The Triumph Of The Swill

I really wanted to be wrong. But every time I heard the likes of Chris Hayes on MSNBC say, “No one can know the future,” I felt dread. Make no mistake, the wishful thinking Democrats were complicit in making the so-called leader of the free world become an authoritarian nation.

Besides echoing Trump’s “Fight, Fight, Fight” attitude, a main theme of the Harris campaign, a line Kamala repeated ad nauseum, as Presidents Biden and Obama also repeated ad nauseum, was “This is not who we are.” Once and for all that lie, flowing from the deepest sources of denial about the American people and body politic, has been proven painfully wrong. A dead people have voted a tyrant into power.

When a people show you who they are, believe them. The wishful thinkers, the optimists, the hope-filled fools who refused, against all evidence, to see this nation as it is, gave the people who projected and acted out of America’s core of hate, self-centeredness, greed, anger, fear, racism, misogyny, militarism, violence and unvarnished evil an open field. “The goodness of America will prevail, and win,” was the baseless trope that made the deniers complicit with the liars.

Even when it was undeniably clear that politics is the tail of the dog, the commentariat reflexively focused on the tail. Now they are shocked, shocked, that the dog has won again.

Is there any point to writing columns from a deeper place than politics about what is really happening in America and the world, as I’ve been doing so since George W. Bush was elected, to no avail and to so little response?

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Unless this victory of Darkness provides a wider opening, then this collapse of hope and optimism in the face of reality has no point and possibility. Hope and optimism are opiates that prevent us from facing things as they are, but the most educated people cannot offer anything but these bromides when it comes down to it.

Donald Trump, it’s often said, is the luckiest man in the world. But it’s the luck of the devil, which isn’t luck at all. After all, after inciting a riot that nearly killed his vice-president, Mitch McConnell went down to Mar-a-Lago and kissed his ass.

Metaphysically, Trump rides a tsunami of global darkness that has yet to crest, while his followers, who he derisively calls “basement dwellers,” believe he’s the Second Coming of Christ. The bullet that grazed his ear wasn’t meant to kill him, with God saving him for his messianic role, but to usher evil into the most powerful office in the world. Trump is not the devil, just one of its main vessels in the world. And it was the devil, not God in any sense of the word that made him turn his head at the right moment.

Yet liberals and progressives scoff at the very notion of evil, thereby making themselves, in their own way, as ignorant as Trump’s mob.

For nearly 25 years I’ve been writing that America is essentially a dark land that will fully manifest its darkness unless it is faced by a sufficient minority of people here. And just as an individual can go from crazy-dark to dark-crazy, so too can a people and nation. Now it has happened, and sane people all over the world are asking, “Why did you go crazy America?”

But at the risk of repeating myself ad nauseum, the United States is no longer the issue. The post-World War II order, sometimes called “Pax Americana,” has been dying since America’s inner deadness was unmasked after its “forever wars” following 9.11 on the heels of a decade of triumphalism after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Continuing to make nearly 200 separate, “sovereign” nations the cornerstone of an increasingly dystopian world order when man is plundering and destabilizing the earth is also a form of craziness. Two or three “tipping points” have already been passed, such as a global die-off of coral reefs. And now the biggest historical polluter and carbon-spewer, and in recent years biggest exporter of fossil fuels, has just elected a man who promises to issue orders to “drill, drill, drill” on day one of his presidency.

There is only an opening for humankind to change course if the world changes the balance of power by ending its veneration of power, and cuts a hyper-militarized America loose to turn inward in the worst and best sense of the phrase. (Kamala’s fate was sealed the moment she said, “As commander-in-chief, I will ensure that America has the strongest, most lethal fighting forces in the world,” much less when she refused to break with “Genocide Joe” on the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza.)

Are there a people and a place that can step into the vacuum now that the US has collapsed as clearly as the USSR?

What about the EU, one might ask? Can the European Union awaken and become a true union? So far it continues to be the fragmented and feckless patchwork of resentful nations barely stitched together by an ideal, which more and more people on the Continent reject, as the Brits did with Brexit.

Perhaps I’m looking at the world from the bottom of the deep, dark, dry well, and this election will ring every bell in the world. If not, the foreseeable future of humankind is as bleak as today is beautiful in California.

lefevremartin77@gmail

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