I try not to write the word ‘fuck’ too often. This is not from any prudishness or discomfort — I use it regularly in everyday speech — but seeing it in writing quickly gets old and tired. I do use it occasionally for effect, but the effect is usually minimal.
In this post, however, I can’t get around it. This one is about the ironic, unintended meanings of the redneck t-shirt slogan “Fuck Around and Find Out.”
A masterpiece of trashy thought, trashily expressed, I can’t talk about it without throwing a few F-bombs of my own. And while I suspect most of my readers are familiar with the word, they might not be familiar with the slogan.
“Fuck Around and Find Out” is a macho challenge to you wussy liberals whose woke nanny-state ideas don’t comport with the second-amendment values of real Americans. It’s another way of saying, “Don’t fuck with me, I’m white, Christian, straight, and toxically masculine. And if you look at me sideways, I’ll shoot you.” Equal parts bravado and ignorance.
But before we go any further with this, let me acknowledge a debt, once again, to my friends at the Professional Left podcast, as I am here riffing off an idea they recently articulated. I think they’re on to something.
They took that ugly slogan, and with all appropriate irony, focused on the dichotomy that makes up the sentence. ‘Fuck around’ and ‘find out’ can be seen as expressions of cause and effect.
They pointed out that almost eighty million Americans voted to fuck around. Unencumbered by the thought process, they voted for a career criminal and traitor. They were convinced that their vote was about immigration and inflation, when it was always about fascist oligarchs dismantling the government and looting the treasury.
And they got what they voted for. They got an administration that took its election as a license to fuck around with every federal agency it could get its hands on, freezing their funding, firing their best people, and replacing those people with loyalist hacks.
Yes, it’s all illegal. But the people getting fired won’t be waiting around for a reinstatement that might never come. They’re already gone and looking for work elsewhere. Their replacements will be dangerously incompetent.
This is where the finding-out part starts. This is where we all find out how much we depend on these agencies, and how losing them will, in too many ways to count, be devastating. Some will find out sooner than others, based on what the vandals decide to vandalize, and when.
The Pro-Left podcasters focused on farmers, and for good reason. As a demographic, farmers are the staunchest of Trump voters, and Trump always hurts the ones who love him most. Farmers are, predictably, among the first to experience the growing buyer’s remorse, as the vandals proceed to fuck around with their livelihoods.
Farmers are getting it from several directions at once. They have traditionally relied on federal subsidies to cushion them from the wide swings in the prices of their crops. So when a vandal like Elon Musk comes in and arbitrarily puts freezes on federal spending, especially at the USDA, he is oblivious to how badly farmers would be hit by that, and how that hit would ripple through the farm community.
Then there’s the elimination of USAID, the world’s biggest supplier of food to impoverished nations. The vandals might not have realized that most of that food is bought from American farmers. Killing USAID means killing a major market for American agricultural products. Farmers voted for this. Oops.
But it gets worse. The real carnage will come with the tariffs, if and when Trump actually goes through with them. He loves to keep people guessing.
To be clear, Trump’s tariff obsession is a guaranteed fail, and farmers are guaranteed to bear the brunt of it. This was proven, categorically, in Trump’s first term, when the tariffs he put on China ended up costing American farmers roughly $27 billion in lost sales. Trump had no choice but to bail out much of the farm sector — they were part of his core constituency, after all — to the tune of $23 billion in taxpayer money. As an added bonus, China learned not to trust us as a dependable source for the agricultural products it needs to feed its population, so it developed new supplier relationships, especially in Brazil, which was happy to get the business.
Trump’s foolish trade wars came with steep long-term costs to society, and we’re still feeling their effects. And that was just his first term, the warm-up act. Now, there is no idea so bad that he can’t double down on it.
Tariffs are Trump’s personal nukes. He has no idea what they do or how they work, but he loves how terrified people get when he threatens to use them. He loves posting some idiotic word salad he thought of on the toilet, then watching whole countries go into panic mode.
And now, business people of every stripe, in every industry — many of them Republicans — are begging him to stop. They patiently explain that tariffs are a self-induced disaster, an intentional own-goal, and why would anyone in his right mind want to fuck around with them? Trump loves it when they beg.
So I think it’s safe to say that farmers, having voted for a fascist oligarchy, are now finding out what that means. Too bad they didn’t get the message in Trump’s first term.
But farmers are also the canary in the coal mine. As government agencies are eviscerated, one by one, government services will quickly atrophy, with consequences that will range from annoying to outrageous to cataclysmic.
People are about to find out, the hard way, that their local weather reports are all derived from data collected and published by the National Weather Service, a huge federal sub-agency which is now being denuded of competent personnel. The people who’ve been fired weren’t just delivering forecasts to your local TV station, they were also the ones warning you when the weather could destroy your house.
Speaking of which, FEMA too is being vandalized. Next time you don’t hear that there’s a hurricane coming, and you barely get out of the house alive but the house isn’t so lucky, you’ll be able to count on FEMA to make sure you don’t get back on your feet.
Then there’s the FAA, which has been chronically understaffed ever since Reagan famously fired most of the nation’s air traffic controllers. Now the vandals, with an arrogance born of ignorance, are fucking around with our aviation infrastructure, replacing highly-skilled technicians — the very people who keep planes from flying into each other — with clueless MAGA hacks. What could go wrong?
I haven’t even mentioned what they’re doing to the CDC, FDA, and NIH, which will surely be bad for our health. You’d think Trump might’ve have learned something from a global pandemic that sank his first term. Instead, he’s now ensuring that the next one will be even worse.
The vandalization of the government is a catastrophe in slow motion. The skill sets being jettisoned will not be easily replaced. The bureaucrats and technocrats who are fired will take their accumulated expertise and institutional knowledge with them. Their agencies won’t recover for decades.
I’m imagining a meme based on Grant Wood’s classic painting, AmericanGothic — the farmer, his wife, and his pitchfork posing stoically in front of their house. If I had any PhotoShop skills, I’d make it so the house is now rubble, the farmer and his wife both wear masks, and there’s a sign on his pitchfork that says:
We fucked around and found out.
Yep.
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