PECKERWOOD'S WEEKLY LUNOCRACY POST! For the Week of 1/05/2026!

Trump Idiot Paste Up Photograph by Freegar Net (Mexico)

Political fatigue is not maturity; it’s surrender disguised as self-care. It can feel self-protective. Necessary. The current political and cultural landscape looks like a dystopian hellscape, complete with viciousness, impossible atmospheric heat, and a never-ending despair loop with no discernible end. It is no wonder that this stance, political fatigue, has become an accepted contemporary emotional posture. 

We are told, constantly, soothingly, that disengagement is a wise choice. That tuning out is a healthy form of mental health regulation. They tell us that the real danger is paying too much attention. Look away, they encourage. Save yourself. Really. This framing flatters people who yearn to feel evolved, float above the fray, while opting out of responsibility. It is precisely what authoritarian politics feed on. It is the essential ingredient that this dynamic needs to thrive. It requires that the very people who have the heart and intelligence to change the status quo give up; for them to spiral into apathy or retreat, therefore effectively muting their passion for justice and humanity. 

Fatigue is not a neutral choice. But it is neutralizing. 

Here we go, Again Painting by Emmanuel Akolo

The gargantuan mistake is treating figures like the orange menace as a cult of personality problem rather than a demonic strategic one. Mockery, exhaustion, and ironic distance are not oppositional forces. They are pressure valves. Chaos is not incompetence; it is the fragile, nearly non-existent façade. The spectacle is not a distraction from power. It is how power operates while institutions sputter and stall, and civil normality is quietly stripped for parts.

What has been normalized is not just insanely wild corruption run amok, but sullen accommodation, which is nothing more than acquiescence. Open contempt for the democratic process is reframed as style or talking points. Bombastic authoritarian language is dismissed as quasi-comedic bluster. The conversation is endlessly redirected toward individual coping strategies, while the horrifying underlying project continues uninterrupted.

45/47 did not lower the bar, no matter how many times Americans claim this as a self-soother. He revealed how low it already was and how willing the powerful are to step over it if doing so avoids confrontation. Even more so if it means there is something in it for them. Look no further than the joke that is the debased and impotent Supreme Court. 

The latest egregious lie about Venezuela makes this logic impossible to ignore. It is not about democracy. It is not about concern for citizens. It is about the oil. It always has been about the oil. A resource-rich nation that maintains public control over its wealth is framed as a threat, not because it is uniquely corrupt, but because it represents an idea that cannot be allowed to take root: that natural resources might belong to the people who live on the land above them.

The United States has salivated over Venezuelan oil for decades. What has changed is not the objective, but the ham-fistedness of it all. The current disgraceful moment offers a uniquely corrupt and dimwitted figure willing to say the quiet part out loud. Threaten regime change even when this has never worked out for the United States, not as a last resort, but as a staggering entitlement. It is coercion without shame. Destabilize the government, extract the oil, funnel the money upward, and don’t even pretend it is for the people. 

Women's March 7 by Ricardo Tomasz

The grotesque irony is that this is happening as the inevitability of renewable energy becomes an undeniable conclusion. Instead of planning for transition, fossil fuel interests are accelerating extraction, grabbing what they can while they still can, and unlawfully using the machinery of the state to do it. Democracy becomes disposable and inconvenient the moment it interferes with profit. Sovereignty is tolerated only when it aligns with corporate gluttony. 

This is not a foreign policy failure, although it is clearly a humanitarian one. It is malfeasance on a grand scale; it is foreign policy functioning exactly as empires designed.

And this is where political fatigue becomes lethal and eventually fatal. Because exhaustion teaches people to look away just as the stakes become clearer. Malaise convinces otherwise intelligent, engaged citizens that endurance is key and disengagement is the only way to survive. It wrongly reframes withdrawal as maturity while psychotic power consolidates without resistance.

But fatigue is not absolution. It only serves to clear the path.

History does not punish men like those currently in charge. Not entirely, anyway. 

It punishes societies that learn to live with them.