People are always trying to compare the present era to other historical epochs.\u00a0 Thucydidean Athens or Caesarian Rome or pre-revolutionary France.\u00a0 All these analogies are clever or foolish depending on the author.\u00a0 And all of them are of necessity partial in their similarity.\u00a0 What\u2019s the expression, \u201cHistory never repeats itself but merely rhymes.\u201d?<\/p>\n
And that is true.\u00a0 This era is like no other because the assembly of characters is unique.\u00a0 What I notice about the cast of this drama is that most of them are a poor lot.\u00a0 Don\u2019t look for a Pericles or a Julius Caesar or even an Augustus.\u00a0 We\u2019ve got the Clintons, the Bushes and the Obamas.\u00a0 And when even these mediocrities walk away, we get Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.\u00a0 Now I don\u2019t mean to exhort Trump\u2019s virtues as if he\u2019s some messiah.\u00a0 His feet of clay are legendary.\u00a0 But he isn\u2019t a politician.\u00a0 He\u2019s more of a supporting cast member dragged on stage because the headliners all forgot their lines and ran off stage in terror of the audience pelting them with tomatoes and oranges.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s something distressing about the people who run things from behind the scenes handing over the kabuki theater to really obvious fifth raters like Biden and Harris.\u00a0 I can\u2019t make up my mind whether they just don\u2019t think it\u2019s necessary to keep up the pretense of a republic anymore or that some bizarre sequence of circumstances has thrust these two truly unimpressive hacks into the limelight.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure which of these two reasons is true and I\u2019m not even sure which is a worse reason.<\/p>\n
But for whichever reason, here we are.\u00a0 And it is a spectacularly awful moment in our history.\u00a0 For more than twenty years I have been steadily more and more dismayed by the path our leaders have been dragging us down.\u00a0 Every presidential term has plumbed new depths until at this point it appears we may be well beyond the point of no return.\u00a0 And so possibly the only thing left to do about our present situation is laugh.<\/p>\n
Maybe mockery is all that\u2019s left to do.\u00a0 After all, exposing the stupidity and evil of our supposed leaders may even accomplish some small good.\u00a0 Maybe it could even tip the balance by waking up even the terminally dense to just how imbecilic someone like Kamala Harris truly is.\u00a0 And, if nothing else, laughter is good for the soul.\u00a0 Watching those compilations of Biden stumbling and bumbling around trying to walk off stage or failing to remember words like government or health care were hilarious and without a doubt cheered me up.\u00a0 And listening to Kamala expound on yellow school buses or the relationship of Russia and Ukraine on the map of Eurasia did my heart good.<\/p>\n
But humor aside, I do think about what it means that Biden and Harris are now the caliber of leader that the dominant party of this empire finds acceptable.\u00a0 It\u2019s got to say something about how this country works.\u00a0 We don\u2019t elect political leaders.\u00a0 We hire actors to read us the news from the regime.\u00a0 In fact, it\u2019s gotten so bad that we now have actors who translate the news from the actors we \u201celect.\u201d\u00a0 We have the Haitian Betty Boop come out and explain what Joe Biden meant when he mumbled incoherently about Russia or Gaza or ice cream.\u00a0 We won\u2019t get the truth but we\u2019ll get today\u2019s version of the narrative.<\/p>\n
And so, looking at what we have devolved into I wouldn\u2019t compare us to Athens or Rome.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t even compare us to Stalin\u2019s USSR.\u00a0 We\u2019re more like one of the decadent Chinese bureaucratic dynasties right before the barbarians overran it.\u00a0 We\u2019re the Middle Kingdom that has always been and will always be.\u00a0 It will go on regardless of ineptitude, graft and stupidity.\u00a0 It will survive due to the titanic size and inertia of the whole interlocking structure.\u00a0 Even the Mongol hordes were subsumed into its colossal bulk.\u00a0 Maybe in a century a revolution will sweep the Earth and topple it to the ground but a century seems like the minimum time needed.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I hope for some miracle where Trump gets in and like some latter-day Heracles he beheads and cauterizes the polycephalic Hydra of the Deep State and returns sanity to our poor abused republic.\u00a0 Otherwise, I better learn to bow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
People are always trying to compare the present era to other historical epochs.\u00a0 Thucydidean Athens or Caesarian Rome or pre-revolutionary France.\u00a0 All these analogies are<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3344,4310,3042,2927],"class_list":["post-30422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-2024-elections","tag-global-american-empire","tag-oligarchy","tag-uniparty"],"yoast_head":"\n