The Slide to Disaster Quickens
We are so accustomed to the constant tempo of outrageous action and lethal inaction in America that we fail to note the acceleration and the continuous increase in momentum. This momentum is the force of history, but that term is too grandiose, obscuring its day-to-day reality.
All actions have consequences as do all failures to act when action is required. Those consequences, positive and negative of action and inaction, build our future.
In American society, we only see this in abstract polling results on very targeted political topics or, broadly, in the percentage of the population that sees things going in the right direction or the wrong direction nationally. In the latest such pole, AP-NORC found 80% see things going in the wrong direction.
But of course, we all knew that. Even the immovable Trumpists who are reactionary and suffering from social psychosis know this and amplify the insanity by doubling down on conspiracies and media produced lies. The mindset of people drawn to extremist, fear-based groups uses this to build their identity as threatened. They expect to lose and, so, deny responsibility for the evil they advocate while retaining status as the genuinely oppressed ‘Americans.’ That is safe. If they can succeed in oppressing any others, it is icing on the cake.
Like most Americans, they have no interest in history, past or future. And they are safely corralled in a constructed present by the limits of their language. We all struggle with this limitation that has removed all options but extreme capitalism and oligarchy that does not even pretend to be representative but is labeled exceptional. Only the current rapidly failing reality is valid.
This bizarrely limited language is why Joe Biden, an enthusiastic architect of our predatory capitalist, imperialist, police state, is our only hope. Against a mentally ill, incompetent, and vicious usurper of the presidency, the only option is to return to the old system and hope something changes.
We have to play the cards dealt. Even the people unable to grasp what they don’t know about the losses to our language in the last forty years, know that we are screwed. It is all broken, but options address only the symptoms. We have no words for what we must-have for our future.
This sticky problem of managing our language, far more profound and fundamental than the US concept of ‘free speech’ is my primary theme over the last two weeks. This is Reclaiming Our Language and Communities, a rather difficult perspective to describe in the language still available to us.
The US is now an unguided ballistic missile falling at supersonic speed, silently, targeting ourselves. Just as with German V2s falling on London in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, if we are in the wrong place, we will be dead before we hear it arrive.
How we can survive the collateral damage of this is covered in Surviving Trump’s End and implications for the even bigger picture is The Fermi Paradox Hurdle. All of this, believe it or not, is an attempt to plot the battlefields that American and much of our planet has become.
This newsletter will occasionally provide some linkage between the things that I write. Let me know if this is useful.
