A good month after finishing Hell’s Angels, I finally cracked open The Great Shark Hunt to look for material of current interest. It didn’t take long. The first piece after the Author’s Note is called “Fear and Loathing in the Bunker,” and on the second page Hunter says:

Nixon…was blessed with a mixture of arrogance and stupidity that caused him to blow the boilers almost immediately after taking command. By bringing in hundreds of thugs, fixers and fascists to run the Government, he was able to crank almost every problem he touched into a mindbending crisis. About the only disaster he hasn’t brought down on us yet is a nuclear war with either Russia or China or both…but he still has time, and the odds of his actually doing it are not all that long.

This seems especially apropos in a week where President Von Clownstick discovered how much fun it is to bomb people. First it was Syria, then Afghanistan, and North Korea may be next:

China warned on Friday that tensions on the Korean Peninsula could run out of control, after North Korea said it could test a nuclear weapon whenever its top leader, Kim Jong-un, decided, and as an American naval group neared the peninsula in a show of resolve.

“The United States and South Korea and North Korea are engaging in tit for tat, with swords drawn and bows bent, and there have been storm clouds gathering,” China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said in Beijing. (New York Times, 4/14/2017).

Our relationship with Russia is not so healthy either.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday that relations between the two countries are at “a low point” as clear divides remain over Syria, Moscow’s alleged meddling in U.S. elections and a host of other major issues.

So, just in case FVC manages to provoke the nuclear war that Nixon — for all his faults — avoided, let me say a big hello to the sentient cockroaches of the future. I suppose you’re reading this because you’re doing research into why the primates who dominated the planet for a few thousand years wiped themselves out, clearing the way for your ancestors to take over. Well, it’s complicated, and there are many better authorities than myself, but it has something to do with a particularly insecure and combative primate somehow being chosen to lead a powerful and well-armed nation-state.

I was wondering how long it would take the FVC administration to work itself into a state of “mindbending crisis” (almost immediately), start looking around for a distraction (they’ve been working on it), and then figure out that war is always the best distraction (here we go). I expect us to be in a state of more or less continuous international conflict until a) Fuckface is forced from office or b) the megatons start flying.

In the meantime, I take some small amount of comfort from the following, also from “Fear and Loathing in the Bunker”:

For now, we should make every effort to look at the bright side of the Nixon Administration. It has been a failure of such monumental proportions that political apathy is no longer considered fashionable, or even safe, among millions of people who only two years ago thought that anybody who disagreed openly with “the Government” was either paranoid or subversive. Political candidates in 1974, at least, are going to have to deal with an angry, disillusioned electorate that is not likely to settle for flag-waving and pompous bullshit.

Will be saying the same next year, swapping in you-know-who for Nixon and 2018 for 1974? I can only hope so.