A story appeared last week in the Boston Globe that Whitey Bulger was put in solitary confinement for “sexual activity.”

Sexual activity? Whitey managed to get himself a girl inside the prison?

It turns out that he was only jerking off at 3:00 in the morning in his jail cell.[1] For this he got 30 days in solitary, as well as had commissary and e-mail privileges revoked for 120 days, and had his personal property confiscated for 30 days.

Regardless of what you think of Whitey Bulger, this demonstrates some of what is wrong with our prison system. First of all, solitary confinement is considered torture by a number of human rights organizations, and its overuse in the American prison system as a reflexive form of crowd control has been well document. Second of all, they won’t let a prisoner get a little sexual release in his own jail cell at 3:00 in the morning without that becoming a crime? I’m surprised that Whitey can still get it up at his age.

There are so many things wrong with the United States right now. An old man jerking off in his jail cell at 3:00 in the morning is not one of them.

So, today is Super Tuesday, and today millions of voters will be jerking the lever for that Superjerk, Donald J. Trump. He will probably be the landslide winner on the Republican side of the ledger today.

This is a watershed moment for me, as I realize once again how far out of the mainstream my own political thinking is.

I experience one of these moments before. It was November4, 1980, and I was recently graduated from the University of Massachusetts. I had just arrived in North Carolina to spend a year as a VISTA volunteer working at North State Legal Services in Pittsboro. In any case, on that day Ronald Reagan won a landslide election to become the 40^th President of the United States. Reagan carried every state except for Minnesota, Mondale’s home state, Georgia, Carter’s home state, the District of Columbia and a couple of others. Reagan even carried my home state of Massachusetts – albeit not by much – the state that had been so proud to be the only state not to vote for Richard Nixon in 1972.

Reagan was the “Great Communicator,” the savior of the Republican party, the guy who was going to bring ha “new day” to America.

I saw mostly an empty suit, a kind of simpleton with a simple message and some smarmy “aw shucks” kind of charm. But the leader of the free world? God help us all.

My opinion of Reagan hasn’t changed much over the years, and I see his presidency as one that was rife with hypocrisy and did a lot of damage to the United States. But he’s still revered as this magical President by his acolytes on the Right. Regan began the great movement towards anti-intellectualism in American public policy, which has raged unabated to this day.

And now we have Donald Trump. I mean, I can see that this guy can be occasionally entertaining if one doesn’t take him seriously. But there are millions of Americans who are taking this poster child for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, this boorish jerk of a bully, this serial liar, this over the top demagogue as a serious contender for the Presidency of the United States.

Yesterday, Donald Trump claimed that he failed to distance himself from former KKK Grand Wizard and Republican Senatorial Candidate David Duke and Duke’s endorsement of him because he had a “lousy earpiece” and didn’t properly hear the question. Yeah, and the dog ate my homework. That is so lame and so not credible, and so typical for Trump. Has this man ever taken responsibility for anything?

I’m living in an alternate universe right now, one where propaganda and red meat and the vitriol of right wing talk radio and Fox News has distorted this country beyond recognition. I mean, there are not many Republicans up here in the Bay State, but the ones that we do have here are voting for this moron en masse, at least if the polls are to be believed. And the polls have been pretty close this year, for once.

It’s like the voters of Super Tuesday are collectively doing a circle jerk in a proverbial jail cell at 3:00 in the morning.

[1]Talk of masturbation in the news media is apparently so verboten that the word can’t be used in many periodicals. Granted that the discussion is a little bit indelicate, but it’s only sex, people. It’s about something that most of us have been doing, in one form or another, since we were 13 years old.