed by punching, kicking, biting, cursing – or worse – before some adult would step in, pull the plug, pull them off and, finally, calm everything down.

Oh, where have all the adults gone???

Not that I myself wasn’t pissed off often at many, many, MANY people and about many, many, MANY things way back when.

I can recall my tiny existential mind seriously thinking, and with equal weight:

• Why are people racist?
• Why do some kids beat up others over something as dumb as a football or baseball game?
• Why can’t I wear what I want to school, and….
• How come my parents can be so continuously, and consistently, embarrassing ALL of the time????

Even though I don’t have a satisfying answer to any one of those now, I can honestly state I didn’t know how good I had it back then. 

Because right now it’s far worse and a hell of a lot MEANER.

(Note:  My husband thinks I should say mean-spirited because most people are not innately mean.  But since he’s the far nicer of the two of us, I’ll stick with mean – to the bone).

I don’t want to make this political but I’m just recovering from Covid, and a weeks worth of TV news watching, where I’ve been continuously slapped in the face by the Trump of it all. 

I mean, I’d much rather write about the brave, smart, thoughtfulness of Zelenskyy but we don’t live in a Zelenskyy world right now, do we?  In fact, it’s actually that kind of world we’re trying to get back.

Instead, what we have is this revelation from a piece in The Atlantic about the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley:

It was in 2019, during his welcoming ceremony at a military base in Virginia.  Milley had chosen an extremely disabled, wheelchair-bound vet named Luis Avila to sing God Bless America, which he did wonderfully despite having lost a leg and endured two strokes and brain damage as a result of five tours of combat.

Yet after the song was over, then Pres. Donald J. Trump marched directly over to the general and snapped to his face:

Why do you bring people like that here?  No one wants to see that.

This statement echoes another from a New Yorker article when, during the planning of an intended big military style parade, Trump warned his then Chief of Staff John Kelly that he:

…didn’t want any wounded guys in the parade.  It wouldn’t look good for me.

Which echoes Trump’s infamous putdown line about former POW and then Sen. John McCain in the 2016 Republican primary campaign:

I like people who WEREN’T captured.

And thematically gels with Trump skipping a traditional visit in France to a cemetery containing the remains of 1800 dead American soldiers in 2018, when he told his staff:

Why should I go to that cemetery.  It’s filled with losers.

It’s not surprising, so much as appalling, when you consider the guy has pretty much clinched the Republican nomination for president in 2024, a party that sports as one of its primary constituent groups, the Religious Right.

You want mean, continue to vote for and support Trump, MAGA and Trumpism.  And then pray or confess to whatever your God of choice might be that at worst you are merely sometimes mean-spirited.

Of course, if you think Joe Biden, 80, is too old (Note: He’s a mere three years older than Trump, 77 – and a lot thinner. Oops, now I’ m being mean! ) and too liberal (Note II: As compared to whom – Bernie?  Or me and my friends????) —

Right behind in the Republican pack, is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, 45.  A few weeks ago in a stump speech for his faltering presidential campaign, he ranted this about retired former NIH director Anthony Fauci, 81,

I’m so sick of seeing him….Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.

No, I am NOT embellishing.  He’s been saying it for more than A YEAR.

And, I just want to state for the record:

DeSantis – 5’9”

Fauci: 5’7”

The Chair: 5’6” (though I used to be 5’7”)

And that:

– DeSantis consistently wears heels to make himself look taller, hates all things Disney and shames kids on camera for wearing masks and eating too much sugar.

-Fauci is responsible for guiding us through the Covid pandemic and facilitating the invention and distribution of the five Covid vaccines/boosters that probably saved me a hospital intensive care visit in the last several weeks.

-The Chair has a sense of humor and has a Joy Inside Out doll sitting in his home office, alongside a poster with a quote from Hillary Clinton that tells you to keep getting up when someone knocks you down and to never listen to anyone who says you can’t or shouldn’t go on.

Fine, Joy and Hillary (Note: Ugh, and The Chair) are not perfect, and there are certainly some meanies in the Democratic Party. 

But…mean to the bone?

This past week I watched a wrap up of the legal woes of Trump, our twice-impeached former president and cult leader.  It began by telling us that He is the FIRST U.S. PRESIDENT in our 234 year HISTORY to be INDICTED for crimes and that it has happened FOUR DIFFERENT TIMES this year.

1. In Washington, D.C. for the Jan 6^th insurrection.  Among the crimes: a sustained effort to prevent the vote from being counted in a federal election; interrupting Congress’ counting of the vote; conspiracy to deny citizens the right to vote nationwide.
2. In Georgia: Running a Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization that, among other things, tried to get its secretary of state to overturn the election; change the votes by finding illegal votes; throwing out already existing votes.
3. In Florida: Thirty-two counts of willful retention of classified documents, hiding them in boxes and then lying about it.  (Note: And my fave, testimony that he used them as “to do” and “doodle pads” where he wrote notes to his assistant).
4. In NYC:  Faking business records to reimburse a personal lawyer ordered to pay off  $130,000 to a porn star the defendant had sex with.  And in doing so, accruing 34 felony charges of lies about the various businesses and corporate holdings used to bill the reimbursement money from.

This is all to say, in the oft-quoted words of one 13^th century Turkish philosopher:

The fish rots from the head down.

If we really want to clean up this mess of meanness we’re in, we might follow that lead.

Metaphorically, of course.

Taylor Swift – “Mean” (Taylor’s Version)