A Christmas Meditation

Merry Xmas Waferinos!

Here is a meditation for the holiday season (and into the next year):

1. The nation is depraved 2. The citizens are debased 3. We are in slo-mo collapse

In terms of understanding the US, these 3 mantras are all you need to know. Feliz Navidad!

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Trauma Nation

Waferinos-

Have recently been listening to talks by Gabor Mate, an honorary Wafer for sure. He's got an hour-long film coming out soon, "The Wisdom of Trauma." He believes that trauma means a disconnection from the self, and healing = reconnecting to your true self. We get disconnected, he says, because it's too painful to be ourself. I thought, this is the story of America.

In one of his short YouTube cuts, he comments on the 2016 Hillary-Trump debates as two traumatized people fighting for the right to govern a traumatized America. These are the people our society rewards with power. And his data as to how sick Americans are, are impressive: rates of addiction, suicide, anxiety, depression, and so on. You folks may remember my list of "ized": weaponized, moronized, digitalized, buffoonized, and so on. Mate would argue that these are the effects of being traumatized.

Of course, Mate's treatment, like all therapy, is individual; politically speaking, the country will remain fucked, with people like Hillary or Trumpalumpi in charge. "Mass therapy," complete with very sick gurus, is a cure worse than the disease. But Mate does offer some help to those who want to get beyond being run by traumatized, unconscious programs.

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Americans Are a Class Act

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-24/lafd-investigating-firefirefighter-accused-of-despicable-act-vaccine-mandate-protest

440

Well, Wafers, our descent into fascism continues at its relentless pace. Every day one reads something online about the headway the GOP is making in this direction. A year from now, Biden will get creamed in the mid-term elections; two years later, Trumpi, with Tulsi Gabbard as his running mate, will hand him his ass on a platter. This blog will remain the only locale where truth is seen as something that has to be corroborated by evidence. Most Americans don't know what evidence is, however, so maybe that won't be any great loss. In the meantime, the Buffoon Index (BI) climbs higher and higher on a daily basis, while OB-GYN wards across the nation are cranking out future morons by the thousands. Myself, I can't help it: from a certain angle, this is a load of fun. Hee hee.

The Tale of a Whale

Well, Wafers, maybe it's a question of dual consciousness. Some of you have suggested that it's possible that more and more Americans are becoming Waferish, at least in part. That is, they realize that the country is finished; that capitalism is a con; and that progress is an illusion. Hard to say. I'm guessing that these Waferian themes have penetrated some American minds on a subliminal level, but that the dominant consciousness is still the ideology of the dominant culture. This would mean that some percentage of the public is undergoing a kind of mental strain, in that these people are of two very conflicting minds. So they mostly remain committed to the American value system, but in Mr. Hyde fashion, there is a dark undertow pulling them in another direction. It may even account for the typical hysteria that Americans display when confronted with serious critiques of the country: the critiques touch a hidden nerve. As to how all this figures into our ongoing national collapse, or whether it makes any difference at all, I don't really know. But imagine this as a collective dream, anticipated by Herman Melville: as the ship of state moves along, the giant tail of an enormous whale rises up out of the sea, and smashes the ship to pieces. You don't have to be Freud to decode that one, I'm guessing.

Changing Americans: 1964 vs. 2021

Who are Americans, today? What makes them tick? What is characteristic of their behavior in 2021?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/19/opinions/philadelphia-train-rape-bystander-effect-filipovic/index.html

Let me know what you think.

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Reality vs. Buffoonery

Wafers-

This is my idea of serious political action:

https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/more-civilians-take-up-arms-in-northeastern-chiapas/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=jeeng

Compare political "action" in America, which consists of a deflated BLM (and the leaders getting rich), a witch-hunt #MeToo (as Woody Allen predicted), Occupy Wall St. theater that changed absolutely nothing, a million useless pussy hats, and so on.

Honestly, what jokes Americans are!

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We've Been Ized!

Wafers-

Speaking of being Ized, I recently realized that while it has taken a bit of time, the American public has been completely Ized, most especially within the last 20 years. Here are the Izes I've counted up; if you can add to this list, please feel free to do so:

-Weaponized -Monetized -Digitalized -Virtualized -Cellfoneized -Moronized -Buffoonized -Consumerized

No wonder the average American doesn't know his/her ass from his/her elbow: with all of these Izes, what else would one expect? All of which means that in one form or another--culturally, socially, politically, economically, and intellectually--the country is going to be pulverized. This Ize will be our last frontier.

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435

Well, we're coming up on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I think I said it all in a previous post, on the legacy of the event, but let me add this helpful book:

https://www.amazon.com/Reign-Terror-Destabilized-America-Produced/dp/1984879774/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3T8U6WP5QTV5O&dchild=1&keywords=reign+of+terror&qid=1631042990&s=books&sprefix=reign+of+terror%2Caps%2C203&sr=1-1

For anyone out there debating whether or not to hit the road: What are you waiting for, the Nuremberg Laws?

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What Is There Left to Say?

There it is, for all the world to see: the shame, the violence, and the incredible stupidity of the United States. It's quite amazing, how we keep repeating the same unworkable formula: attack or invade a country that poses no real threat to us; plan to remake that nation in our image, since obviously, we are the shining city on the hill; ignore the fact that while we've been around for 250 years, Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan have been around for ages; then get handed our asses on a platter, because these yellow and brown folk don't want the great gift we are offering, for some odd reason, and because their spirit is stronger than our technology; pull out in a fog of humiliation, leaving death and disaster in our wake; and then rinse and repeat, start the same absurd cycle somewhere else, having learned absolutely nothing.

Shamed in front of the whole world, much of which is glad we were defeated, and made to look like fools. Truth be told, we are worse than foolish; we are jokes. What is there left to say?

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433

Well, that last thread was a good discussion. I wish, as the Great Seer of the Western Hemisphere (GSWH), and facilitator of the Greatest Blog on Earth (GBOE), that I had some words of wisdom to impart at this point. But--I don't. I can report to you that the antisemitic trollfoons have all but vanished. All I get now is the occasional hit-and-run message along the lines of "Yr a kike, I hate u"--evidence of the great intelligence possessed by these folks. But maybe most of them finally wised up, decided it was pointless to attack someone who can defeat them so easily (after all, without testes they don't exactly pose a serious threat), and found another Jew to annoy. I wish them godspeed. Anyway, let us continue our discussion, recognizing that 99% of the American population is clueless as to what is going on, and forge ahead, a beacon of light in a very dark time, and a very dark nation. A very few will hear us, and quite honestly, that is all we ask.

The Decade of Our Discontent

Wafers-

Perhaps we should call it "death creep." Slowly, slowly, America drifts towards its end. We all feel it on a daily basis: a pandemic that looks like it's here to stay; China rising, replacing us step by step; a high suicide rate among our armed forces, in the context of stupid and meaningless wars; the widening gap between rich and poor; direct human relationships supplanted by digital/virtual ones; and so on (it's a long list). It is said that yes, Rome was invaded, sacked, but the real fall of Rome took the form of imperial overstretch (our problem as well) and what some historians have called "the death of a thousand cuts." It's possible, or even probable, that we shall see another 9/11, or another 2008 (economic crash); but the real work of History tends to be glacial. Millimiter by millimiter, we are going down the drain. Who could have imagined, even 10 years ago, a scenario in which one American tells another to put on a mask, and the offended individual takes out a gun and shoots the first one? And that this scenario would be played out repeatedly? Has it really come to this? Meanwhile, the smartest in the land, the pundits at the NYT and elsewhere, keep telling us that this is temporary; that we shall pull through this. Only a few Cassandras--very few--say the obvious: that by the end of this decade, America will be unrecognizable, a very different sort of country (with or without Trump). Meanwhile, the great mass of people live in a fog, oblivious to an end-of-civilization process that has been repeated many times in the past.

Something I have been arguing since 2000, when I published The Twilight of American Culture: There are two, and only two, ways out: you can leave the country, or you can become a New Monastic Individual. There is no bright future for the US. The lights are slowly going out, and by 2030, things will be very dim. Recognizing this, as very few do, is called Reality.

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431

Well, our previous thread investigated topics such as Pearl Harbor, the vaccine (pro and con), and whether Kamala Harris was a buffoonette. There was also an interesting discussion of the possible idealism of Jefferson et al., and whether the vaunted ideals of the early Republic were merely a cover for a deeper underlying ideal, namely hustling. In all of these crucial debates, Wafers displayed, as usual, brilliance of insight and subtlety of argument. I'm telling you guys, there is no blog like this blog. When I hear of people going to other blogs, I am filled with a great sadness. "Why?" I sometimes cry out loud.

In any case, I think we can all agree that the American empire is drifting, with no coherent purpose. Oswald Spengler, who wrote The Decline of the West a century ago, argued that every civilization was held together spiritually by a central, guiding Idea, in a Platonic sense, and that once that Idea became tarnished or unconvincing, the civilization was on its way out. In our case, the brief debate we had over America as bastion of democracy/freedom vs. America as world epicenter of hustling may be moot, in that "pursuit of happiness" effectively identified--or perhaps we should say conflated--democracy with the opportunity/freedom to amass wealth. A similar ambiguity would seem to be present in the Idea of the American Dream, American Way of Life, etc. In Trumpi we had (have) not merely the apotheosis of hustling, but in fact a full-scale assault on democracy, so we see where things finally wound up. But as Richard Bushman showed many years ago, in From Puritan to Yankee, the seeds of this were planted long ago, in the late 17th century, when the classic definition of virtue--putting the welfare of the community ahead of personal aggrandizement--got turned on its head. (Joyce Appleby makes the same point in Capitalism and a New Social Order, but incorrectly dates the shift to the time of Jefferson). We see this everywhere: Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, for example, a self-described Marxist, turns out to own millions in real estate. She is hardly an anomaly: this is the essence of the American Dream, or Way of Life. Or so it would seem.

The problem is that if the Dream is really about personal aggrandizement, then the nation is doomed; it is perhaps the core reason that we are drifting, because what it really amounts to is that we have no guiding moral purpose. We drift because we have no rudder to guide us, or no compass, if you will. On an individual level, the cost is by now obvious: millions dying by suicide, alcohol, opioids, television, cell phones, and rioting at Wal-Mart sales. At the national level, it takes the form of the government not being able to say what our foreign policy consists of. Indeed, some (few) astute observers have suggested that we have no foreign policy to speak of. Inner and outer, microcosm and macrocosm, reflect each other. Or as Jefferson's contemporary, William Blake, declared,"Earth and all you behold: though it appears without, it is within."

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430

Well, Wafers, we're having a great discussion, but I don' have a lot to add to it at this point. Let me just submit a question that many of you might wish to debate. It's the most important question facing America today, if not the entire planet. Kamala Harris botched her trip to the US-Mex border; now staff members are quitting due to what they claim is her dysfunctional administration. More and more, it's beginning to look like she's incompetent. But this thought occurs to me: what if, besides being incompetent, she is also a buffoonette? Here she is being groomed for the presidency, and may actually be a buffoonette! The consequences of this for the alignment of major power blocs--well, I don' hafta tell you guys what this would mean. So please, let's all weigh in on the subject and see if we can come to some consensus on it. The world is watching.

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429

Well, the descent of the US into irrelevance and complete dysfunction continues apace. Poor Joe, most of his great plans are now on the rocks, or are soon to be. Despite his own descent--into madness, by all reports--Trumpaloni continues to exert a very serious influence on the American political situation. 602,000 Americans have died from covid; the stats of alcoholism, opioid use, and suicide are thru the roof; brutality of the cops is even greater than it was before George Floyd; 'unexplained' massacres now occur on a daily basis; citizens exploit each other, and treat each other like dirt; and in general, the misery of Americans is probably at an all-time high. In addition, the government has no coherent foreign policy; it continues to float without any direction, while Russia and China certainly know what they are doing.

All of this is well-earned karma; Americans are getting exactly what they deserve. They embraced this way of life--radical individualism, every man for himself, hustle your way to fame and fortune, cheer the government on in its imperial wars, believe we can do no wrong, and so on--with great enthusiasm. Now it has turned around to bite us in the ass. We are being punished for our callousness, our cruelty, but the word 'punishment' doesn't really apply, because it assumes the punishee knows what s/he did wrong. Americans don't; they don't connect the dots, partly thanks to gov't propaganda, and partly because they are quite stupid. All of these signs of collapse, such as daily massacres, are 'external', as tho they fell from the skies. Suicides, opioid use, alcoholism--these are supposedly individual problems, as tho there is no pattern to them. There is no awareness that all of the factors I mentioned are all of a piece, and that piece is the American Way of Life. Even our most astute critics (or most of them) never realize this, never manage to point this out. And in addition, this blindness is part of the collapse as well.

So we shall either limp along to our oblivion, a la Biden, or--if Trumpalumpi makes a successful return in 2024--rush toward it, like lemmings to the sea. But avoiding it is no longer an option. We cannot, and we shall not, escape our fate.

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428

The Obama presidency was characterized by 8 years of going nowhere. Obama was little more than a photo-op with pretty speeches. Indeed, he had no moral compass, and no vision for what America could or should be. His 'goal', if one can call it that, was simply to be president. Once that was achieved, he was content to just float on the status quo. In a lot of ways, it was similar to the Clinton presidency, minus the semen-stained dress.

Then came Trumpaloni. A declinist's dream, one might argue, because his notion of saving America was in fact to mount an assault on it. He did a ton of damage, and we are still living in the fallout from that. He could well get reelected in 2024, and get us back on the straightforward collapse track.

What, then, can we say about poor Joe Schmiden? The guy certainly means well, but the drawbacks are obvious. First, he wants the US to recover its world hegemonic role, to be the global leader once again. I don't have to convince readers of this blog that such a goal is a fairy tale par excellence.

Beyond that, however, he has no coherent foreign policy; a fact that many political analysts have already commented on. Internationally speaking, the US is basically adrift.

On the domestic front, let me point to 3 things. First, Biden wants to fight Covid, and has done a fairly decent job (dramatically better than Trumpalumpi, quite obviously). Second, he seeks to promote diversity across the board. Which he has done to a large extent, but there is the question of whether this is window dressing, or real social change. Again, I think readers of this blog know the difference between shit and Shinola, even if Joe and the rest of America do not. Finally, Joe has FDR-type ambitions, which include massive spending on infrastructure and aid for families in need, taxing corporations, and perhaps a few other noble goals. All of this, however, is starting to look like it will be stuck in the mud. Which is not Joe's fault, but the Republicans are having none (or very little) of it, and they seem to be in a position to defeat these plans in the Senate. My prediction is that on the domestic front, deep structural changes are not in our future. As for various protest movements, I think we can already see that they have been about as effective as pussy hats. Across the nation, to take but one example, police departments have larger budgets than they did a year ago. So much for "defunding" the police. America will remain what it is, in other words, as it moves slowly but steadily along the path of social, political, cultural, and economic disintegration.

The difference between the Clinton/Obama/Biden mode of being, and that of Trumponi, is thus the velocity of our disintegration, nothing more. That we could switch to an entirely different trajectory is not an option; way too late for that. The choices are slow disintegration or rapid disintegration. The elections of 2022 and 2024 should clarify how things are going to play out.

Finally, it is not clear how the condition of the American people is going to figure in this drama. Nearly all of them have security as their first priority, and no admin, Dem or GOP, can guarantee that for them. A large percentage of the population, in consequence, doesn't care if we have a democracy or not; for them, that's neither here nor there. Most are angry, scared, desperate, disoriented, and above all--dumb as a bag of hammers. Fundamentally, Americans are a silly people, a frivolous people, with no goal beyond learning how to hustle better. Concepts such as "community" or "society" never cross their feeble minds. I can't say exactly how that will fit into the current disaster, but I am sure that it will, one way or another.

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Temporary Blog Closing

Everyone Please Note: This blog will be closed during May 20-26. I know this will cause great grief, but it can't be helped, as I have to go to DC to meet with other Wafers for the fabulous 7th Annual Wafer Summit Meeting--the meeting to end all meetings. So feel free to post today, May 19, but after that, I ask you to hold off until May 27; after which, we can resume our lively discussion. Thank you all for your patience and understanding.--mb

426

Well, Wafers, that last thread was quite a ride. We seem to have worked through Senor Maher pretty thoroughly, both pro and con; I do believe that wittingly or no, he has been documenting the collapse of the nation. This especially in terms of the sheer stupidity of Americans. We seem to have finally caught up to that iconic film, "Idiocracy," portraying nation of morons 500 years hence, but what in reality was only a few years away. But I do have a few disappointments.

1. Like almost all media pundits, Bill fails to state that the country is finished, despite the fact that this is the obvious reality. 2. As a result, he is not able to connect the dots: that a major factor in our collapse is our collective stupidity. 3. He also is confined to a very limited vocabulary: Americans are dumb. But they are also spineless douchebags, pathetic turkeys, and clueless buffoons. We need an upgrade in nomenclature, in short. 4. I keep waiting for him to say, "Morris Berman has recommended that all Americans be vigorously slapped, as a partial solution to our problems. Let me state here and now that I am in full agreement with this sentiment, and if such a movement will be launched, I intend to be on the front lines."

And so, Wafers, we move on into the future: dark, bleak, violent, and without a lick o' sense. When the president can declare that America will not be overtaken by China, you know we're up to our eyeballs in horse dung. Disneyland lives!

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425

Waferinos-

Well, Derek Chauvin was found guilty--a relief, if not a surprise--and meanwhile, a number of massacres occurred in the wake of this, including the gunning down of black men by white cops. You'd think the cops would want to curb their enthusiasm as a result of the verdict, but no: the death toll kept going up. I doubt this bodes well for the current "defund the police" movements going on, and the odds are that when the dust settles, any changes to American law enforcement will be cosmetic at best. As I've said many times before, substantive change in the US, in a large variety of contexts (not just law enforcement), would require a whole different way of life: a different set of values, a different population, and finally a different country. Since there is no way that can happen, short of the complete disintegration of America, cosmetic changes are all we can expect, at least in the short run.

As for the long run: well, I've also said that America will be a very different country in 2030 than it is now. In this case, by "different," I mean "worse." And I don't doubt that for a minute. But if we were to look 20 years down the line...I don't have a crystal ball, but it's possible that by then, secessionist movements will have been successful, and the US will literally be broken down into various independent regions. Some of these will not be particularly benevolent; I'm guessing Texas will be very different from Vermont, for example. In terms of substantive change, we would be able to say that in such a decentralized situation, the American empire, and American imperialism, would be finished--a relief to most of the world. But one would also hope that the mentality of hustling would be finished, and that perhaps a few of these independent regions might wish to emulate the world view and way of life of Native Americans, most of whom we destroyed. A return to the values of craft, community, true friendship, a homeostatic economy (de-growth or no-growth), care for the environment, and perhaps trust in the Great Spirit, however that may be defined. Sustainability at all levels, in short, and a way of life that honors human dignity rather than the possession of objects. And certainly, a redefinition of the word "wealth."

Hey, a man can dream.

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A Path with a Heart

Waferinos-

Many of you have probably read the Carlos Castaneda series about his apprenticeship to a Yaqui Indian shaman, "Don Juan." Although Carlos' critics attacked the books for being fictional, I personally know from an inside source that the first two in the series were real, although Don Juan was actually living on the outskirts of LA, and that Carlos would visit him on weekends while he was a student at UCLA. That notwithstanding, many of us were taken by the epistemological challenge posed by the first book (late sixties), The Teachings of Don Juan. Carlos began with a quote from DJ:

"Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path."

As I demonstrate in Why America Failed,settlers on the American continent, several centuries ago, came to Robert Frost's "Road Not Taken," and sad to say, they, and what became the United States, took the path without a heart. And so we are witnessing the results today; the chickens are coming home to roost. Not only are we killing each other off with a vengeance that is breathtaking, and imposing this violent way of life on other nations (or trying to); it is also the case that every day seems to turn up another murder that is gruesome. We stuff babies into garbage cans, or snuff out innocent animals, or the cops gun down unarmed civilians and then lie about it. The list goes on and on. Meanwhile, as Ronald Dworkin and Paul Fussell pointed out years ago, we are wallowing in corruption: literally every institution is riddled with fraud, and the sabotaging of those institutions for personal gain.

Our path without a heart is hustling, competition, and personal advantage. You can even see this in popular sitcoms, or in the way high school students relate to one another. There was no interest in the Yaqui path, or any Native American path; instead, we just butchered all of those people and stuck them in reservations, out of sight, so we could get on with 'progress'. That, as a few dissident voices tried to tell us, was a path with a heart; we weren't interested. And thus, as Don Juan told Carlos, the path is ready to kill us; is killing us, to be more precise. You don't destroy the sacred and get off scot-free; that's not how the world works. America is just now discovering how the world works, and it is hardly working in its favor. Our time, and our way of life, are fast running out.

Happily, for the few who still care, there are voices out there who talk about the path with a heart. And although, as DJ said, there are very few who can leave the heartless path and switch courses in midstream, at least they exist--as E.M. Forster told us in his essay, "What I Believe." Beat poet Lew Welch put it this way:

"What strange pleasures do they get who’d Wipe whole worlds out, ANYTHING To end our lives, our wild idleness? But we have charms against their rage– must go on saying 'Look, if no one tried to live this way, All the work of the world would be in vain.' And now and then a son, a daughter hears it. Now and then a son, a daughter gets away."

You be that son, that daughter, amigo/a; you get away.

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423

Well guys and gals, not much new under the sun. Massacres, foolish foreign policy moves, one scandal or revelation of corruption on a daily basis, plus the relentless and unstoppable self-destruction that is America. I'm slowly working on a new book, and also helping a Mexican friend translate Are We There Yet? into Spanish, which should be finished in a few weeks. I'm still thinking about the 7th Annual Wafer Summit Meeting in DC on May 22; will let y'all know more about it in 2-3 weeks. Hope you all are safe and healthy, and ready for yet another exciting thread. :-)

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

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422

Wafers-

Time to continue our spirited discussion, this time sans topics of trans and racism, which have become so off the subject of this blog that I'm ready to beat my head against a wall. The only trans I want to hear about at this point is the Trans Siberian Railway. In any case, I was very cheered by the link posted on the last thread to Bill Maher, correctly identifying the American people as dumb as dogshit. Duh! I've been pointing this out for 21 years, in the tradition of Gore Vidal, George Carlin, and H.L. Mencken. Finally what's obvious gets a public hearing. Maybe some other public figure, if not Bill himself, will say: "Gee, do ya think that's why the country is going down the toilet?" Duh once again. Cultural suicide isn't pretty, but as I've said b4, there is something funny about it. You watch people who could do something about it if they had half a brain, but at this point, we are talking about very small prefrontal lobes. They can't even spell "buffoon".

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421

So, the stimulus bill got passed, Piers Morgan revealed himself to be one of the greatest scumbags on the planet, and all's well with the world. Yea!

But meanwhile those of us in Waferland have been having some good discussions, and I appreciate all of your excellent contributions. And the antisemitic trollfoons, those vomititious pieces of dreck, have been ground into the dirt, forced to realize that the Jews are better than them, and do indeed rule the world. Also Yea! (Is 'vomititious' a word? Barf-inducing, is the idea.)

Let us continue the work of the Greatest Blog on Earth, amigos.

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420

Well, it would be bad enough if America was just shooting itself in the foot, but it looks like it's hell-bent on blowing its brains out. It all started in the obscure circles of postmodernism, which was more of a French intellectual fashion than anything serious. There is no such thing as truth, everything is a text, all texts are equivalent, and so on. Then it made its way across the Atlantic, and as American academics are just like all Americans--empty, and in need of an ism to fill the soul--it got hopelessly lionized. ("Give us the Word, Derrida!" cried the faculties of Yale and elsewhere.) Slowly, it spread to the culture at large. For the masses, Holocaust denial was as legitimate as solid, Holocaust evidence. Wearing sweat shirts that said "Camp Auschwitz" was offensive to some, but it's possible that millions were OK with it. "Stop the Steal" was more legitimate than the lack of any evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. Or, for millions, equally legitimate. In my last years of undergraduate teaching, students had no idea as to what the difference was between an argument and an opinion, and even my grad students at Johns Hopkins (circa 1999) were not quite sure what constituted evidence. (I knew it when I was a junior in high school.) For most Americans, if you're on the side of the 'angels', you must be right. Of course, different people had different angels--a bit of a problem, that.

I'm sorry, but when a nation has reached this point, it has nowhere to go but down the drain.

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419

Well, nothing new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes told us. Trumpi acquitted, maintains hold on many politicos and a large % of the American people; covid destroying many of those people, along with the economy; QAnon alive and well; and the sad, pathetic trollfoons continue to take the bait I taunt them with. And then the larger picture: the country continues to descend into violence, meaninglessness, and stupidity. Decline is clearly on the rise. Wafers watch, shake their heads.

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418

Wafers-

Not much to say this time around...I'm still excited about the possibility of Jewish space lasers, their relation to deli meats. Other than that, I suggest we continue our observations of a nation in process of disintegration. I'm intrigued by how a congresswoman can urge the assassination of the Speaker of the House, and how members of her party can feel OK about standing by her. What could possibly be more proof of a nation without a future? Also, Trump may have lost the vote, and technically lost the election, but wow, his influence remains a powerful one. His upcoming trial in the Senate is a farce, and he may well be in a position to run again in 2024. America is indeed a house divided against itself; how long, then, can it stand?

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417

"The sun never sets on the British Empire." Well, in the fullness of time, it did. For eventually, it sets on all empires, and our turn is now. At least from the point of view of an historian, this is nothing to get excited about. It's essentially a neutral process; no civilization has escaped this fate. But evaluating an empire, a civilization, or even a nation, is not a neutral thing. The great historian, Marc Bloch, claimed that the way to make such an evaluation was to ask whether that empire etc. "delivered the goods," i.e., made its citizens happy. Which citizens? I suppose we might ask. The majority? And how are we to decide what "happy" means? Did America succeed? Did it make its citizens happy (whatever that means)? In the waning years of American civilization, it might be useful to sit back, and take stock.

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A Nation Going Nowhere

Good Day, Waferinos-

We watch the progs jumping up and down with joy over Biden, while we know that none of the changes he is proposing are structural ones. And unlike the progs, we understand that only major structural changes can save us, and that these will not come to pass. Of course it is good that he is fighting covid (unlike Trump), and all of us want to see this scourge defeated (although I predict that viruses and lockdowns and masks will be with us for a long time to come, especially as mutant viruses emerge). But as I said at the end of the last thread, Biden is no FDR, and even Roosevelt's structural realignments were fairly mild, all things considered. I keep coming back to that line from W.H. Auden, "We would rather be ruined than changed." Well, amigos, we are going to be ruined; we will be the cause of our own destruction; and the possibility of reversing this downward trajectory is nonexistent.

Pain is a great teacher, said a Buddhist monk to me years ago. For a very few Americans, our disintegration will be a significant learning experience. For 99% or more of the population, it will be no learning experience at all, just rage and hurt and violence--the tantrum of a spoiled child, although so many are taking the route of drugs (coke, cell fones) and suicide. At every stage of our ongoing defeat--Vietnam, (the mess we made in) Iraq, 9/11, 2008--we could have learned something and failed to do so. There is no motivation for us to do anything different, and we lack the intelligence to do so in any case, so our national suicide will continue on its sad and perilous journey. I can only echo what I imagine Native Americans have said for so many years: "I told you so, but you just wouldn't listen." (Sitting Bull: "Possessions are a disease with them.")

"Have a nice decade"--mb



Banana Republic

Wafers-

As I write this, the inauguration of Senor Biden is only 6 days away. How things have changed! In order to insure the safety of the event, it will be guarded by police, the National Guard, and whatever other military forces are necessary. What must the other nations of the world think of us? This is standard procedure in a lot of so-called banana republics, but not in the holy, almighty, United States of America. And yet, here we are: a sad, dying empire, trying to preserve itself by force, which History tells us cannot be done. Despite all our bluster, we are not exceptional, and we shall not escape our fate.

One way to look at this event, as well as the riot of Jan. 6, is to see it as sad. Because this denoument of America is sad. We had so much potential as a country, and we pissed it away in fraud, greed, hustling, and corruption. In Ben Franklin's time, you could drink out of the Schuylkill River; now much of our formerly beautiful country resembles a cesspool. And it has also become a cesspool of the mind, in which extreme individualism is celebrated, and helping others is regarded as weak. Well, I could (and have) go on and on, but you all know the drill: Last Exit to Brooklyn, get out while you can.

-mb

Bad Joke

Wafers-

Very good discussion on previous thread. What I wish to add is this: in all of the predictions I've made about the coming collapse of America, starting with the Twilight book in 2000, the one scenario I never anticipated was that the country would disintegrate in a bad joke. Trump may be a horror, but he's also funny. The same may be said of the absurd 'insurrection' of Jan. 6. There is something hilarious about it all, imo. T.S. Eliot wrote that the world would end with a whimper, not with a bang. But neither he nor I ever said that it would end with a joke. Yet there it is, for all to see. And while I think our allies view the events of Jan. 6 as tragic and/or outrageous, I also think they, as well as our enemies, have come to an additional conclusion: the US is silly. It's a frivolous country, and is no longer to be taken seriously, except as a rogue state that has its head wedged in its rump. Which would, of course, be a correct assessment.

-mb