Introduction. I’ve been working on this post off and on for a while now. It’s not really ready for prime time, but I decided to put it up in its immature state because the debt ceiling charade we’ve just witnessed demonstrates very conclusively that I’m right, and I want to appear somewhat prescient. Also, I’m out of here on vacation in a few days, and I won’t have time to polish it. So, here goes:
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. This has resulted in rather desultory writing on this blog, so I decided to step back and figure out what happened to my mirth. Having done so, I take this opportunity to report back to my readers, if any there be, the true and accurate cause of my mirthless condition. This being a political blog, it should come as no surprise that the source of my ennui is political. In a word, or a few words, I am sort of bummed out because I have come to the reluctant conclusion that the good old USA is going down for the count, and we will probably drag the rest of the world down with us. Now, taking the long run perspective, this is only to be expected. Empires come and, thankfully, empires go, and anyway, as Keynes said, in the long run we’ll all be dead. Still, there is much to be regretted in our coming demise. Some may call me an alarmist, and in any event, a decent respect for the opinion of mankind, etc., so I shall explain myself.
As the all wise Bard said:
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
We’ve missed a lot of flood tides in the past 40 years or so. Unfortunately, human affairs do not have the same regularity as the sea and the moon; we may never, in fact I would argue that we will never, get another flood tide like we got in 2008. It may not have been the highest tide, but it may have been our last chance to escape the shallows and miseries that now most surely await us. Unfortunately, the captain of our barque felt that a due respect for the opinions of the mutineers below decks required that he steer toward the shallows, so here we are.
To go from Shakespeare to Dylan, it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows or to see that a hard rain’s about to fall. (Two for the price of one on that one).
First, a few propositions on which I think we can agree.
People don’t change much and they usually pursue their own interests. Bankers will be bankers, Republicans will be Republicans, and Democrats, alas, will be Democrats. Knowing the actors, we can predict pretty much how they’ll strut and fret their hours on the stage. Or, as the immortal Willie S put it:
There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceased;
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, which in their seeds
And weak beginnings lie intreasured.
Such things become the hatch and brood of time
Basically he’s saying if you know the past, you can make a pretty good guess about the immediate future. I see doom, and I herewith present my case. To make my case the stronger, I will stack the deck against me. Let us assume that things go as well as we can reasonably expect in 2012, but we must further assume that the same actors, still being around, aren’t going to change the way they strut and fret.
So, best case: Obama wins. The House flips to a slight Democratic majority. The Senate, against all odds, retains a nominal Democratic majority, but then, we all know that the Republicans run the Senate unless there are only 36 of them, and there will be many more than that. This is best case reasonable scenario after all, not fantasyland, and lets not even talk about the Supreme Court, to which no non-right wing Obama appointee will ever be confirmed. In other words, the best we can hope for is that Obama serves a second term in a far weaker position than that in which he started his first, with the Republicans still controlling the Congress, since the Democrats would rather let the world explode than even think of damaging the non-existent collegiality of the Senate by barring the filibuster. Moreover, the Republicans have Obama’s number, and we can assume that he will be more than willing to “compromise” in the future as he has in the past. I.e., the Republicans will be imposing policy after 2012, with the added benefit that they will get to blame Obama and the Democrats when their policies fail.
So, given effective, and ever more detached from reality Republican dominance, what can we expect in the coming years.
Lets start with the most important issue of our time. Which issue is that, you may ask? Here’s a hint: the most important issue of any time is the one that the politicians talk about the least. This particlar issue is so important that politicians don’t talk about it at all. Now, think hard. Texas is baking, and they deserve it, with the situation apparently worse since Perry invoked the aid of his god, who apparently is pissed at even Texas for gay marriage.
Australia has finished baking and is now being deluged. Australia, being in many ways our twin, apparently thinks the solution is to kill climate scientists.
The Midwest was savaged by tornadoes, and we here in Connecticut can look forward to a day when we can get fresh squeezed OJ every morning by just stepping outside and picking a few big ones off our very own trees.
This goodly frame bids fair to soon become a sterile promontory, while this most excellent canopy, the air, does not just appear to be a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours, it most definitely is. In response, the paragon of animals, at least the examples of that breed that inhabit our Congress, have deified the incandescent bulb and, rather than even thinking about doing something about our impending doom, they are busying themselves trying to re-pollute the waters of America.
Obama, having done next to nothing about it in his first term, will do nothing about it in his second, and his fellow Democrats will follow his example, with the exception of an unhappy few. Frogs, apparently, do not actually allow themselves to be boiled alive if you turn the temperature up slowly, but it appears that humans do. This video from the Onion (only our humourists pay attention to these things) pretty much sums it up:
Nation’s Climatologists Exhibiting Strange Behavior (Season 1: Ep 5 on IFC)
But lets put the climate aside. After all, everyone else does. Even if we could add a refrigeration unit to the planet we’d still be doomed, if not to the everlasting fires of a superheated planet, at least to being a third world nation. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this than the deal presently being negotiated in Washington to solve the Republican manufactured “debt crisis”. If it’s a crisis at all, it’s a hostage crisis, since the Republicans have held the economy hostage, demanding ransom in order to take what has historically been a completely routine housekeeping measure. How have Obama and the Democrats responded to this hostage taking? By proposing to give the Republicans an even better hostage. The deal apparently is that if the Republicans and the Democrats can’t agree on a way to destroy the economy by November, the Republicans’ preferred plan will automatically become law. Literally no one in Washington is pointing out that the obsession with the deficit is an insane reaction to our current financial woes, except, of course, for lonely voices like Krugman, to whom nobody listens. Nor is anyone pointing out that the war on the poor and elderly further targets the victims of the bankers and rentiers that destroyed our way of life, while leaving those criminals in possession of their booty, along with an additional infusion picked from the pockets of those from whom both the Republicans and Democrats are demanding more “shared sacrifice”.
Thus, we march on, with one party more or less openly advocating for the destruction of the middle class and the creation of an oligarchy, while the other makes mildly protesting bleating noises. The corporate media, right wing radio, and their fellow travelers have brainwashed more than enough people in this country to vote against their own interests. Just to make sure, they’re also busy making it harder for people who might see through the bullshit to actually vote. Distraction and disinformation, spiced with racism (the ingredient that always seems to add a bit of kick) will assure that the distracted multitudes remain “pawns in their game”. Elections will simply be spectacles that give the fixed game a veneer of legitimacy. Real representative democracy cannot emerge from a delusional population.
If we can’t be number one, we can still believe we are, and our overlords will encourage that belief for as long as they’re able. That requires faith, and all evidence points to the further decline of reason in this nation. As always, religion will play a role, but the media may play a much bigger one. I was taken by Al Gore’s analogy in a recent edition of the Rolling Stone. His main concern was global warming, but the observation applies pretty much across the board. He relates how, when he was very young, he was mystified by professional wrestling. He wasn’t sure if it was real or not.
But the most unusual and in some ways most interesting character in these dramas was the referee: Whenever the bad guy committed a gross and obvious violation of the “rules” — such as they were — like using a metal folding chair to smack the good guy in the head, the referee always seemed to be preoccupied with one of the cornermen, or looking the other way. Yet whenever the good guy — after absorbing more abuse and unfairness than any reasonable person could tolerate — committed the slightest infraction, the referee was all over him. The answer to the question “Is it real?” seemed connected to the question of whether the referee was somehow confused about his role: Was he too an entertainer?
That is pretty much the role now being played by most of the news media in refereeing the current wrestling match over whether global warming is “real,” and whether it has any connection to the constant dumping of 90 million tons of heat-trapping emissions into the Earth’s thin shell of atmosphere every 24 hours.
Of course, the press follows the same pattern on most issues, and, quite predictably, the ref is always looking away when the corporate shills are smacking us on the head. Inconvenient truths are ignored as a matter of course. Truthiness rules.
Time is running out. The young people of this nation who have recently entered the job market are finding that there are no jobs waiting for them, in no small part because their anxious elders must work until they die or enter nursing homes. Meanwhile, the American educational system is being destroyed by a right wing that insists that the government can’t do anything right, and proves its proposition by making sure that the system lacks the resources to succeed at anything, including educating our youth, who continue to slip behind the rising generations in Europe and Asia. We no longer make things, and in a few short years, we will no longer be able to design things. Once we are completely useless the money pushers will abandon us for richer pastures, leaving behind the nation they have hollowed out.
We’re doomed.
Still, we can’t let all of this get us down, can we? Empires come and empires go. Ours, which seemed to bid fair to be the Rome to England’s Greece, has turned out to be a flash in the pan, with our Republic, such as it was, surviving for a far briefer time than the Roman variety and our empire collapsing while it is being built. Who knows, our Chinese overlords may not be any worse than those of the Galtian variety. Or, to quote a more modern English bard:
Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle
Don’t grumble, give a whistle
And this’ll help things turn out for the best…And…always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the light side of life…
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