This week, a clear "dignity gap" amidst more botches - war, flu, pools, fans - suggests a faint, nascent shift in momentum back toward we the people. As DC sank into mire, New York came together "as one" - Mamdani: "We find a way" - with a jubilant party for its beloved Knicks, and Chicago marked a dazzling, joyful, Juneteenth launch of an Obama Center with free library, museum, gardens, sledding hill where "hope took root" for the first Black president, and somehow still resides. Meanwhile, the regime tried to sell a fragile Iran deal deemed "the worst foreign policy blunder in decade" that achieved none of their goals, prompted Iran to claim "total victory," and led Andy Borowitz to report the Ayatollah had named Trump "Employee of the Month." Now a newly empowered Iran will control the Hormuz Strait, levy new fees, see sanctions lifted, get a $300 billion infrastructure fund that makes Obama's 2015 pay-out pale, and be free to keep building its nuclear stockpiles and repressing its people, all at the cost of thousands of lives including 175 Iranian schoolgirls and global economic mayhem. The surreal bonus: In "the greatest diplomatic troll" ever, France's Macron got Trump, stunned by gold and ignorant of history, to sign the MOU at Versailles, where World-War-I Allies forced Germany to sign "one of the most famous surrender documents in history.”With it all, a still-homicidal, hold-my-beer Israel continued bombing and killing civilians in Lebanon, and US-Iran talks were (again) cancelled. Other fails, less lethal, often cringey, kept coming. Again playing the buffoon on the world stage at the G7 summit, where he appeared dazed and confused before chatting leaders, he claimed Italy Premier Giorgia Meloni had “begged me to take a picture with her!" Meloni, fed up, swiftly retorted on social media that she was "astonished" by a claim that was "completely made up" (America nods wearily), she has no idea why he "behaves like this," and "Italy, and I, do not beg." Then Italy's foreign minister cancelled an upcoming trip here, noting Trump, "whether out of intent or ineptitude," has managed with "his inappropriate outbursts," to make the U.S. "unpopular across the entire European continent" - "no easy feat." Sigh. Too much winning.A flu outbreak hit 150 recruits training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas weeks after manly dry-drunk Christo-fascist Pete Hegseth, declaring "Your body, your faith and your convictions are not negotiable," said he was “restoring freedom" by ending mandatory flu vaccines, ”absurd overreaching mandates (that) weaken our war-fighting capabilities." New viewership data for the Freedom 250 cage fight - Trump: ”one of the most exciting days in the History of our fabled White House“ - were not, as predicted, ”Super-Bowl numbers“ of 125.6 million, or Rubio’s giddy billion, but a sad 17 million. Their latest attempt to "make friends" with MAGA hats and cookie bribes to kids in Greenland, home to Make America Go Away hats, was met by scowls and fingers. After Congress shut him out, Trump stole $352 million from the Secret Service for his ballroom. Then he was defeated by a Medal of Honor.And in the running debacle of his $14 million redo of the Lincoln Reflecting pool, surging algae is worse than it's been in years - “Now that the bottom is nice and dark, the algae grows better" - and peeled-off chunks of his "American-flag blue" paint are floating to the surface, loosened by chlorine-neutralizing hydrogen peroxide hapless workers are dumping into it. The historic kicker: The same thing happened - creation of a swamp-green guac pool - at the 2016 Rio Olympics; it made global headlines, easily recalled. But nope, not by all-knowing "Nero on the Potomac." The pattern repeats: Claim something needs improving, ignore experts, screw it up big-time for too much money, blame someone else when it crashes. It will end, God willing, in humanity's "oldest political ritual" - Rome's "condemnation of memory" wherein evildoers' names are chiseled off, statues toppled, their faces hacked, unmade by history.Until then, we get by on whatever slivers of hope, good cheer, good trouble we can find or make. Thursday saw not just a parade but "a jubilee" in New York, a vast, messy, blue and orange spectacle of two million exuberant fans descending on a packed city to salute the dogged Knicks, NBA champions after a 53-year wait. The staggering turnout for their first ticker-tape parade ever, one of the largest for a sports title celebration, caused mostly glad mayhem in lower Manhattan. For a 10 a.m. parade start, thousands camped out overnight, paid others to hold them a place, took red-eye flights, arrived at dawn, inched forward; many more got turned away when viewing pens filled up before 8 a.m and had to settle for watching on TVS in overflowing bars. Buses shut down, subways blocked exits, people caught rides on garbage trucks and crowded friends' balconies.
