As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the reasons I hadn’t been writing much was that I thought things had got, gradually then quite suddenly, to such a state that further diagnosis and analysis had begun to seem pointless.
Trump had been ousted. The shenanigans that tainted the elections were so swaggeringly, pugnaciously, defiantly blatant, and the coordinated clampdown on any serious investigation likewise, that scores of millions of citizens lost all faith in the democratic process. The American people’s ovine submission to arbitrary authority, and to the capricious suspension of their most sacred rights by jumped-up petty tyrants, made it clear that the brawny and virile spirit that had once tamed a continent and risen to be the awe and envy of the world had sunk, after too many decades of easeful satiety, into flabby and timorous senescence.
The election was awarded to a career politician, now a gibbering dotard: a sniffer and groper of women known to all as a lifelong mediocrity, a rent-seeking jellyfish and fabulist whose long career at the public trough was distinguished only by his willingness to adopt whatever side of any issue would, for the moment, secure his incumbency, and by occasional exposures as a plagiarist. His running-mate, now only an unsteady heartbeat away from the Presidency, is a cackling, charmless schemer with so little appeal to anyone at all that she was the very first to be eliminated in last year’s primary races — but who, for no apparent reason beyond her sex and race, wafted up to take a place on the ticket.
Since taking office the new Administration has presided over: the systematic dismantling of America’s newly accomplished energy independence; the distribution of, and arrogation of credit for, vaccines that Mr. Trump had managed to bring into existence in record time; the flinging open of our southern border so as to admit to the bosom of the nation, without let or hindrance, a surging mass of intruders from parts unknown and unknowable; the increasingly naked attainder of the founding American stock, and of the heroes and traditions and culture they cherish, in a vendetta of racial hatred; the accelerating replacement of the rule of law by the whim of a ruling oligarchy, which was given a tremendous boost by the seizure of “emergency powers” during the pandemic, and by the enforced atomization and isolation that those enhanced powers made possible.
Meanwhile the Democrats, having for the moment got hold of the House of Representatives, have wasted no time in setting up what can only be called, to borrow a term that I learned from the Sopranos, a “bust-out“: the pillaging, to the tune of trillions, of the wealth of the nation and the inheritance of our children in order to bankroll an orgy of present consumption (and to secure the allegiance of the millions of voters they are systematically enfeebling and addicting to government dependency).
While all of this (and much more) has been going on, dissenters have been banned from social media, fired from their jobs, harassed and assaulted by mobs, harried with lawsuits and prosecutions, and denied access to financial services, web-hosting, conference centers, and more. The poisonous “1619 Project” — which makes Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States look like Johnny Tremain — has been adopted by schools across the nation for the instruction of our young children (whenever, that is, the kids are given a break from learning polyvalent sexual technique).
All nuance and subtlety has been drained from political, social, and educational life, along with all the complexities that used to flow from the infinite variety of individual personhood; all that remains is the boxing-up of everyone and everything into a row of bins, labeled by simple sexual and racial markers and sorted according to levels of oppression. All personal qualities above and beyond these crude categorizations are scraped off in the process, because they no longer matter.
Faith in the press, and in the institutions of government, are almost completely gone, because they have made it so abundantly clear that their respect for us is gone. Whatever framework of honor, laws, decency and tradition restrained them, however slightly, in the past is now gone as well; all that remains is the struggle for dominance. They tell us lies: daily, casually, nonchalantly, and entirely without remorse. The sense that, as fellow Americans, we are “all in this together” is now just rose-tinted nostalgia, a wistful memory of a vanished past — a past now seen as so irredeemably wicked that it must be trampled into oblivion.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. As I said above, what good does it do to keep pointing these things out? Everyone sees all of it already, and everyone who might object to any of it already does.
I’m sixty-five years old. The America I grew up in is a dead nation walking. No doubt its twitching corpse will totter on for a while yet, but it will not recover.
Can some part of it live on? Should it?
9 Comments
Malcolm you have pretty well covered the waterfront for me. I will say yes, some part of it will survive and thrive eventually. America did so after the Civil War though it took a long time.
No it’s too far gone, America wool be gone as a nation in 15 years
America is finished, and being finished off, as we speak.
I could see some large metropolitan areas becoming de facto city states, as well as some states like Texas or Alaska seceding, with some semblance of normalcy returning based on an older set of assumptions, but the stability and continuity that all of us have known for most of our lives is gone, and not coming back.
What is most depressing and demoralizing is that it is clear, at least to me, that it didn’t have to be this way, that this has been a conscious act of murder committed by a conspiracy of degenerate financial and cultural elites.
It’s like watching, or living inside of, a lousy, third rate, low budget movie where you know exactly how the script ends, but you can’t exit the theater. You are glued to the seat and you just have to take it.
It’s all so tiresome… and surreal.
A truly penetrating philippic. Thanks: A good one like that clears the head.
Current circumstances aside, it’s great to have you back and pounding on your keyboard(s) once again when you can, Malcolm.
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“for no apparent reason beyond her sex and race”
Old Joe might be shrewd, after all. KH’s raison d’être is FPOTUS’ Get Out of Impeachment card.
Unless you believe that the U.S. needs to dissolve peacefully (i.e. constitutionally and lawfully), or you’re one of those intrepid bloggers (and his commentators) who intend to create an American Zion extra-legally – which probably would be beyond the purview of Motus Mentis! – I’m not sure there’s an alternative to attempting to resuscitate this “corpse.” Somehow the fractious peoples of the republic will have to learn to live together, or else. I wonder Malcolm if you and other commentators are underestimating the vast reservoirs of goodness and decency that still reside in many citizens. From my perspective it’s vital that such men of good will adapt some form of resistance, powerfully fueled by the deiform and secular virtues – without which action will I suspect become cruel and counterproductive. America’s soft majority need to call the hard minority’s bluff, from the realms of excessive COVID tyranny to laxity regarding immigration. And this will require the father of virtues, courage. I was impressed recently by Razib Khan’s burst of impatience on Twitter about how anonymous followers want him to speak out on controversies rather than stick out their own necks. Just so: we all need to be less passive nowadays.
To be sure, perhaps the above advocacy is quixotic and Pollyannaish, the naivety of a moderate, squishy conservative who just wants to rearrange the chairs on the Titanic as the paleos like to say. Fair enough. Still, I believe we all need to step up to the plate and – prudently, based on individual circumstance – preserve where possible civil society, certainly locally. While there is little one voter one can do about profligate federal spending, we can all participate in a school district meeting, donate to an enterprising private college, tutor or mentor a troubled youth. And never, never, deprecate the validity or efficacy of such endeavors, which may appear miniscule or insignificant in the grand scheme. Karol Wojtlyla (later John Paul II): “A flame rescued from dry wood has no weight in its luminous flight yet lifts the heavy lid of night.”
Jason,
you might appreciate:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/16/until-lambs-become-lions/
Perhaps this will be timely here? Dare I say “useful”?
Of course I ought include who the publishing authorities are – none other than the NIH!
It’s difficult to decide excerpts but as our ‘long lost host’ (not really) mentions “religion/faith” this one perhaps:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7913136/