I keep waiting for the punchline. A cosmic punchline, to be specific. Maybe a booming voice from the heavens to drop the gag and clear the smoke, because it sure as hell can’t be real. What kind of sick joke have we wandered into this time? The war in Ukraine—stalemated and bloody, grinding on like a meat grinder with no off switch—set to the dull roar of geopolitics played by armchair generals with more hair dye than brains. Then there’s Palestine, where “genocide” is the polite word we use to describe the meticulous erasure of a people. And all while the U.S. political machinery—once marketed as the Last Bastion of Freedom™—has choked on its own gridlock, content to sip cocktails with the very capital that’s designed the mess. All of it. Every bit of it.
Is this the great cosmic joke? The punchline so dry, so dark, you can barely hear it over the drone strikes and CNBC stock tickers?
Let’s start with Ukraine. It’s 2024, and yet here we are—watching Cold War reruns but in high-def. Russia stumbles into a war it thought would last weeks, but now the landscape is littered with bodies and rusted tanks as far as the eye can see. And what’s on the other side? The West, doling out arms with the subtlety of a blackjack dealer at a casino, waiting to see how many chips they can lose before the house explodes. Everyone’s playing the long game, except for the Ukrainians who don’t have the luxury of games—they’re playing survival. But hey, war is great for business. The defense contractors are licking their chops like they just found out Santa Claus is real and his sack is full of billion-dollar contracts. Cha-ching.
Then we glance toward Palestine. What’s there to say that hasn’t been whitewashed already? Words like “war crimes” and “ethnic cleansing” float around like balloons at a child’s party—except the party’s been over for 75 years, and there’s blood on the floor. The bodies pile up, but somehow it’s never the right time to talk about it. “Complex situation,” they say. It’s about as “complex” as a brick wall hitting you in the face. Israel’s playing chess with bulldozers, while Palestine gets checkers with rocks. And the world watches with a kind of selective amnesia—Oh, is that still happening? Yes, Karen. It’s still happening, and it’s going to keep happening until someone remembers that human rights aren’t an item on a “to-do” list.
And while we’re distracted by the explosions, we’ve got the good ol’ USA trying to be the referee in a game where it lost the whistle years ago. I mean, gridlock politics has always been a joke—two parties, equally corrupt, with the collective foresight of a goldfish on meth. But now it’s a full-on parody. You can’t even get these jokers to agree on funding their own government, let alone tackle climate change or fix healthcare. The elephant and the donkey are so deep into their wrestling match, they don’t even realize they’re both choking on the same chain—the one tied to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, keeping them nice and tame. Don’t worry, folks, democracy’s just taking a nap. For the next 50 years.
But hey, at least the capital’s doing fine, right? Cozy up to it. Pour it a drink. Capital doesn’t care if you’re Republican, Democrat, or a libertarian freak who thinks Bitcoin is the second coming of Jesus. It just wants to be stroked and fed, like a fat, lazy cat that can still somehow land on its feet every time. Hell, it’s already one step ahead. While we’re all doom-scrolling and arguing over whose fault it is that the world’s on fire, capital is already planning its next vacation to Mars. Elon Musk is building rockets while the world burns, and I swear he’s doing it just to rub our faces in it.
The cosmos has to have a punchline for this. There has to be something coming at the end—some grand, twisted laugh from the universe itself. Otherwise, what are we even doing here? Watching atrocities on YouTube while eating takeout. Arguing online in a digital Tower of Babel where everyone’s shouting into the void and no one’s listening. Maybe the joke’s on us.
Or maybe the joke is us.
Cosmic absurdity would be a mercy at this point. A giggle from the gods, some divine laughter rolling down the heavens to let us know it’s all been one big cosmic farce. But we aren’t so lucky. There’s no laugh track. No curtain call. Just the blood-soaked ground and the drone of machines, churning on and on.
What’s the punchline you’re waiting for?