9.3.2026 – extraordinary

extraordinary
becomes ordinary
through repetition

First off, yes I can count and there are 6 syllables in extraordinary.

My blog, my rules (anyone else remember the Australian TV show, The Librarians?) …. but I digress.

Today’s haiku is adapted from the passage in the Wall Street Journal Opinion Piece, The Art of the Self-Deal (download pdf of article) by one time Ronald Reagan speech writer, Peggy Noonan (which used to count as Republican Royalty) where Ms. Noonan writes about Trump-era corruption:

We’ll quickly posit what we mean by Trump-era corruption. I see two general areas, personal enrichment and the use of government to satisfy private goals.

The personal-enrichment part is suggested by recent and frequent reports showing that Mr. Trump’s net worth, and that of his family, has surged dramatically in his second term. This isn’t just wealthy folks seeing their stocks go up: Trump businesses have developed positions in industries over which the administration exercises power.

And there’s the sheer scale: The extraordinary becomes ordinary through repetition; scandals add up and become a blur, not a call to action. But the country pays a cost for all this. Institutionally, everything happening today sets a precedent. Every abuse we accept widens the range of possible misbehavior for the next administration.

As always, the whole world is watching. What it has seen lowers the esteem in which it formally (if grudgingly) held Americans. It embarrasses us before the world. It hurts our heart a little. We were the morally rectitudinous Doughboy GI Marshall Planning JFK and Ronnie People who made the wall come down. We did our best each generation to be equal to our reputation, or at least to have some class. There are foreign-policy implications to all this. Some day we’ll need friends and see only the satisfied spite of the previously jealous.

Nothing good comes from this. When corruption is allowed, it governs not today but tomorrow too.

The extraordinary becomes ordinary through repetition.

Nothing good comes from this.

When I think that we are already so worn out with all of this and there two years to go, the bearable, in the face the extraordinary becoming ordinary through repetition becomes un bearable.

I can no longer see any light at the end of the tunnel.

I cannot imagine a light at then end of the tunnel.

I cannot even see the tunnerl.

All I can see the end of the movie, The Planer of the Apes.

Charleton Heston character, Taylor, rides along the ocean to find what is left of the Statue of Liberty and he realizes that all the technology that was supposed to send him off into space and bring him back home worked.

Taylor was home.

But while Taylor was gone, the World went a little crazy and a destroyed itself as it once was.

The unthinkable had been become thinkable.

All Taylor could do was pound his fist on the sand in frustration.

And say, “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

I watch the news.

I read the news.

And I pound the sand.

And I say, You maniacs!

And I say, You blew it up!

And I say, Ah, damn you!

You knew what you were doing and you did it anyway.

Right now I that’s what I see when I look for any glimmer of light at the end of any tunnel.