Living in Reality

Well, Wafers, here we are: launched into the next 300 posts. Meanwhile, we look around, and we see a country sinking into degradation and despair. At the helm, a kind of cartoon character, who doesn't really know what he's doing. There is perhaps some coherence to his domestic policy, which can probably be summarized as "Up with the rich, down with the poor, and let's snuff out the middle class, while we're at it." As for foreign policy, it's little more than chaos: ad hoc, shoot from the hip. Most of it would seem to be posturing. It's not clear that any foreign power takes us seriously anymore; the president comes off like a three-year-old child waving around a bazooka. Russia and China astutely bide their time; they understand that the US is unraveling, and that someone else will fill the power vacuum left in America's wake. Geopolitics has its own techtonic plates, after all.

Probably, the only people who still believe in America are Americans. 96% of Trump voters, recently polled, said they would vote for him again, because he is going to Make Us Great Again. But the progs believe in America as well, if only we could get different leadership. So they flail around, stage ineffectual marches, talk of Comey and Russia and impeachment, believe their own rhetoric. They don't seem to understand that impeachment doesn't mean, thrown out of office (Clinton was impeached; BFD). The notion that America can be saved at this stage of the game ignores the structural forces, 400 years old, that have brought it to this precipitous point in time, and in history. In 1953, the great Southern historian, C. Vann Woodward, wrote that no nation that bases its way of life on a single economic formation can last. He was talking about the antebellum South, of course, but also about the go-go capitalism of the North. America paid no attention to the few, but important, voices that were saying this, and so finally we have hit a wall, and have nowhere to go.

The idea that any of this can be reversed also ignores the overwhelming testimony of the past, that no civilization lasts forever. But the progs slog on, unwilling to let two little words enter their consciousness: "It's over." This denial only helps to accelerate our decline. We thus have a situation in which 323 million people are living in fantasy, and 171 in reality. I guess Disneyland is the final phase of American civilization, as we drift off into la la land. This is a scenario that no one, not even Vann Woodward, could have anticipated. There is something terribly sad about it, when all is said and done, and incredibly stupid as well.

Wafers have chosen a different path, namely, living in reality. This, I argued in Spinning Straw Into Gold, is the true success in life. Everything else is bullshit. It may not be a great reality, of course, but it does have one advantage over all the other options: it's real. And you know, mis amigos, in today's world, that's no small thing.

-mb