. . . Many of them Incompetent Boobs!

I have tried to find an image that encapsulates what I feel about 2020, and this is the one I settled on only after about ten seconds of deliberation.

I re-read Dr. Laurence Peter's "The Peter Principle," this year, and was going to follow up with "The Prince" by Machiavelli and "What Would Machiavelli Do" by Stanley Bing AND WHY AM I FINDING OUT JUST NOW THAT HE DIED THIS YEAR? These are the books by which 2020 should most be remembered, where we saw both the results of competence and incompetence at the highest levels.

I won't name names. That would just upset people, and lord knows we've had enough upset people on the Internet lately.

And while I'm not surprised to see incompetence and competence at whatever level they show, what did surprise -- or disappoint -- the most this year is how many people I know and care about supported the incompetents.

And this is where it gets complicated. Because I'm sure on other levels, I supported the incompetents. If we look on our bookshelves or in our closets or round and about the cafeteria of belief we store in our skulls, there's bound to be incompetence there, bound up in the fuzziness of love, memory, blindness, what have you.

I, myself, have proved myself incompetent more often than not. And probably have vast areas of incompetence I will yet explore in this thing called life. In fact, as I type evidence of my incompetence is being blared anonymously on social media. I won't own up to it; I am no fool. But it's there, and those in the know will recognize it.

Recognizing it. Maybe that's the key to getting away from our incompetence and boobery, if I can mangle a phrase from Homer Simpson. But that requires humility, and that's getting harder to come by.

I'm sure 2021 will be filled with additional incompetence disguised as whatever you want it to be: Truth-seeking. Bravery. Heroics. But if we're honest, we'll see it. Almost everywhere we look, even if we're looking into the bottles containing our most cherished beliefs.

This eye-roller comes a close second, though. Because "European newspaper" ALWAYS uses US state abbreviations because everyone there knows what they are. Particularly if they're used inconsistently (Ga and PA).

And if this were real, what's the name of the newspaper? They don't provide it because, oh yeah, IT DOESN'T EXIST.

This is the kind of incompetence that makes me chuckle, it's so clumsy.

It irks, though. Because we're going to see this kind of horseshit on repeat and repeat and repeat and REPEAT and I hope Donald Trump runs for president again in 2024 so he can LOSE AGAIN.

But I promised I wasn't going to name names. Oopsie.