August 27, 2020
"Information
Clearing House"
- So,
the tumult and the shouting--such as it
was--dies, the Capitalists and the Cronies
depart, still stands this diseased, battered
country, reeling in furious confusion,
justified outrage, passionate nonsense, and
reflex violence as it shifts its focus to
the geeks and freaks--the Bearded Lady,
Sword Swallower, and Pinhead--who’ll parade
their freakish kinks...
No. I
can’t do it any more. There’s no zest, no
satisfaction, no pride in ridiculing an
unmitigated tragedy, and what has happened
to America is a tragedy. To make fun, to
satirize, to cleverly lampoon it, as if
there was a purpose in such ridicule is just
too sad, too grim an exercise to justify.
What’s
changed? Why won’t the old ways of
critiquing our country work any more? It’s
because wit, humor, and irony are devices
used to impel change for the better. They
lose all effect when change is impossible
and essential change is no longer
conceivable in America.
The root
cause is our system--fantasized,
mythologized, sacralized--built on
injustice, inequity, and engineered
privilege, with a profound and tacit
hypocrisy that even its purveyors couldn’t
comprehend. Our foundation was laid on
footings of genocide, slavery and empowered
oligarchy and the nation so based and
created evolved exactly as it had to do.
The last
four years of Trump, has forced into high
relief and placed under spotlights, the
grotesque falsity and ugliness that our
deeply corrupt polity has made hallmarks of
our failed state. Yet these years of the
Trump Era have altered nothing significant
about us, nor have they deviated from the
dark, sinister character of our notorious
history. Their dull, dense and banal evil
were the inevitable result of decades of raw
crime that went before.
What they
have
done--in their bald vulgarity, in their
gallumphing, puerile hubris, their refusal
to mask our historic amorality with fulsome,
exculpatory rhetoric and paeans of high
spiritual purpose--is to advertise in grisly
detail the vacuous arrogance, blatant
cruelty, bottomless avarice, and brazen,
bullying aggression that has insulted,
violated, and alienated the world.
It is
psychological fact that when the gap yawns
too wide between what is asserted and
reality, when a description clearly no
longer matches an object, when what is said
bears no relation to what is experienced,
then the faith they’re intended to bolster
evaporates and is gone. This is what has
happened in America. From our beginning,
our Exceptionalist mythology, with its
heroic gospel, its philosophical poetry and
gorgeous, vital imagery had kept its iron
lock on the minds and hearts of a vast
majority of us. It has taken only one
lifetime for it to be exposed, decoded, and
sprung.
Americans,
long taught that they were a superior people
in the most just, honorable, wise, heroic
nation on earth have had their faith
battered and broken, gradually, against
their will, by decades of crime and folly,
with each new outrage and imbecility
hard-sold to them as what it was not: an
action of the most heroic humane kind, for
the most admirable of motives.
Perfected
in World Wars I and II, sustained with
difficulty in Korea, it began to rapidly
unravel in Vietnam, and the blatant, bloody
fiascos of Aghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria
and--diplomatically--Iran, have proven the
myth a maudlin yarn of bathetic fiction.
Only ignorant, blind, propagandized boobs
and kooky xenophobes still cling to the gory
fairy tale of Exceptionalism and the dirty
joke of America’s purity and nobility it
trumpeted to the world.
Concurrent
with the bloody amorality of America all
over the earth, as our government partnered
with and coddled dozens of the most brutal,
vile, murderous maniacs ever to live, arming
their police states, death squads, torture
regimes, and mercenary jihadis, the myth was
used to hoodwink and impoverish the great
bulk of innocents at home who supported it.
For
generations the economic security of working
people has been actively undermined and
their wages eroded by their own corporate
government. They were told there was no
money for social well-being as they watched
a tiny clique of titans of finance enrich
itself beyond imagination, and obscene
“defense” budgets milk billions via
government fiat for the War Machine to kill
millions of peasant “enemies” in places they
couldn’t find on a map.
Deception
and murder overseas; fraud and crushing
punishment at home: these are the filthy
realities the grotesque fairy tale so long
and diligently concealed from us. That
horror is ended. It’s deep, fatal effects
are not.
The
greatest peril to a state occurs when its
people no longer believe that it represents
them. When that faith fails, as it did in
Periclean Athens, in late imperial Rome,
Republican Spain, and Weimar Germany, state
machinery seizes up, its authority
dissolves, and there is war in the streets.
That we are nearing such a point is made
obvious by the bitter polarity and violent
opposition between Trump and anti-Trump
factions, but also in a deeper, more
dangerous division between the tyrannical,
wealthy oligarchy that owns the country and
demands endless war and American hegemony,
and the great majority that lives as
economic victims of that insane ruling
clique.
Now, faced
with by far the most ominous sociopolitical
disfunction of our modern history, and with
the overlay of the unknown destructive
potential of Coronavirus and the certainty
of inexorable climate catastrophe already
evident, we are given the Presidential
election of 2020, hyped to the max by
solemn, phony politicians and hysterical
media flacks, packaged as if it addressed,
in any way, the interlocking complex of
impending disasters.
The
absurdist commedia del arte of two old,
ridiculously inept, and grossly impaired
buffoons heading two sick cadres of leased
political whores who jointly serve the
.0001%, is the memento mori of America.
Regardless of the outcome of this sorry
farce, the end of the country in any
recognizable form will be accelerated, fast
tracked to implosion.
As in any
natural process, disintegration will not be
sudden or immediate. Dissolution may take
as long as creation. As it proceeds,
Americans will suffer and their suffering
will be intense, acute and inescapable.
They will grope and grasp for answers,
remedies, fixes, and find none. They have
been schooled that all problems have
solutions and can be overcome. It is not
so. Their myth deceived them.
The end of Rome
ushered in a thousand years of darkness in
Europe and nothing could prevent it but
precedents are meaningless. Modern
countries and cultures do not disappear in
failure or even war, nor do entire peoples.
Matter, says science, is neither created nor
destroyed. When a great nation fails and
falls apart, there remains the eternal
resilience of the life force, which is
unending. That force will always be with
us.
