Rigor Tortoise?

They tell us the Dirty Old Turtle – Senator Mitch McConnell – is not only alive but in good enough condition to pose for a picture with his wife. He looks alert enough and well enough in the picture, so how come we haven’t seen or even heard any more of him? Why does he not speak? Why are there no videos of him up and about?

How come he’s not back at work? Isn’t that what he’s being paid (by taxpayers) to do? How many of us could disappear for a month and still be getting paid by our employers? Oh, yes. Of course. Our employers have the power to fire us because we work for them and if we do not work, then off we go. We are told, of course, that people who work for the government work for us. If so, why is it that we cannot fire them or even put them on leave?

Common sense suggests McConnell is at the very least incapacitated, if not actually plastron up. It is a reasonable default to assume this given what is known, including the fact that he was obviously in bad shape before he suddenly disappeared from sight about a month ago. He is a frail old man who has needed help walking; who has glitched multiple times while attempting to speak (a symptom of stroke). When a frail old man who can barely stand up on his own disappears for a month, it is reasonable to assume he probably can’t get out of bed anymore. That pic of him sitting upright in bed is very probably a fake and an official one, too.

That’s where this gets interesting.

If you’re old enough to remember the old Soviet Union, you probably remember when the various doddering old men who led it would just disappear and we’d be told they just had a cold and were just fine, really. After awhile, when the official lies could no longer be maintained, it was admitted that Comrade Brezhnev or Comrade Andropov or Comrade Chernenko had died. An interesting thing to recall is that Comrade Brezhnev was just 79 years old when he died. Almost youthful relative to the Dirty Old Turtle, who is 84. Comrade Andropov was a mere 70. Comrade Chernenko was 74 at the time of his death. The Soviet gerontocracy was more youthful than America’s gerontocracy, in other words. Nancy Pelosi is 86. Dianne Feinstein was 90 when she finally died in office. Trump is older right now than Brezhnev was when he died and will be as old as the oldest Soviet gerontocrats were by the end of his current term in office.

It is a metric of the ossification of the American Soviet. It is also eerily similar in terms of the way the actual condition of the gerontocrats is hidden from view and openly lied about, too. The Dirty Old Turtle is not an isolated case. We are not told the truth about Trump’s health, for instance – and are supposed to deny the evidence of our own lyin’ eyes, such as his obviously swollen ankles, strange gait and the blotches on the back of his hand. There are also the strange disappearances – periods of incommunicado – during which our Gerontocrat-in-Chief is not heard from (except via social media) or seen. We are told he aces cognitive tests because he knows that a line drawing of a sheep is a sheep.

The people around Trump know but pretend not to know. Just as the people in the know about the Dirty Old Turtle know but pretend not to know. They lie to us openly, in fact. Unless you believe the multiple Republican honchos who say they all spoke to the DOT for “20 minutes,” each of them. Curious how they all spoke to him for exactly the same amount of time. As if reading from the same script.

The longer this goes on, the better – in the sense that it inadvertently reveals just how Sovietized America has become. The parallels are more than just gerontological. America in 2026 is a lot like the Soviet Union was toward the end of the Soviet Union. The latter was broke, exhausted and demoralized after years of pursuing a stupid, evil war in the Middle East (Afghanistan) and led by rheumy old fossils who clung to power for the sake of clinging to power. And now so it is in the American Soviet.

It will be interesting to see what comes after.

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