It’s a multilayered apocalyptic confection, suitable for a world addicted to dystopian hedonism. Irreconcilable political ideologies, the plutocracy and the new class of “influencers,” have found the perfect recipe for destroying democracy. And yet we go on, one step in front of the other, as if life can continue like this. I’ve avoided these issues in my blog, but not in my mind, so time for a polemic catharsis.
To borrow from Dickens, the human race, like Joseph Marley, now wears the chain it forged in these times, having “made it link by link, and yard by yard; [and] girded it on of [our] own free will, and of [our] own free will [wear] it.” I am now mixing metaphors (chains and cake), flailing for understanding.
We have embraced the kleptocratic emperor who wears no clothes, so transparent in his horrific iniquity and ignorance, but so in sync with popular culture, bolstered by social media. We have become vassals to the very technology we now can no longer live without (somehow we managed before the ubiquity of the smart phone). An agnotological oven has baked the cake and forged the chains.
It’s become a topsy-turvy world where an indoctrinated post-truth minority has turned the Bill of Rights and the Constitution on its ear. The archaic Electoral College was almost toppled by its vulnerability to manipulation in the last election and state Republican bodies are now arranging for the members of the College to become their marionettes.
The ideals of the Democratic Republic are under siege. The Supreme Court was the first to topple. The imagined rights of individuals hijacked those that the social compact of the Constitution was supposed to ensure. One only has to consider the endless jousting over vaccines and mask mandates in a pandemic that has killed one million in the U.S. Or the “rights” of military-style weapon owners transcending the right of society to live safely. Only a morally bankrupt society would tolerate more guns than there are citizens.
The previous administration laid the long-term groundwork for January 6, and its execution on that fateful day using mob psychology. Sedition, an act of a third world country was perpetrated in front of our own eyes, and yet here we are more than a year later still waiting for justice to prevail.
The pandemic hastened supply side issues, labor
shortages, the flooding of the financial markets with liquidity, and now, the
consequence, inflation. This will be
borne on the backs of those who can least afford it with increases in transportation,
housing, and food outweighing other inflation measures. Not discussed much is the elephant in the
room: as the Federal Reserve increases interest rates, the current National
Debt of $30 Trillion will have to be financed at higher interest rates, a self-fulfilling
prophesy (in the absence of higher taxes on the rapidly growing uber-wealthy
class) of either default or still higher inflation in the future so debt can be
retired with depreciated dollars. One only has to look at the US Debt Clock which is a real time pulse of our economy and debt.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine assaults our senses daily, accompanied by a feeling of helplessness without risking a nuclear war. It is far beyond my understanding to discuss this horror in any kind of detail. Finger pointing can be found for whatever position one wants to take. Putin very quickly referred to slaughtered Ukrainians as “fake news.” Doesn’t this resonate? We have forged the chains of gaslighting over years of social media. Four years of the prior administration made “fake news” the centerpiece of how to manage its citizens where truth/lies are fungible according to one’s own belief and feelings. In fact, feelings are as valid as scientific evidence.
How all this will end is anyone’s guess; nothing is beyond the realm of possibility, including a civil war or a nuclear war between East and West. Civil war is “easier” to imagine than the latter, but the April 30 Wall Street Journal carries an opinion article by Peggy Noonan, Putin Really May Break the Nuclear Taboo in Ukraine which goes to that very place. She makes a persuasive argument: “It seems unthinkable, but American leaders’ failure to think about it heightens the risk it will happen.”
Indeed, we have forged the chains, link by link. By weakening democracy here we have emboldened Putin’s actions with heretofore unimaginable consequences.
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| The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, known in the West as Joe-1, on Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk Test Site, in Kazakhstan |
