The fog of war is abroad in the land, and in every direction sturdy, familiar realities dissolve into grotesque phantasms and chimeras. Trumpets and bullhorns blare in the smoke and chaos. The ground trembles and shifts under our feet.
One thing seems clear, I think: this Republic, as we have known it in our lifetimes and understood it to have existed for 243 years, is over. I hear the voices of stout “conservatives” talking about political strategy, and about how we will vote ourselves back into power — as if the nation we loved still lived, and was just going through a difficult spell. But the reality is a familiar one from science fiction: the friend or loved one we hope to nurse back to health is dead, gone, replaced by some ghastly alien who wears his body as a costume. I’m reminded of “Edgar” from Men In Black, whose hollowed-out corpse was put on by a roach-like monster who wore it around town even as it began to rot and stink.
We are going to have a lot of work to do, and we’d better start figuring out just what that means. But first I think we have to understand that, as hard as it is to accept, the USA of 2021 is no longer Edgar.
8 Comments
Yes, the republic is over.
Whether the corporatocrat left now get what they variously think they want, is another matter.
The future is always changing.
I highly recommend this interview with Kerry Gershaneck on China Unscripted:
https://youtu.be/wUfUUXcbg7E
I’m about one-third of the way through his book Political Warfare about the CCP’s plan to win without fighting.
My takeaway – the entire Western world is in serious trouble, having been lulled to sleep by a CCP-run China that posed as a friendly, collaborative partner when the reality is they are nothing of the sort.
I realized on November 4 that the Republic was finished. Serious question though: Who controls the Wednesday-morning mail-in vote? The Progressive-Greenie-Socialist Left or the Billionaire-Corporate-Oligarch Left? The way fifth-place Dementia Joe suddenly swept the primaries suggests the latter; the guy never seemed to have any support from grass-roots leftists.
I expect Antifa/BLM to return in full force when the weather warms up; they were already assassinating cops when Obama was President. Maybe this time around the cops will wake up, stand up, and become the renegade blue-clad right-wing death squads that the Democrats presently imagine them to be.
Being conservative types which means reactive instead of active, we’ll just have to wait for events to unfold. With Trump soon gone, Dems will be faced with dealing with each other. They dread that. Also, in addition to being called deplorables, we have now been labeled “domestic terrorists”. We can use this in our daily lives to make everyone unsure of just who their neighbors are and instill a general paranoia among the progs and libs. Make them “check under their beds” at night for us like we did as children when worried about the ‘boogeyman’.
https://bigcountryexpatoriginal.blogspot.com/2021/01/ok-thats-lot-of-troops.html
“America is a corpse being consumed by maggots. Liberals are rooting for the maggots. Conservatives are rooting for the corpse.”
– @RisingVendee
I’m confused. I was told that the United States ended in 2008 when Obama was elected. That’s what rightwingers told me, anyway. I even remember little headstone memes that said “United States 1776-2008.”
Is that not the case?
Martin,
Even human death occurs over a period of time; it isn’t the flipping of a switch. As Adam Smith said, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”, and one certainly can’t expect to be able to point to a single instant when, for a mighty nation, death occurs.
So: there is a transition from life to death, and at some point the process becomes irreversible, and mortality unambiguous. The election of Obama — the man who set out to “fundamentally transform” America, and handled that malevolent task with considerable effectiveness — may well be seen, by future historians, as the time when the decline of the great American experiment in ordered liberty under limited government entered its terminal phase.
(After all, there is no “transformation” more “fundamental” than death…)