“No Kings!” Boom the Boomers

*Exasperated sigh.* Is there anything Boomers don’t ruin?

The prohibitively expensive housing market; fastly dissolving entitlement programs; over-prescriptionization of minor aches; social standards slipping into acute slovenliness—the list of malgoverno malpractice, or, enshitification, as the kids say, extends like aluminum grabber hands for top-shelf groceries.

And the politics of our great commercial republic, which has been a Boomer preoccupation since Lyndon Johnson fried a couple million charlies in Vietnam? Pardon piling more frass on a dung heap, but a slipshod braggard like Donald Trump ascending to the presidency means the system’s foundation is thoroughly rotted.

Naysayers may point to the stock market climbing ever higher to heaven. (Many happy returns to the invested!) Yet the body politic doesn’t thrive on dividends alone. Bless the progeny of the Second Great War who are too introspectively blind to hold themselves responsible for the collapse in institutional trust. In the face of an illiberal president who, in his vulnerable moments, crouches and lashes like arch autocrat Richard Nixon, Boomers are reliving their lovebeaded youth, with more lidocaine and less chiba.

So back to the streets, the chanting, the performative aggrievement. Only after parking their Buicks, lugging their walkers out of the trunk, snatching their homemade wash-markered signs, and getting into a slap-fight with a parking meter that only accepts payment via app. OK, now sings the sweet bird of passionate youth! Right on! Take Saig… er Dump Trump!

Last month’s “No Kings” rally was a creaking gestalt of the late-Boomer spirit. The threequel of an ongoing series of fun-run excursions in major metros, this springy Saturday “protest” once again teemed with pasty pensioners and rangy layabouts enticed to join ranks with the promise of Chipotle gift cards. Drug stores in immediate vicinities were cleared out of posterboard, Crayola crayons, and paste. Local Amazon fulfillment centers shipped off all in-stock orthopedic sneakers. Empty beta-blocker prescription vials clogged up storm drains. Feebly croaked mantras against crowned despots rang out.

The entire demonstration was representative of Boomers’ civic activism: high on aspiration, low on substance, consistency, and any semblance of concrete accomplishment. Can’t hardly blame the ungainly. After trudging down a few blocks, the bugbears of age necessarily kicked in. Osteoarthritis, lumbar soreness, neuropathic pain, polymyalgia rheumatica, gassy tympanites, all those Latin-esque fatal-sounding maladies on drug commercials that just mean discomfort. Fatigue won out over fumes. The cranky codgers sounded retreat. Back to the Buick, zip out the city, and into the driveway of a fully paid-off million-dollar McMansion purchased for $10,000 and a handshake the last millennium.

By the cushiony silvered metric, the day was an obvious success. Grievance was registered. Snapshots were taken for Facebook. The once-enterprising old mixed amicably with the listless young. Orange Odin was resoundingly humiliated.

But if the Iraq War or ‘08 financial crisis are marks of record, one should never discount the Boomer ability to bullock things up. Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono lent her fellow dissenting crones some verbal encouragement: “Donald Trump is not, never will be, and has never been a king.”

Good one, grandma! Someone forget to take her Prevagen? In one compound predicative sentence, the shriveled senator undercut the Trump-as-tyrant narrative, which has been a buttress of the left cosmovision since 2015. To the slipping senator, the President was “never” an “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King,” even during those heady first-term days when the White House was a Kremlin outpost. Nor is he now a maniac monarch, despite the progressive howls about DHS acting as an immune royal guard. And Hirono’s vatic assertion that Trump won’t red Caesar himself? Well, why me worry! The USA isn’t about to go KUK.

Hirono’s gaffe wasn’t the only blue-badged blunder. One old objector sod was interviewed claiming Trump was establishing ICE gaols all over the country to jail citizens. Finally! A government prison Alex Jones overlooked! Another wirey altacocker insisted the marches were “not for black people” because of the rampant risk of arrest. Who said down-south noblesse oblige was dead?

In the Boomer’s flowered imagination, it’s still 1969, with an immoral president waging murderous war on non-white pathetics, both at home and abroad. In the face of such thuggish rule, these sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation playact as demolitioners of a system that they’ve been the biggest beneficiaries of. They might even refer to themselves as Thomas Jefferson’s great bloodletters if they weren’t too cowed by their blue-haired granddaughters into thinking the Virginia statesman was a lecherous man-devil.

Two decades from now, the last Boomers will be weezing on their death beds, having sucked Social Security empty and bankrupted Medicare, demanding thanks for keeping America a king-less land. The Treasury will be pinched dry. The federal bureaucracy enfeebled. The country’s vast resources, including wide swathes of land, valuable intellectual property, massive number-crunching data centers, will all have been leased to the Chinese. Domestic student debt will outnumber the European Union’s GDP. The National Archives will be sold to Polymarket, and schoolchildren will spend their days betting lunch money on what makes better toilet paper, Charmin or the Constitution.

But the Boomer can go to his maker in peace, knowing that Donald Trump never got his diadem.