Who are you? What do you want? Where are you going? Whom do you serve – and whom do you trust?! – TV Series Crusade

I’m an American, of mostly Anglo-English descent, who mostly wants to be left alone to pursue happiness and a modicum of fame as a writer of historical or comic fiction. Frankly, if I am going anywhere, it’s slightly crazy, and as for whom I serve, my family, good friends and close neighbors, more or less in that order. As for whom I trust …

Not as many as I once did. One by one by one, the people and institutions which I once assumed to be competent, honest, and worthy of my trust and respect have revealed themselves to be corrupt, shallow, incompetent, partisan and cynical users of those ordinary American citizens like me.

In my personal estimation, the nation institution who has fallen the farthest and most precipitously has been the FBI. I’ve been aware that for decades the general opinion was that J. Edgar stayed at the helm of that agency mostly because he had the goods on just about every person of note in politics. A lot of the FBI’s fame came from the man’s noted skill at PR, and years of mythologizing in radio, television and the movies. As long as his agency appeared to be a competent and impartial investigating authority, it didn’t seem that anyone in the outside world minded very much the means by which Hoover kept his agency going. But the series of flat-footed failures and failings, coupled with the decidedly partisan anti-Trump actions in the last four years, culminating with fitting a frame around General Flynn. Well, there you go – a good reputation for nearly a century of dedicated crime-fighting, all destroyed in a few years. Frankly, were I ever on a jury having to render a judgement in a matter involving testimony from an FBI agent or facility, I’d discount that testimony from the first word.

Who else has fallen almost as fast in my estimation? Most mainstream news organizations. The first cracks in my wall of credibility occurred during GW Bush’s first term, widened when Dan Rather perpetuated a political hit with the TANG memo, crumbled substantially when the establishment media all but dragged the juggernaut of Barak Obama over the finish line – not once, but twice. There was also my experience with the Tea Party, where for our well-founded concern regarding fiscal responsibility and fidelity to the Constitution, a bunch of otherwise inoffensive, middle-class citizens (and most of us were quite well-educated, honestly) got called bigoted, racist, stupid hicks by press creatures like Anderson Cooper, he of the ‘Teabagger” insult. Hard to believe it, but the mainstream media creatures have gotten even more insulting since that point. Papering over the Biden family corruption and enabling a presidential election to be stolen is only the rotten cherry on the top of the whole rancid sundae. With the result that – well, I don’t believe most of what’s in the American news media, these days, especially if it’s to do with politics. It’s all partisan spin and lies, all the way down. I can hope that eventually most print media and cable channels will die the death as readers and viewers tune out.

There are a couple of other institutions which have zeroed out all trust from and credibility with me, but since I didn’t have much to begin with when it came to professional sports, higher education of the Ivy League or would-be Ivy League persuasion or in mainstream book publishing – no great loss there.

I do, however, confess to being savagely disappointed with the establishment GOP. Whereas I had most usually felt a kind of fond exasperation with them, mostly for being submissive saps when it came to responding to Democrat Party abuse and insult, for treating the Tea Party generally as an inconvenient embarrassment once they realized that Tea Partiers were not going to be obedient little subordinates and money spigots, and GOP presidential noms John McCain and Mitt Romney for being two-faced and cowardly creatures of the political swamp when it came to straight-up defending the interests of the greater nation against Dem corruption. And this time around, sitting on their hands in response to a flagrantly stolen election – that’s disappointing. Not entirely unexpected, but still disappointing. I guess that the swamp is just too rewarding for our incompetent, corrupted so-called elite.

Discuss as you feel moved. Who were you newly disappointed by, in 2020?