The Darkest Timeline

I wanna talk about the darkest timeline.

Twice! 

To set the stage, let's cover some ground about the darkest timeline that originated on the TV series Community.

In the 3rd season episode "Remedial Chaos Theory", Troy and Abed have invited the study group gang to their new apartment for a housewarming party.  

The group gathers to play Yahtzee when the pizza delivery arrives.  

Jeff suggests rolling a 6 sided die to determine who will go to the door to get the pizza.

Abed cautions that each roll of the die creates an alternate timeline.  

The episode unfolds as each roll of the die arrives at a different number and a different person goes to the door and each time, different stuff happens in the few moments that person is away. Various things go askew depending on who is still in the room.

Of these scenarios, "the darkest timeline" arrives when Jeff roles a "1" and Troy has to go to the door.

In the brief moment Troy is gone, the gun in Annie's purse has gone off and shot Pierce in the leg and Britta dropped the joint she was "secretly" smoking, setting the apartment on fire.

The episode ends with a tag scene set in what Abed calls "the darkest timeline"

• Pierce died from his gun shot wound.  
• Shirley is alcoholic.
• Annie is confined to a psychiatric hospital
• Jeff lost an arm in the fire
• Troy has no larynx after trying to eat the troll doll Pierce gave him.  
• Britta puts a blue streak in her hair

Abed made the group goatees out of felt as indicators of their evil nature (like Spock in the Star Trek episode "Mirror Mirror").  

So that's one "darkest timeline", the fictional one from a TV show.

Then there's the other "darkest timeline", the real one.  The one we're living in.   

Every time I see a story posted on Tik Tok, Twitter, Facebook, etc about some damn thing done by Donald Trump or one of his simpering snivelling syncophants that gives more power to the powerful, more wealth to the wealthy or take away something that actually helps people, I will inevitably see this comment:

"This is definitely the darkest timeline."

Every single day I hear something that seems to me the worst possible outcome.  

• A.I. is coming to take all our water and electricity and then kill us all.
• This weekend, my news feeds were blowing up with stories about A.I. run amuck, doing shit we didn't tell it to do.
• Reps from Google and Anthropic are all "My God! What have we done?" If the people who created A.I. are worried, I'm thinking there may be something to worry about. 
• Nah, there's nothing to worry about! Speaker of the House Mike Johnson doesn't think Congress needs to do anything about A.I. and that the tech companies know best about how to handle things.
• Communities are super stressed out by the demands for water and electricity caused by A.I. data centers.  The tech bros building these centers are carving out sweetheart deals to avoid paying taxes, contributing nothing to the local infrastructure. They only take and take and give nothing back.
• Donald Trump of course thinks A.I. data centers are the wave of the future and any community that doesn't want a data center wants to be poor and stupid.
• Women's rights are being curtailed. 
• In some states, draconian anti-abortion laws are so broadly written, women are being charged with murder if they have a miscarriage.
• There are states where if a woman gets pregant due to being raped and she decides to get an abortion, she can go to prison longer than the man who raped her.
• There's a petition on change.org to repeal the 19th amendment (that gave women the right to vote).
• The Department of Labor recently ruled that a female sailor being raped on a ship was not a "crime" but a "workplace injury".   
• Good news: the murder rate is down. Except for women being murdered in domestic violence events.   
• A war widow was denied benefits for her dead husband because whatever he died in, Congress never declared it a war.  
• I could go on but let's just sum up: it sucks to be a woman in Trump's America! 
• ICE is scooping up people for looking like they MIGHT be illegal.
• Remember the premise that ICE was focusing only on the worst of the worst, the illegal immigrants commiting crimes?  Yeah, I never believed that either.
• And the net has widened with actual citizens being scooped up for the temerity of looking like they might be illegal.  In other words, brown skin.
• That includes arresting a woman who was a Native American. OK, I'll bite: where the fuck are they going to deport a Native American?
• ICE wants electric shock gloves. (They looked cool in the Land's End catalog?) 
• ICE is buying robot dogs. (Because real dogs will not put up with these fuckers.) 
• There are threats to send ICE to the polls this November.
• The war Trump started with Iran continues to be a mess.
• People who know better tried to tell him that the idea that Iran was on the verge on having a nuclear weapon any minute now was bullshit. They had facts, figures, graphs!
• Trump said his gut told him different and here we are 6+ months later in a quagmire of chaos that shows no signs of ending.  
• It is no surprise that the war with no definable plan for ending had no definable reason for even fucking starting other than Trump felt like it.
• These fuckers cannot even agree if it's a war. When Li'l Donnie and Prickly Pete want to get all macho and tough, it's WAR! When they want to downplay that what's happening is not that big of a deal, it's a conflict or some other bullshit. (See above for how widows are being fucked over by this gamesmanship over wording.)  
• The price of food, gas and damn it, EVERYTHING keeps going up.
• Trump will tell anyone who will listen than prices are DOWN.
• He also insists his poll numbers are UP and any polls that say otherwise are fake.
• How can his poll numbers possibly be down when Natalie Harp keeps showing him print outs from the internet on what a fantastic job he's doing?

Last week, the Republican Party staged a Mid-Term Convention, what they described as a "Trumpapalooza" to celebrate their lord and savior and praise him for all the good things he's done for our country.

And if the party didn't praise him enough, Li'l Donnie spent two nights taking up the slack, extolling just how GREAT everything is, how prices are DOWN, not up, that America is strong and respected and blah blah blah.

Funny, my grocery bill is certainly not the fuck going down.

I look at the clown car antics of those in charge of our government and I do NOT feel strong or respected.

Do I need to go on? 

It feels like the darkest timeline to me.  

Let me use TV to offer some context.  

In last week's season finale of The Librarians: The Next Chapter (see yesterday's Tuesday TV Touchbase), Merlin seeks to go back in time and through the use of raw, unchecked power make Camelot great again and prevent it's fall. 

By the time Merlin is done, a lot of people are dead and Camelot is shattered into ruins.  He causes the very downfall he professed to want to stop.  

I feel like that's where Trump and those in the MAGA movement are heading, employing raw, unchecked power to force America back to whatever they perceive as greatness and to force the rest of the world to acquiesce to that vision.

Every step these miscreants take is one step closer to a deeper and lasting misery and closer to the American dream being shattered into ruins.  

Honest to God, every day in this reality brings me to the conclusion that yes, "This is definitely the darkest timeline."

But here is a scary thought: as dark as things feel now, what if they can become even darker still?

"This is definitely the darkest timeline?" 

Fuck me but I don't think Trump and the minions in his government and his compliant corporate stooges have actually reached the bottom yet.

OK, this is a bummer of a note to end on.

I need a puppy! 

Fine, that helps a little bit. 

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Tomorrow on the blog: comic books!