My Year in Springfield

Not Springfield, Massachusetts, where I was born and partly raised and where I spent more time than I would've liked this past year due to the passing of my mom...but rather THE Springfield...the most famous Springfield of all, located in an anonymous state and home of America's First Family, The Simpsons:
Homer—head of the family, the unleashed id, driven to satisfy his every want and need and never coming to his senses until calamity strikes
Marge—good hearted and nurturing, but a fool for love for Homer so she sublimates all her best instincts to his worst and forgives him way past forgiveness, thus enabling and encouraging him to continue behaving as a child
Bart—the boy as mischief incarnate, forever scheming and flaunting authority, painfully funny at everyone else’s expense
Lisa—conscientious and sensitive with an appreciation of art, music, and science and thus friendless and alienated
Maggie—the baby...the future...wide-eyed and speechless at the world happening all around her and thus rightly addicted to her pacifier

As I announced early in the year, I was going to trade the time I used to spend watching cable news in for watching The Simpsons. With more than 600 episodes in the can spread over the past 30 years, it seemed a good bet that there would always be something if not exactly fresh, at least re-heatable in the offing. It turned out to be much more than that. The Simpson re-runs that became my morning viewing fare (replacing Stephen Colbert) actually transcended freshness to achieve a level of prescience that would've been impressive enough for a so-called trend expert, but for a cartoon show it's positively astonishing. I haven't re-watched every single Simpsons' episode, but it's hard to imagine any other one of them could so capture the trajectory of the Trump Presidency from beginning to the current moment as Trash of the Titans. Check out the 4-minute excerpt below, and marvel as I did at how well the creators anticipated the rudeness, recklessness, and overall wretchedness in utterly uncanny detail. And think hard on this: the Simpson creators did not put this show together after a months or a year of watching Trump in the news...this show was first broadcast in 1998!

"Trash of the Titans" excerpt: