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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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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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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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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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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