My Christmas Letter to Satan

VISIONS OF SUGARPLUMS

I think we could agree it hasn’t been a very good year, not on a personal level, not for the Republic, and not for the world at large. It’s been discouraging. For many of us, it was like we just hit the wall. It was shit or go blind. You couldn’t find your way to the fire exits.

I was going to write a year-end satire piece, called “My Christmas Letter to Satan,” with Santa’s name scratched out, and the dyslexic Satan scribbled in, but the problem was that I couldn’t make it funny. The idea was to get inside Trump’s head, and use his voice, and complain that he wasn’t getting enough credit for all the souls he’d sold to the Devil. I gave up. It was too exhausting.

And then, Christmas Eve with the fuckin’ Serbians, right? As if Zelensky weren’t already enough of a pain in the ass. I could barely keep my eyes open.

How much of this delivery can you mimic, effectively?

Back here, in real life, there was an awful lot of clamor. My partner lost her older sister, in June, and later in the year, I had a piece of my right lung removed. The kind of thing, in both cases, that makes you sit up and take notice, and consider your own mortality. Trump isn’t going to last forever, and neither are any of the rest of us. It’s a help to put this stuff in perspective. There’s an immediate view, and then there’s the sight line of history, over the horizon. Most of us inflate our importance.

All the same, you can’t help but suspect Satan is making a list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. And he must have a bumper crop, reaping the harvest of the damned. I’m astonished, how many people made reservations. It’s like a Sam’s Club for Faust groupies, line up on Aisle 3 to give Jeffrey Epstein a formaldehyde blowjob.

When we consider the circles of Hell, the 9^th Circle, the innermost, is said to be for treachery. Dante reserves his deepest contempt for betrayal, for bearing false witness, for going back on your word. The faithless: to kin, or country, or hearth. And they’re encased in ice, imprisoned by a frozen waste. It reflects the chill of their hearts. What do we make of this metaphor? That their hearts can never be unlocked, that they’re clapped fast in irons, that they’ll forever be denied warmth. Satan’s grip is cold.

Trump and most of the people in his orbit are greedy muttonheads, and in no serious way ideologues, or even principled. Which isn’t to excuse or mitigate the real and lasting injuries they’ve done - their betrayal of democracy, the paralysis of health and social services, the futility and barbarism of their deportation policies - but to point out that by and large this is about having both feet in the trough. It’s no different, in that sense, from Teapot Dome, but scaled up enormously. Albert Fall, the secretary of the interior, laundered a few hundred thousand in bribes; these guys, we’re talking literal billions.

The difference is of course crypto. And the difference in both scale and effect is that trading in crypto puts you in bed with terrorists and state sponsors of terrorism, arms dealers, mob oligarchs, and the cartels, who are all in it for the same advantage, the unregulated transfer of dirty money. This is in fact the entire raison d’etre of crypto. It exists in a parallel, shape-shifting universe.

I think you can make a good case that the administration’s anti-democratic maneuvers are designed on the one hand as a diversion - Oh, look, a squirrel - and on the other to get around regulatory oversight, and establish gangster capitalism as their default mechanism. In other words, to reinvent the government itself as a criminal enterprise, and clear away any and all obstacles, so they can make damn sure it’s not a level playing field.

I wish I could say I believed in Hell. I wish I thought these reptilian bastards would be held prisoner in the Devil’s icy fist, but I’m afraid we’ll have to settle for something more prosaic and worldly, just as their crimes turn out to be nothing very original, the same old Pigeon Drop, with a digital wallet. If they suffer any actual consequences at all. Let’s face it, they may get away with looting the public trust and corporate capital.

In this one thing, at least, Trump has gotten the biggest ask on his Christmas list. We’re all in a fury. No matter where you turn, you can’t escape.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.