Commentary on the surreal

As shock turns to resignation over another horrific mass shooting, the mass media gorges itself on the tragedy.. This time it's a new record - 49 dead, 6 in ICU and another unknown number maimed or crippled. The motive of the killer still in the midst of being untangled by the 'media sleuths'. And then there is the florid faces of our two presumed presidential candidates in full oratory mode each trying to capitalize on the moment. Was it a result of our overly lenient gun laws? Or was it another instance of another home grown Muslim terrorism? Can these acts of lunacy be stopped by some impossible scheme of barring entry of citizens from entire countries? Was was simply some twisted psychotic response to homosexuality, a (self) hate crime of the first magnitude? The candidates no doubt will tell us.

You have to admit things keep are getting ever weirder. This election is turning out to be something that might have been concocted by a Hollywood screenwriter. The strange, unexpected and unwanted candidacy of Donald Trump as the Grand Old Party's official candidate for the presidency of the US is a descent into the surreal. His unfitness is unparalleled, and it scares the bejesus out of anyone with half a brain including many of the half-witted Republican Party stalwarts .

But to compound the problem we have the Democratic Party foisting off on the voters an unpopular, corporatist, imagination-challenged party hack as their candidate selected autocratically long before the primaries ever really got underway. Furthermore, they pulled out all the stops to make sure a popular progressive challenger was pushed aside.

Have we all given up? We have two candidates each representing a loss of hope from different angles. One is a total charlatan, who himself seems surprised that his shtick has taken him this far - almost to the presidency. He promises a vague return to some ill-defined halcyon past by promising if elected to implement impossible schemes. The other one, a careful an ever-plotting mainstream policy wonk/politician whose charmless style and sense of entitlement, leaves everyone except Demo party acolytes and identity politics driven feminists either bored, disappointed or openly hostile.

• But beyond the sorry and weird 2016 Presidential election this loss of hope can be seen it in other phenomena:You see it in public and political cynical acquiesce to the biggest threat ever facing the life as we know it – human induced global warming. Our chance to really begin to address this profound crisis in an effective way was probably lost two decades ago. Yet judging from public priorities we are still. incapable of really seriously invoking adequate mitigation measures and enduring the economic dislocation these measures will involve. In fact one entire political party categorically denies a problem even exists.

• You see it as the ever-wobbly global economy run on a mode of production based on resource and labor exploitation leaving half of the ever expanding world population in abject poverty while most of the new wealth flows ever upwards to a small ruling elite of millionaires and billionaires. Some of them see the handwriting on the wall, but most are engaged in a several decades long one-sided class war.

• You see it in the embrace of demagogues like Donald Trump in the US and Marie LePen in France and the emerging strength of the far-right in eastern Europe. Such actors use the classic emotional political levers of hate, jingoism and racism offering simplistic solutions to complex problems that always involves xenophobic neofascist scapegoating.

• You see in the passionate embrace of the most reactionary and brittle interpretations of major world religions, the most dangerous being Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi Muslims, Israel's ultra orthodox Jews and American right wing evangelicals. This unfolding renaissance of religious fundamentalism is resulting in a scourge of terrorism, violent insurgencies and brutal suppression of rights.

• You see it as the inability of nuclear weapon armed nations to cooperate on some fundamental level and to go beyond primitive hegemonic competition even as full scale war with nuclear weapons amounts to global suicidal. Geopolitical gamesmanship still reigns supreme.

• You see it in popular culture as a constant outpouring of movies, graphic novels and computer games involving acquiescence to a violent, hopeless, dismal dysotopian future, or else as escapist CGA-driven fantasies of future intergalactic warfare as if war as we know it is inescapable throughout the entire universe.

As we plow deeper into this new millennium the stakes are getting ever higher. Yet how could the stakes get any higher than they became after the advent of nuclear weapons? While these doomsday devices so far have only been used once (well twice actually), we have come very close several times to again using them (accidentally or intentionally) and initiating a nuclear apocalypse. Paradoxically in the past, the Cold War years, their very existence discouraged such a war, since the two major adversaries more or less were equally armed and knew a 'nuclear exchange ' would have ended badly for both sides – and for human civilization - Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Yet these quintessentially evil devices still exist abundantly and are even scheduled to be 'modernized' by the US and China.

While this horror beyond imaging has been hovered over us for over half a century, another slowly unfolding crisis is now taking center stage: global warming. Yet the public for the most part does not place it high on their list of things to demand that their politicians 'fix' – hence procrastination continues. Only one candidate for US president even systematically mentioned it and now he is gone. Yet no day goes by without another depressing news release of some inexorable change wrought by this rapidly unfolding catastrophe – mass dying of coral reefs, flooding coastal areas and island chains, major droughts, massive loss of ice on both poles, ocean acidification, specie die-offs. The list goes on.

More immediate concerns always dominate and distract. There is always the latest incident of mass carnage, nativist-driven immigration woes, serious economic concerns (like pending recessions/ depressions) and of course 'geopolitics by other means' - localized wars. These stock issues are always easier for politicians to make facile promises on based on their party ideologies and penchant for bullshitting. So these become the issues of the day while the deeper problems are publicly ignored. Admittedly with these 'deeper problems' we have formal global conferences where well informed experts express grave concern and leaders formally sign (usually unenforceable) grand global agreements. But discussion of such larger issues are nowhere to found at election time.

So the deeper question of how to progress as a species never enters the dialogue. And as Kurt Vonnegut used to insert at that end of his great metaphorical sci-fi novels “..and so it goes”.