Let’s start by saying that I think Joe Biden is a good president. In my lifetime—or, rather, in my memory; I don’t remember Nixon at all, or Ford other than the bits Saturday Night Live did, with him tripping on his shoelaces and falling off planes—I’ve had a few presidents. Carter, who made zero impression on me, as a young lad. Reagan, who terrified me to the point that I cried myself to sleep in my bunk bed the night he got elected; for whatever reason, I was sure he was going to lead the world to nuclear war. As his eight years went on, and as I went into high school and got into music and action movies and occasional sex, I kind of stopped caring about politics.

Reagan was always there, of course, on the television, in the news, talking about the shining city on the hill, morning in America, ordering Russia to tear down the Berlin Wall, being significantly silent while his toadies testified about selling arms for hostages, and finally disappearing when his Veep won election on his own. At the time, I didn’t think Reagan was a bad president, but now I know better. He was a fucking AWFUL president. He, more than anyone else in American history, destroyed the middle class. And when you destroy the middle class, you destroy the best thing this county ever accomplished—democracy is all well and good, but it only works when the overlying system ain’t basic feudalism. And Reagan brought us back to feudalism.

Papa Bush was an inconsequential president. He was unlucky enough to preside over an economic disaster (and it’s funny, isn’t it, how often that happens to Actual Fascist presidents?), but he did manage to cobble together a coalition to beat the fuck out of Iraq, and that was fun to watch on teevee. Tracers and bombs and pillars of fire, big beefy generals, CNN sex symbol anchors—it was my first war (I was too young to remember Vietnam), and it was pretty fucking cool, in a video game kind of way. Also, the Soviet Union collapsed on his watch, and thank god we never have to worry about THOSE bastards again. They’re now part of the big capitalist democratic polity of the world, we gave them blue jeans and McDonald’s, and they would never do anything like invade another country for blood and glory.

Then came Clinton, and he wasn’t a good president, either. He was FINE, but he wasn’t GOOD. Balanced the budget, played the saxophone on MTV, got blow jobs in the White House hallways, marginalized gay people in the military, ramped up the United States’s remote-control method of waging war (in which we bomb and bomb and bomb, but never risk our own flesh and blood), and generally came off as a low-budget knockoff of Jack Kennedy with a tenth of the health problems, half the style, and every little bit of the arrogance. But, let’s face it—America was safe and quiet during his eight years. Prosperous, even, if you ignore all the looming real estate bubbles and reverse mortgages and cadres of crack families. And it took a safe and quiet America to elect Baby Bush (or, rather, to get him close enough that his dad’s Supreme Court could tush-push him over the goal line), who was another absolute fucking disaster as president.

In the last quarter-century, my America, the country I grew up in and was pressured and cajoled and seduced into loving, has legalized fucking TORTURE. It has normalized the act of taking foreign prisoners, jetting them to dark sites in sketchy countries, and waterboarding the hell out of them. We have this liminal prison in Cuba where people are STILL being held without being charged, tried, and convicted. I feel for W., I really do—he was completely unprepared for the job, and he tried his best, but he surrounded himself with orcs and Nazgul and Wormtongue Cheney, and he did almost as much damage to this country as his dad’s boss did back in the eighties.

Obama was a decent president, but he had to get forced into every good thing he accomplished. He was perfectly fine with leaving gay people on the sidelines, with continuing America’s habit of bombing poor people with satellite drones, with staying in useless, unwinnable wars, and with trying for small, incremental changes in the face of implacable resistance on the Fascist side. I honestly think that he left office STILL believing that the Republicans could be honest brokers, that they actually wanted to govern rather than to get clicks, and that if he played golf and sipped whiskey with John Boehner they could get a budget hammered out. Poor sap.

We all know who the next president was. If Reagan was a cancer on this country, Trump was a supercharged form of extraterrestrial syphilis. He tore down the last remnants of honor and nobility America was desperately clutching in front of its private parts, he killed a million citizens with his fucking bleach injections and sheep de-wormers and plague rides with the Secret Service outside of Walter Reed, and he shoveled cheeseberders into his flabby maw watching television while his white trash, white supremacist goombahs spread their own shit on the Capitol walls and rubbed their dicks on Nancy Pelosi’s desk.

So, yeah. Joe Biden is getting rid of whatever student loan debt he can, and that’s actually a fair amount. He’s stood with unions while unions have been having a surprising resurgence. He’s building highways, setting up broadband access, tearing out lead water pipes, trying to establish charging stations for electric cars, and for an old, old-school Irish Catholic boy, he’s done a remarkable job sticking up for abortion access.

He’s stood firm with Ukraine as that country faces an existential tsunami (and remember—even FDR took his fucking time to finally get jets and tanks and bullets to Europe during WWII. All that ‘arsenal of democracy’ shit took FOREVER). The big problem is Israel, but how do you solve that problem? Israel got raped in October, and they’re lashing out, and we’re still nominally invested in having a ‘democracy’ in the heart of the Middle East, so we’ve got to tread carefully—but I think Biden’s patience with Netanyahu is running out. Wouldn’t surprise me at all on March 25, if we just stopped sending them aid.

As for the rest of the country’s problems, you can’t put them on Joe. It’s the Fascists who blew up the border deal, it’s the Fascists who are calling frozen embyos actual human beings, it’s the Fascist women standing in their kitchens, with big glowy crucifix necklaces, crying about human trafficking in Mexico during Baby Bush’s time in office, and spitting outrage on CNN when someone dares ask them, as survivors of rape, why they’re supporting a rapist for president. It’s the Fascists who are trying, fumbling, horribly, to build some kind of Potemkin case against Joe’s son, who are throwing feces at Fani Willis, who are stalling the open-and-shut documents case in Florida, who are spooling razor wire in the Rio Grande, busing confused, terrified migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, who are banning books, enabling mass shooters, welcoming tyrants, demonizing trans kids, who have reorganized their entire party to accommodate a ninety-times charged sexual abuser, who slurs and stutters and can’t put a sentence together, and his grifting family, and who STILL insist on going out there and claiming they’re the party of values.

The State of the Union speech is over. The candidates are a week away from being finalized, and then begins the real contest. And it’s not hyperbole, what people are saying—this IS a contest, in America, between authoritarianist White Supremacist christofascism, and basic democracy. And I have no fucking idea which side we’ll come down on. I have thoughts about how it’s gonna go, and I’m cautiously optimistic—but I was cautiously optimistic about Hillary Clinton, you know? And I still remember how I felt on Election Night in 2016, crawling off to bed, sick, crying.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes. I’m 55 now, and if I’m lucky I’ll have another twenty, thirty birthdays. I don’t have any kids to worry about, thank dog. I’m white, and straight, and male, and skimming the edges of what used to be middle class, so even if Trump DOES win again, I’ll probably be all right. But, goddamn, we should be better than this.

We shouldn’t even be having this debate. I’m not saying we’re the shining city on the hill, but we’ve shown glimpses of greatness. And now we’re stripping down, next to the void, getting ready to dive in, MAGA caps on and Jesus on our lips. Putin’s driving on western Ukraine, Bibi’s going full Dresden on Palestine, Orban’s eating chicken fingers at Mar-a-Lago, the metastatic blob of late-stage chlamydia is rallying in the swing states, and it’s the ninth straight month of highest temperatures in history.

Thank dog for books, for cats, for music, and for friends.