Wafers-
We have reached a new stage in the evolution of this blog. The senders of hate mail have escalated their hysteria: they are now making death threats. It's not clear to me how serious these are, but it would not be impossible for these folks to track me down and kill me, if they really intended to do it. And they just might, especially since their bitterness is completely over the top. However, it would take a fair amount of work, and there's always the risk of getting caught. So it's hard to predict what will happen. Lots of writers get death threats and are still walking the streets; or so I am told.
Not to be excessively grandiose, but I am reminded of a similar situation in the Germany of the thirties. The Nazis held huge book burnings, and many of the books thrown on the fire were studies in psychoanalysis--Freud, Reich, et al. As some historians have observed, there was an immense irony in all of this, for the Nazis were destroying the very texts that could have helped them, psychologically speaking. Similarly, this blog, with its overall candor and insistence on reality, might just possibly serve to help these folks heal, become genuine human beings, instead of vessels of rage and hatred. Of course, as we all know, they much prefer to hate than to heal, in the same way that the Nazis did. I am certainly not writing these words in the hope of waking them up; I'm not a
complete fool. And it must be added that almost all Americans are living in unreality, although in most cases it doesn't get to the point of making death threats. These guys, I venture to say, are the craziest of the bunch, the far end of the spectrum, and their response to this little essay will surely be additional threats. Inner reflection would be great, but it's not likely a path they will choose to take. Increased hatred is the more likely path. Actually, it's absolutely certain.
Unexpectedly, I felt some degree of compassion for these folks: living in that much pain can't be much fun. But there is, in addition, a larger perspective to consider, namely the one of declinism. In a series of books and articles I have (I believe) convincingly argued that the US is going down the drain; that the only future it has is a dark one; and I have also identified the causes of our decline. But it might be said that the one thing I neglected to emphasize is the poison contained in the individual American soul, multiplied by millions. It's one of the factors that put Mr. Trump into office, after all. He has created a favorable climate for these types of people, and since his inauguration the stats of racial hatred, antisemitism, and the like have taken a decided upturn. Speaking as a declinist, and as an historian, I can say that this sort of soul-poison is an obvious factor in civilizational collapse. The death threats that show up on this blog (and elsewhere) are the tip of the iceberg, as the ship of state increasingly resembles the
Titanic. What future can the country possibly have when a large percentage of its population is steeped in this much anguish (and with 40% living in poverty, to boot)? In that sense, these death-threateners are historical agents, in much the same way that Trumpi is.
There's microcosm and macrocosm, as I've said before, and they operate in tandem. On the macrolevel, when a civilization or empire implodes, it doesn't look pretty. We are witnessing this right now, a nation swimming in chaos and disarray, led by a "leader" who leads by random impulse. On the microlevel, it's equally ugly: the hate-mongers claiming (e.g.) that I spend all my time with Mexican whores, that I suck Jesus' dick(?!), that my days are numbered, and that they intend to put a bullet in my brain. Very often, a Wafer will post an article about some guy who axe-murdered his two-year-old daughter (or whatever); and when you click on the link, you see a face that is pure horror. This is what I imagine the death-threateners on this blog look like, or something close to it. Meanwhile, in the face of this rock-bottom reality, we read about the silly debates of Democratic candidates (1.5 years in advance), or the even sillier left-wing predictions of how the masses are going to rise up, turn everything around. These are anodynes for fools, in the same category as Kim Kardashian's buttocks, and serving a similar function. For me, at least, what comes to mind are the words of Kurt Vonnegut: "There's a shit storm coming." What he he forgot to add was that the death-threateners are the shit in the eye of the storm; the vanguard, if you will, of a nation bereft of hope, whistling in the dark, and perched on the edge of an abyss.
-mb
