I have not posted anything since March of this year. I have left it to other commentators more erudite, informed and skillful as wordsmiths than myself to agonize over our situation. I hope I am proven to be overly pessimistic. But however today's election turns out the overall dynamics that I see I believe will remain in force.
November 6. 2018
Never in my life have I had more
misgivings about the future. We seem to be doomed to bitter hard times whether it's an slow descent or a sudden heart stopping
plunge. Usually it's some poor souls
somewhere else but eventually everyone's turn will come.
Whether it is a climate change driven fire storm or an overheated ocean
spurned Category 5 hurricane, or whether it's street fighters with bandannas
covering their faces hurling rocks and bottles at police or a sudden
bloody ring of carnage wrought by someone armed with an assault
weapon and made crazy by hatred. Whatever it is some form of historical (and preventable) calamity will
eventually track us all down. Across the globe such events
seem to be erupting daily usually in the form of tribal or religious
warfare. And always they are underpinned by an ever sharpening
divide in wealth inequality.
This divide between factions is
becoming increasingly insurmountable with many countries pushing
messy democratic norms aside in favor of autocracy and 'trains running on time 'type solutions.
Everywhere it's the same story the few possessing impossibly vast
stores of wealth use local religious theocrats in conjunction with
home grown demagogues and/or corrupt pols to manipulate the
uneducated and gullible to resist any reasonable and humane approach
to what is essentially an economic problem. This while the planetary
resources are being pushed to their breaking point as the natural
environment is ravaged and consumed. Systematic
unsustainability is ignored in a mad rush to feed capitalism's monstrous appetite for growth. The only future that novelists and
screenwriters can can now imagine are dysotopian nightmares – either sterile, mind controlling Orwellian police states or Mad Max barbarism on a
horizon of empty desolation and dead cities. But never mind that, for the oligarchic overlords
and their well paid minions, science when it cannot be teased into
profitable technology, is ignored even as the warning lights flash
red. Obligatory formalized acknowledgement of the 'climate change' crisis and it's dire implications is duly made but real engagement matching it's degree of seriousness remains impossible.
And to make matters worse a newly
invigorated 21st Century fascism has emerged and is
normalizing itself as a legitimate political faction hiding behind
the frayed banner of nationalism. The traditional mainstream
centrists parties are becoming increasingly irrelevant. And the
traditional left is yet to reformulate itself into something beyond
simply a means of defending the remnants of social programs that
resulted from capitalism's 1930s Keynesian rescue and the heady
pro-labor post WWII years.
The Brit's Tories have been forced to
embrace and enact the self destructive nationalistic insanity of
Brexit supported by a deluded and angry working class, while its own
Labor Party struggles to breath some life back into the tired
discredited chimera of socialism. Here in the US the once
center-right Republican Party, having sold is soul to lingering
racist legacy of the old Confederacy, cynically embrace a dangerous
mountebank. The once merely 'conservative' Grand Old Party that has
moved so far to the right on the political spectrum that even Ronald Reagan is rolling in his
grave. While the Democrats, still dazed and confused as to how they
lost the presidency to such a fraud, are wondering how they allowed
things to go so far 'south' (pun intended). Having long ignored a
critical part of their base, the rural and rust belt trapped white
working class, they now realize that they focused too much on
identity politics and the placating liberals in the professional
middle class. The tone deafness of the Democrats to the reality of
late capitalism and its depredations on the US working class as it
mutated into a heartless trade union hostile globalized version was
not lost on one up and coming gifted demagogue.
When ordinary people become convinced
by glib professional haters that their traditional way of life,
economic livelihood and even physical safety is threatened by
'outsiders', they become mobs or sit by and watch as 'good Germans'.
The reality that these so called 'invaders are' actually just
ordinary people desperately fleeing the horrors of civil war, abject
poverty and gang warfare is lost in the firestorm of hate fueled by
fear and loathing of imaginary demons. We can only hope this fever
will break before all is lost.
