'Wasted On The Way'

We live in a time of burgeoning madness, when the horrors of the World Wars and the progress, industrial prosperity and tenuous peace made in the aftermath are being cast off to satiate the desires of a would-be mad king from Queens.

In the end, they had no real fight in them, those hopeless marks in MAGA-land. ‘Home of the brave’ was a myth like everything else in this plastic land, tucked away somewhere between John Wayne and that great uncle you never met who stormed that faraway beach.

Courage requires constant dues - that the people stopped paying. When it was time to stand up they sat down.

Sated and slumbered by their phones and their podcasts and their ‘one click’ purchasing power. Personalities replaced by algorithms, endless online shopping and rage-farming. When it came down to a choice between freedom and attention, they chose the latter. They rode its sugar high all the way to the end of the line and then they said goodbye to all they pretended to love.

It’s easy to throw on a ‘Never Forget’ t-shirt or slap a ‘Blue Lives Matter’ sticker on your truck and care nothing for the injustices and complexities of this world. Trump instinctually knows how to exploit this spiritually-diminished demographic because he’s been doing it his entire life.

He was born with the same sort of outer borough mentality he shares with his supporters. Think Archie Bunker on Adderall. It’s shocking to me how many folks in my generation do not seem to care what is happening to their country. Or seem even the slightest bit concerned about what sort of future Trump will leave for their children.

Civil liberties disappearing right before their eyes, while they mumble conspiracy theories from the bleacher seats. Explaining away their fellow citizens’ protests as ‘Soros-funded,’ while flecks of popcorn and chicken parm fly from their mouths and land on their made-in-China Yankees jerseys. A self-perpetuating cycle of moral rot and blunt ignorance.

So many have been numbed out since 9/11 by all the badge worship and jingoistic pablum served up on Fox News. Masked ICE officers making your average NYPD patrolman look peaceful, while smashing the windows of migrant mothers, causing their kids to burst into tears the backseat.

Performative terror and aggression designed to appease and tickle the masses. Trump knows exactly what he is doing when he attends UFC fights - the specter of violence is a large part of his appeal. So is the toxic masculinity.

MAGA supporters live in a world of delusions but perhaps none more lethal than the belief that this will only happen to migrants. It could be them next if they fail to take action. I get that the sort of folks drawn to Trump are mostly in support of this madness but they do so at their own peril.

They also demean the values of the nation they pretend to love.

Karma is a funny thing - when your entire political platform consists of demonizing hard-working people just looking for a chance to feed their kids sometimes the universe has a way of flipping the narrative on you.

MAGA supporters may soon find themselves not so much better off than the people they are taking so much pleasure in hurting.

There is something especially disgusting though about watching the privileged capitulate. Those who benefit from being at the top of the ladder owe more to those on the rungs below when the going gets tough.

That’s just how it works in a fair and equitable society.

Or at least how it should work. Instead, they horde their wealth and let fear guide their actions - seemingly oblivious to the pain meted out by their corpulent ogre of a leader who will smile smugly as he causes the innocent to suffer, taking a deviant pleasure in his ability to inflict harm on the world beyond his gilded excess and Palm Beach pomp. Those among us with the least will lose more because of the cowardice of those with the most.

The saddest part is that everyone beyond the billionaire class may be in for a bumpy ride. Prosperity doesn’t exactly follow Trump around, despite his life of pampered privilege and the golden thrones on which he sits.

He is a man who filed six bankruptcies and was involved in over four thousand lawsuits BEFORE he became POTUS. He failed or corrupted every business he ever ran until he finally struck gold as the grifter-in-chief; pilfering and plundering his way through our federal government. He will leave this once-proud land barren and broke if we let him.

I remember being on tour with Crosby, Stills and Nash during the summer of 2015. It was a long and sticky few months as Trump bullied and berated his way through the field of Republican candidates. The GOP primaries had become Trump’s latest reality show - and the networks and mainstream media ate it up while seeing profits surge.

A digital cottage industry in ‘Trump talk’ was being born, much to our detriment, as it made him both ubiquitous and inevitable. Deep dives into his past to educate the electorate were passed over for the cheap and easy game of ‘what will he say next…?’

In many ways, it was the beginning of a cycle we have not yet escaped from. Nobody was more aware of the value of an attention economy - and his place in it - than Donald Trump. A man who has craved attention the way flowers seek the sun. Except nothing pretty blooms from his exposure - only rot and wreckage. Weeds in the dirt that bear a bitter fruit.

We had a show at the iconic Chicago Theater and then a couple of days off for the band and crew, then a flight to New Jersey for the next gig. I shared a bus with Stephen Stills who was my responsibility as a road manager, and an avuncular, mercurial, mentor to me. Stills was never the type to sit around for long - so he decided we should skip the flights, leave right after the show and ride on the tour bus to Atlantic City.

The plan was to catch up with the rest of the guys in a couple of days.

We were out of the Windy City not long after the curtain came down and the last notes rang out of his road-worn ’57 Fender Deluxe - the tubes still glowing from the encore. ‘Love the One You’re With,’ as always. A couple of Italian beef sandwiches waiting for us on the bus. A ‘runner’ they call it in roadie parlance. Seventeen hours or so later, we stepped into the salty sunlight of the Garden State.

The bus was parked on an empty side street of Caesar’s Palace as we wearily grabbed our things and alighted our rolling home. As my feet hit the sandy sidewalk, I looked up towards the end of the block where the boardwalk was, and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. An onshore breeze blew softly through my hair. Stephen looked rested and ready for trouble - I made a mental note to keep an eye on him, we had a history in Atlantic City.

Grateful for the crisp sea air after so many hours on the road, I noticed Trump Plaza stood abandoned at the end of the street, surrounded by a chain link fence. Its windows broken and trash strewn about its lot.

A relic from an earlier time, that like everything Trump touches, ended in bloated disrepair and rust. A crumbling edifice standing as a monument to 80s excess and bad business. Bleached and faded and long since serving a purpose. Much like the man himself. His name still stood in giant, silly letters on the roof - only the ‘R’ was missing.

I pointed towards the derelict building and looked back at Stephen, ‘If Trump gets elected, this is what the whole country will look like someday.”

He looked at the building and then back at me, ‘I believe you’re right, that’s a pretty safe bet, Squire,’ calling me by the nickname he gave me.

We turned and crossed the street and walked into an empty casino.

Nobody was winning. There was noise and bells and lights but no smiles, no payouts. No people. A cacophony of cruelty, of loss.

You could tell you were in place that had seen better days.