Past posts from The Weekly:

Cracks in the foundation

We think of concrete as a very strong and long-lasting material, indispensable to building sturdy structures, from bridges to apartment houses. Over years, however, it may be subject to degrading by many sources, chiefly water; and those structures relying on its strength are in growing danger - the concrete cracks. As in the building industry analogously in civilization: foundations crack. From our vantage point today, these cracks are accelerating. Is collapse pending?

While I ascribe to the bromide that there is nothing new under the sun, surely it is equally true that every reiteration of a thing is distinct in some way. Today the chief distinction is in population numbers, growing every instant. Dangers to civilization grow out of this fact, and the quickening pace of these dangers lies squarely with cyber technology. In some respects it can be argued that to provide even the most basic social services to billions of people computers have been necessary. The worldwide web has in fact been a boon in the ease of communication and international trade, albeit at the same time causing considerable economic disruption. But in the so-called social media, we clearly observe the rising flood of murky waters that ever more swiftly erode the concrete foundations of modern civilization. These dangers are without equal in human history. 

Among the most consequential of these cracks, observe the phenomenon of the “influencer.” Any adolescent child sufficiently savvy may make a video of themselves doing nothing in particular - jumping up and down perhaps and gyrating in a manner prejudicial to the skeleton. Post the video and it catches on with millions of other adolescents, i.e. it “goes viral.” Adoring fans send money, sponsors are attracted. Other juveniles are inspired to follow this easy path to wealth, and suddenly countless puerile billionaires are born. Just what the world needs?! See evidence of more crumbling in the deepening roots of the culture war. Despite efforts by the right to torch progressive movements on the left the only result has been to further geographical segregation: Israelis and Palestinians leaving the Middle East, brown people being driven out of northern countries, women fleeing red states for blue. In the end? No more nations, only tribal territories. Tribal life is savage, and those who feel nostalgic for it have not read War Before Civilization. Read it before it’s too late. Yes, ours is in the process of collapsing.

Dies Irae

There is no end of fodder in the morning newspaper for a blog post, when every government department is headed by hacks whose partisanship is exceeded only by their incompetence. At the war department is a former TV journalist and one time mouthpiece of the Murdoch empire, who has his own personal video game going on in the Caribbean with real guns and live people. Given the escalating truculence of the war mongers could it be great wars that MAGA yearns for? Surely not! Just witness the obsequious deference of their dear leader to a blood thirsty Arab sheik, who went home with all of America’s most important military secrets. Still the only tyrant our chieftain loves more than himself is not this Arab, nor Xi nor Kim, but Putin, who wins all of his elections.

Closer to home, bellicosity is infectious in our daily lives, which become unpleasant and dangerous. In our quiet village, which we have kept carefully out of the fray for decades, it now seems that all 300 million people in the nation are descending upon us, and they are angry. There is a persistent jarring sound of car horns, and drivers pulling recklessly around one another. Clerks, those that remain, are surly at best, even those who were once friendly. Have their coworkers been deported, or are they late to work, stuck on our chronically clogged highways? People are increasingly desperate. Adding to the many who have lost their jobs are the functionally underemployed doing multiple jobs and still struggling to survive. But across the world these are days of wrath, described in the medieval hymn, Dies Irae, that became part of the Requiem Mass. Origins of the hymn, which refers to Judgement Day, are lost in the fog of medieval history. Here is a transition of the first lines: “That day is a day of wrath, a day of tribulation and distress, a day of calamity and misery, darkness and obscurity…” Sound familiar? It surely would to any Ukrainian, any Palestinian in Gaza, any woman in Sudan. At least there is good news in the polls here for next year’s election, and even some movement in the courts and among Republicans in Congress. Also remember this name: Jason Crow, representative from Colorado. He is young, intelligent, insightful, plain spoken, courageous, in short the real deal!

Tribal imperium

To all my dear friends and relations in the old country, whom I despair of ever seeing again in this life, I proffer my sincere apologies for the pain and chaos my adopted country is inflicting on the world, including allies such as you. At some point, those of us sidelined by this new revolution against common sense, wonder where next to take the discussion. Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank, one time scathing gadfly covering the Congress, bought a farm in rural Virginia, from which he now contributes to the weekly Health and Science section on such subjects as deer hunting and fly fishing. With all due respect and admiration for Milbank, I am not prepared to take such a drastic measure at my age. Thus I soldier on in the trenches. 

I must agree that the political party facing a tribal regime gone rogue is in considerable confusion. They seized upon affordable health insurance in refusing to fund the government, and for two months the tribe in power shut down services the lack of which hurt their own constituents, the supreme irony being that for ten months they have already been racing full speed to shut down this government permanently. Health insurance is but a smidgen of what the tribe intends to take away from Americans. Allow them to have their way and voters to feel the full consequences, praying the while for the safety of the next elections. What else can be done by the powerless?

Willfully and openly, the tribe has come upon us like the bulls of Pamplona, trampling every law and every tradition, the Constitution itself, with a flimsy rationale in each case based on their twisted interpretations of vague wording at best. Tribal toadies in the legislature smugly eschew laws passed and agencies established by their benighted predecessors, with the exception of their nineteenth century idols. They collect their paychecks and go home, leaving the country and the world at the mercy of a ruthless and bloody imperium. Until the insolent tribesmen in Congress can be voted out, only the courts have power; judges must rule on every flimsy basis of each infraction before we are all too numb to oppose our enslavement. 

Political vs. tribal

What must surely stand out in even a brief abstract of human history and prehistory will be the many failed attempts by Nature to exterminate us. We slogged for millennia through the mud of prehistory to a civilized state. Our civilizations have risen and fallen and risen again, in the manner suggested by Father Teilhard, spiraling each time to a greater level of cohesion. Yet still Nature, karma in fact, persists. Microbes continually knock us back with plagues to this day, and as though that were not bad enough, our own irrepressible propensity to kill one another in great wars helps Nature along. And still our numbers continue to explode exponentially, until the planet itself is endangered. Of course people will migrate from regions rendered uninhabitable, lost to the rising seas. What do we expect them to do? And as they seek the comfort of their kinship group, tribalism will spread - like plague.

The modern evidence of these developments is irrefutable. In the Middle East and Africa, historically tribal regions, we see the earmark tribal barbarism, call it what you will - terrorism, ethnic cleansing. In the rest of the world, all the commentary speaks of partisanship, deep political divisions. This is only a half truth that glosses over a dreaded reality. America is the perfect example: There are not two political parties; only one is invested in governance. The other is clearly a tribe whose one rule is blind loyalty and whose purpose is domination by any means, from skullduggery to slaughter. The chieftain at present is a farcical old codger, but tribal members are in the millions. 

Is it not telling that the major religions of the world have slipped precipitately toward fundamentalism, religion being the bulwark institution of a tribe. In each of these faiths, however, the fundamentalist version is the antithesis of the true creed. Christ after all was an outlier in his time and place; his tribal adherents appear never to have read the Sermon on the Mount. Christians, Jews, Muslims, may appear to be at war with each other in the name of religion, but they are cut of the same cloth - merciless savagery. And Nature is taking its course.

Desperate times

These are desperate times in the USA, for everyone regardless of politics. There is food insecurity for the poor and for a growing number of the unemployed. Many businesses and farmers are reaching the precipice of bankruptcy in an economy being manipulated by narcissistic whimsy, blasted through social media in the dead of night. Meanwhile as Rome burns, Nero fiddles, sending his amateur military forces and intelligence services to start a war with Venezuela. 

Senator Chris Murphy was the subject of an article last week in the Post, highlighting his vehement assertion that the nation is “sleep walking into autocracy,” while even those who agree with him fail to appreciate the urgency. Why should his party, holding but few levers of power, accede to fund a government now ruled by fiat? Laws and appropriations passed by Congress are simply ignored. Government shutdown? No, no! This has nothing to do with passing a budget. Just another way to speed up fulfillment of the guiding principle the rulers have expounded for generations: the elimination of government, except perhaps to rubber stamp their violent and corrupt motivations. As this brouhaha goes on, the rulers scold the powerless party for starving the poor, and their warlord goes off to Asia to schmooze with Genghis Khan. But he is not a dictator. He has not yet ordered his gestapo to lay siege to all cities who oppose him. He has only succeeded in crippling any institution that might block his successor. And he is an old man.

Our village and surrounding neighborhoods, where Anna and I live, enjoy relative affluence, and even here imports in the grocery aisles are becoming scarce.  No more winter strawberries from Mexico. Readers may recall demolition of the vacant house that was home to a family of red foxes. The gigantic monstrosity that replaced it is still a construction zone. It is twice the size of any other house in the development, and looms over us all from a great height, a towering hodgepodge of glass boxes. The owner, an Indian man, introduced himself to the neighbors in a chat group by complaining about Arnold, a happy canine vagabond who often gets loose. Mr. Gupta was naively welcomed in response. America is now safe for the wealthy narcissist. But thankfully nature at least remains indomitable, of which I was assured today when a red fox shot across in front of my back porch. 

Skepticism

In my last post on epistemology, I explained it as the study of knowledge with reference to its limits and validity. Such a study is uniquely critical to humans, blessed by evolution with the ability to learn and to accumulate knowledge, a mixed blessing perhaps considering it was the fruit of that tree that got us ejected from the Garden in Genesis. Human history, as I wrote, has been punctuated by perversions of reality, doubts of facts or even our own senses. The worst of such perversions, as I concluded, are lies, and today magnified by technology the sickness spreads virally, poisoning human society. But what can be the cause of these recurrent suspensions of disbelief, the ebbing tide of what should be normal skepticism? That question surely must lie in the realm of psychiatry. 

Degrees of skepticism of course are variable. Some people are more gullible by nature. Religious fundamentalism breeds rejection of any idea inconsistent with sacred text, as interpreted by tribal leaders. Moreover reality - the facts, the truth - can be a moving target. What was accepted truth a hundred years ago may have since been disproven. On the other hand, once you have accepted the usefulness of arithmetic, 2+2 will never equal five. There is the crux of it: when the ordinary person can be persuaded to doubt logic and demonstrable fact, the gate is wide open to the self serving partisan for their exploitation. 

Critical to this dangerous enterprise are the worst of human emotions: fear, anger, pride. A time comes when there are a sufficient number of the ingenuous - nay, millions - in whom those emotions can easily be fanned to flames. First light the spark of doubt: What is the source of the knowledge? It is the monstrous enemy! Be afraid! Use the bellows of anger: How dare they lie to you! Now amplify the roar of pride: You are superior to them! The holocaust begins, and the enemy is a stable government, its nonpartisan agencies, trusted for generations to gather important data, destroyed under a cloud of opprobrium. Thus facts are no longer “demonstrable.” With great irony the dupes that brought this about will find themselves in a state of even greater fear, forbidden to express anger, humiliated by their exploiters who will burden them like the beasts they always were.

Epistemology

My neighbor the retired doctor who feeds the birds, along with a loyal following of other wildlife, has told me a story about a class he took as a student at Georgetown. It was a course in epistemology, the study of knowledge with reference to its limits and validity. The final exam was one question: to write an essay on the window in the classroom wall. The only student to earn an A+ had given this answer: “What window?” Provocative as this incident may have seemed in that long ago era, I venture to say that today in an age of “alternative facts,” millions of people would not even scratch their heads, having slipped into an Orwellian rabbit hole where 2+2=5, depending on who is demanding it is so. How have we come to this point, where suspicion of certainty is coupled rigidly to impatience with uncertainty, its frustrating subtlety and nuance? How in God’s name!

In God’s name indeed is precisely how human perversions of reality began in eons of prehistoric tribal life when only a supreme being could account for the inexplicable threats. Very slowly, with the development of agriculture and animal husbandry, civilization brought opportunity to indulge insatiable human curiosity, and the resulting science undermined the grip of religion. For the first time, we learned not to trust our perceptions: the earth is not flat after all. Soon however modern science outstripped the understanding of an average person, and many have fallen prey to the easiest alternative, conspiracy, an ancient and virulent perversion of reality, symptomatic of declining civilization.

'Autism a spectrum of a genetic trait? No, no! It is caused by vaccines. Let your child die of measles instead. They are lying to you!" Expect ignorance and fear to bring about the reversion to religion and with it idolatry, its ironic obverse. 

The truth is that human curiosity is not insatiable. We will always distrust our perceptions, harboring as we do a deep intuition that things are not ultimately as they appear. The key is that adjective, ultimate. A thoughtful person will decide that such questions are unanswerable and become agnostic. At the quantum level, science reaches the same conclusion because the observer is inextricable from his observation. Yet the ultimate reality is accessible in the Zen master’s charge: one must swallow the red hot iron ball of paradox! It is a rare person up to such a challenge. Instead human history is punctuated not uncommonly by the worst, most devastating perversions, lies, bald-faced lies. 

God help us!

I have heard it said that even an atheist, finding himself in imminent danger, will pray to God, and as a Buddhist I do not consider that either hypocritical or unusual. There is in human consciousness a deep intuition of a greater power behind that consciousness which might be called up at such times by one’s earnest supplication. And indeed on the streets of today’s America I keep hearing that plea, “God help us!” History teaches that authoritarians capture a democracy by legal means, then change the rules to ensure they will never be removed. This is the process playing out here in the States, with but the barest possibility of its being halted in the next election. Yet at this stage many partisan true believers are wavering as they face utter ruin due to policies of the despotic regime - the farmers, the small businesses, countless enterprises that depend on migrant labor. 

By no means should anyone assume the majority of independent voters here approve of what’s happening: the draconian evisceration of federal resources, the casting off of the constitution and the rule of law onto the tender mercies of courts. Rest assured many repent their vote. But will the majority be heard when leaders of both parties are cowed into submission, and any voice of opposition is bullied into silence by threats? Will governors in blue states be rounded up and imprisoned for resisting the deployment of their own state troops to their own cities for the alleged aim of protecting federal gestapo? God bless Governor Pritzker of Illinois for calling a spade a spade. Indeed we must pray to God to grant such courage to other leaders, and further to arouse the conscience of those in seats of power blithely rubber stamping the blitzkrieg of illegal actions. 

Can there be a more evil person alive today than this man Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, trumpeting his power to traumatize fellow citizens? Even Mr. Putin conceals his relish of such power. Vought is better compared to Count Voivode of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But one ray of hope! None other than that Georgia peach of the white chinchilla, Marjorie Taylor Greene, breaks ranks on behalf of poor constituents in danger of losing health insurance. Praise be to thee, oh God!

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Martial law

I must begin this post with a tale I had from an old friend, now gone, whose grandfather emigrated from Russia before the revolution. He had been one of a small military corps charged with guarding the Tsar, and like every man in that brotherhood was an ethnic German. The Tsar you see could not trust his fellow Russians. It was a long period of considerable domestic unrest, and my friend’s grandfather did his duty. He followed orders until he was told to fire on fellow citizens, upon which command he fled the country for America. And now it sickens me to report that any rational, objective observer will recognize those same conditions brewing in America itself. 

To witness the ludicrous assemblage of America’s top military leaders at the behest of their civilian bosses, neither of whom could hold a candle to any of the officers in the room, was heartbreaking. A photograph of their stony faces in profile brought tears. Men and women of the highest integrity, experienced, intelligent, honorable, being lectured by a popinjay, and that followed by a rambling, partisan rant from the doddering president. The fact that a crackpot crusader, plucked from Fox News to masquerade as a cabinet minister, is terribly fond of the word lethal, combined with the doddering, demented president bent on deploying soldiers to American cities to “fight crime,” surely must be raising hackles in the military leaders. What rules of engagement will they be expected to hand down the chain of command to soldiers facing innocent civilians in their own country, and how will American soldiers respond when ordered to kill them? That will tell us whether or not the seed of tyranny has taken hold in American soil.

Meanwhile, with soldiers aimlessly patrolling cities in camouflage and helmets, the regime can rest easy that no future election will ever again be stolen from them. Armed to the teeth, soldiers will guard the polling places, as in Russia, assuring that no one will vote for the opposition - if any opposition remains. 

Equivalence

Two boys are fighting in the schoolyard. A teacher breaks them up. To justify himself, one shouts, “He started it! He hit me first!” A fair fight then, of course. The aggrieved one had the right to punch back. One lad grows up to be a popular celebrity and decides to leverage that popularity to become president of a powerful nation. His followers, with virulent adoration, install him as Lord and Savior, ensuring at the same time that he will have absolute, divine powers. Now this lad can not only punch back but ruin the life of anyone who displeases him. He has never left the schoolyard, and now there is no teacher to break up his fights with the world. A fair fight then, of course.

Because America retains some military and economic strength, we see a dangerous tendency to mollify the dictator and his minions. Liberals after all have had too much cultural influence. The rightwing is only seeking redress with equivalent abuse of power. A fair fight then, of course. Please, children! Surely you can see clearly what a dictator stands for, and the huge chasm between that and any person who cherishes freedom. Regardless of the threat, the differences must be called out unambiguously, because dictatorship is not a mere style of governance but an affront to the humanity we treasure as inherent in all people of good will: generosity, love, humility over arrogance, tolerance over bigotry, empathy over cruelty. And what, pray, does a dictatorship stand for? Call it out! There is no equivalence in this matter. Tolerance? A person’s worth is instantly judged by their skin color. Generosity? By no means, we will keep our personal wealth and withdraw all spending on aid, foreign or domestic. Compassion? We will have no compunction sweeping men from the factories or farm fields, tearing them from their families and shipping them to foreign prisons without recourse. This contrast must not be soft pedaled; it is stark. Satire is not propaganda. Censorship of one is not equivalent to the other. Humility bears no equivalence to the pompous pretensions of an ignorant, uneducated crackpot. Now comes religion, the tribal opiate and final nail in the coffin of civilization. The tribe will adhere to their chieftain no matter how they suffer. Even knowing he is the cause of it. They will die, watch their children starve, rather than betray the tribe. 

Blessed are the meek?

To anyone who loves the English language the term “influencer” must be abhorrent. Not only does it show the nasty habit of turning verbs into nouns, it designates a person who is paid to manipulate others. One such person, a young right wing firebrand, recently martyred by murder, is being lionized as having championed debate between political opponents. It is true that he invited young opponents to lineup and “Prove my wrong,” but he was the one holding the microphone - and a clear unimpeachable channel to God himself. Free speech is a right to be defended, hate speech another thing altogether; but such terms being nebulous at best easily become political tools, crowbars into the closed minds of the ignorant. Nonetheless, the murder of this alleged crusader for free speech is met by the tyrannical regime which inspired him, with calls for censorship, punishment of anyone daring to utter a word against him or themselves. “Blessed are the meek”? Crosses notwithstanding, these people are not following their Lord and Savior. They are singularly Old Testament, and decidedly on the other side of the Looking Glass.

An interesting take on the global decay of freedom came in a Post article from the Atlantic Council’s Global Political Freedom Index. The article compared the state of democracy today with long-covid, asserting that measures taken to contain the pandemic encouraged authoritarian elements in society to take hold and now, like an over stimulated immune system, refuse to give way. Nations large and small that fell into this state are enumerated, from Tunisia to the USA and many more. 

Meanwhile here in the village courtyard, I must confess I have failed as a spy. No one is talking, at least not in public. In private tea parties though, neighbors are saying the fascist takeover is not approaching but already consummated. Expecting the midterm elections to be a barometer of how far economic collapse will have influenced voters, we hold our breath. Passions are intense, goaded by the idea that something must be done. Clearly some individuals are driven to violence. I can’t but think of Calhoun’s mice, and conclude that we are not masters of our fate. 

The dispatch

As your secret agent behind enemy lines, I should start calling this the Weekly Dispatch, being a barometer on the accelerating collapse of American society. The Washington Post, once an institution itself of accurate and reasoned discourse, is slowly giving way to firebrands of the right wing as reputable writers leave in dismay. Yet my hope springs eternal, and I continue to subscribe. This week Matt Bai had an interesting and thoughtful column appear in which he wonders whether our tyrannical new leader might be only acting the part of dictator. The wannabe king has all the trappings: huge banners with his likeness hanging on federal buildings, such as one saw of the late Saddam Hussein; gold leaf bedecking the oval office, and the monstrous addition of a ballroom to the White House, now his personal and permanent home. But so far he is not as ruthless as his models in Russia and China. There has been no Navalny to arise, and while brown people are being rounded up, they are not summarily executed, only “detained” in concentration camps - let’s be honest.

With all these distractions, it is easy to overlook the fact that we are on the other side of the Looking Glass: Where we hear talk of a Nobel Prize, we see the man doing all he can to start WWIII; the goal of shrinking the federal government brings edicts making it more intrusive than ever into every sector, private as much as public. But these intrusions cannot be accomplished for want of staff. Apparently there are not enough sycophants to fill positions. With constant claims of helping the working class, the regime takes away their jobs with blanket tariffs, now being used as a geopolitical cudgel, and deports thousands of the hardest workers for being “illegal,” when the same party has seen fit to ensure there is no legal way to enter.

The lack of general alarm at the “pomp and bluster” in a country founded in opposition to monarchy, Matt Dei writes, is what disturbs him most. Surely he knows there is considerable alarm among the millions who did not choose this. The questions are these: what are those Republican voters now thinking, and will things become bad enough to enlighten them in time to stop total collapse?

Secret agent

In “The Red Headed League,” Homes and Watson are checking out the pawn shop of their client, Jabez Wilson. Sherlock already suspects a plot in the works bearing the modus operandi of Professor Moriarty. Ducking out to sight, he says to Watson, “We are spies in an enemy’s territory.” Reporting here from the courtyard of our humble village, Anna and I may say the same of ourselves, I dare to say. Not that the military forces have spilled out from the District lines, with their tanks and hummers and armed National Guard; these exploited soldiers only patrol where there are news cameras. They are not to be seen east of the Anacostia where the poverty and crime really are. Notwithstanding these facts, what is seeping in everywhere is suspicion. One cannot help but notice when a discussion over coffee shifts to whispers, with attendant furtive glances to see whoever might be listening. Had they praise for the dictator they would not need to whisper. But opposition to the regime is as exceedingly peaceful as the latter is belligerent.

Here then, dear readers, and only here will you get the scoop from your undercover agent, the true intelligence not to be heard or read anywhere else. First of all there is the widespread error of seeing two factions: Republican and Democrat, Red or Blue. The two classes are really these - and may they be united in opposition - one includes those people who recognized and understood the threat of absolute power; the others are those who were duped. Aside from a small class of billionaires, everyone in this country and great numbers around the world are in peril. Is it not supreme irony that a leader who fancies himself a peacemaker is renaming the Defense Department, reverting to the "War Department," which it was called in WWII. The ship of state has been hijacked by incompetent hacks and crackpots who are steering it straight to ruin. Public school children will not need to be vaccinated for contagious diseases; herd immunity is apparently forgotten. In a catastrophic weather event there will be no federal agency to manage relief. Victims are on their own. Not even a year has past and the destruction of America is pervasive, putting recovery in question. Will there even be free elections?  

Still alive

Just months after I was born, the Second World War ended in Europe - and I am still alive. When I was six years old, the world population was 2.5 billion; as of 2023 it is over eight billion - and I am still alive. The great purge of intellectuals in China took place in the middle of the last century; today it is being repeated in the United States - and I am still alive. An important difference here though is that in our revolution the only blood being shed is that of school children slaughtered by the troubled sons of myriad gun lovers. I have known people who lived into their nineties; some retained a degree of vitality, others have descended into a terrible enfeeblement. In the latter case, many would endorse the pronouncement I once heard from a wise old woman, “I’m afraid I will not die.” I am now eighty, and still alive, with no threatening physical condition as far as I can ascertain. My point is that it is not so easy to die as people imagine. Many with bad habits or an unhealthy lifestyle may know the physical consequences but rationalize that surely they will die before such results must be faced. Visit a nursing home to see the fallacy in that premise. Here are patients who have lost limbs, lost their sight, helpless and at the mercy of a dwindling staff. 

Do not despair, children, I beg you. There are advantages to be had in the accumulation of years. Foremost of these is the revelation that your earliest and most paradoxical intuitions have been true all along, including the governing assumption that you have always been alive and always will be. Your body is now changing so fast, it is easy to see that you are not continuous at all, but a different person, that timeless self coming forth. We are each a point moving on the curve of the asymptote toward the straight line we conceive of as death. Surely we are about to touch that line. Closer and closer, closer still - and we are still alive.

God only knows what further history I will live to witness. The vision on the horizon is apocalyptic. Is it a mirage? A cousin of mine, who died long ago, took to saying, “I’ve lived too long!” She dreaded turning 80. When she died, she was 79. A wise woman. I man now 80 - and still alive.

Humility

I suppose it is only natural that here on the outskirts of Washington DC political topics, especially in such terrible times for the world, should be seen to creep into everything. My dear old friend Anna in her Courtyard post last week wrote about a column by George Will which noted that it is Europe’s turn to save America. Even in the comics section of the daily paper, strip after strip makes political reference. With the drums beating so loudly everywhere, I struggle against adding to the clangor, instead to find some point that is not to be discerned in it. I do hope, Readers, that you caught my new poem “Latter Day” last week, and understood my implicit meaning in the last two lines: “We vanquished, and we died.” To be explicit, those now feeling victorious, believing they have conquered, die all the same, and as I also wrote last week humility is the trait most lacking in humans. 

In modern times, despite Christianity being the world’s dominant religion, there has been an emphasis on justice rather than humility. In civilized society there is in fact a constant tension between the two, a condition unique to humans. In other social species, might makes right, and the strongest male leads the pack. Humans in the tribal state were no different, nor were the absolute monarchies, interrupted only briefly by uprisings and revolutions. But absolute power makes no accommodation for justice, only for mercy if there be any. How singular then, nonpareil, is today’s yearning for autocracy around the world. Here our dictator, hard at work to install himself in perpetuity, told a Christian group before the election, “You will never have to vote again.” Therein lies the secret.

Pardon me, Readers, but I must again refer to the pendulum, which now has passed over the pivot point, becoming a trebuchet. Here’s how: In the name of justice for the most vulnerable members of society, the bob of the pendulum was pushed left, harder and harder; approaching the pivot came the demagog preaching to the privileged, “You are superior to these people. What rights have they to any pride, to any advantage?” Now the bob is high on the right, and from this height it is hard to see whether any humility remains at the point of equilibrium. Indeed will we ever regain that point - when all the moderates were decapitated in the swing?

Fractals

The term “fractal” was coined in 1975 by mathematician Benoît Mendelbrot, referring to a geometric shape that is “self similar” at different scales. With the advent of computers, it became possible to model such shapes with fascinating results. Mendelbrot himself described fractals as “beautiful, damn hard, and increasingly useful,” and he extended the term beyond higher mathematics by recognizing signs of it in nature. One such is a tree, where the branching veins in each leaf are the self similar pattern as the branching of the trunk. Other examples are to be seen in blood vessels, DNA, crystals, snowflakes, and much more. Genealogy gives us the family tree, branching with self similarity in each direction, past and future. We recognize also examples in the symmetry of markings in animals, and patterns in flowers. 

What is nature trying to teach us about itself when fractals show up even in chaotic processes, making them of special relevance to chaos theory? For most, this supreme orderliness suggests a supreme being, and God bless them if they use that belief to humane purpose. But surely there need not be a separate agent, a creator who must then sit in a hall of parallel mirrors. No, nature’s evidence confirms the ultimate transcendence of reality. Now lest, in that vanity we displayed in the Garden, we come to believe that nothing is beyond the ken of our science and higher mathematics, consider the fate of those of Newton’s laws defied by quantum weirdness, or our reliance on the rotation of the planet for keeping accurate measures of time when once in awhile, Earth is off a split second and time must be adjusted. A musical instrument tuned precisely to the harmonic series, as another instance, yields cacophony and must be tempered to allow for the modulation that makes beautiful music. 

As our world is suffused with fractal patterns, it is a rich source of metaphor: the symmetry of the yin-yang, the pendulum, the self similarity in that hall of mirrors, generational patterns in history that become predictive as to rise and fall. In such as these, nature would teach us what is most lacking in our species: humility.

Just call me Alice

As I wrote last week, dear Readers, I am here borne along by the lemmings in their stampede toward the cliff, their apparent attempt to prove that their proclivity for mass suicide is not a myth. Bearing witness on your behalf, I perceive the disaster in slow motion, in common with any such calamity. I refer you also to the week before last when I wrote of Mrs. Gaskell’s portrayals of that immense gap of wealth and privilege in her time, which our modern dictators are bent on restoring. Among free people many perhaps are ignorant of an enormous gift for dissembling evident in a megalomaniac. If you are so benighted, simply bear in mind that in your race to the cliff you have passed through the looking glass. When the tyrant says he is going to “liberate,” what he intends is to enslave. Every utterance, every proposal must be regarded as its polar opposite.

Now comes bad economic news, and the tyrant shoots the messenger. Growth is down, along with jobs, and inflation is up. Really, if a large share of workers are deported and small businesses are not able to survive tariffs, jobs are not created, they are lost and prices rise. In today’s newspaper, however, is the more significant perspective: Just ten percent of Americans make up the highest earners, who will thumb their noses at high prices and continue to buy whatever they want. They will keep the all important consumer sector up. Do these numbers worry the Far Right regime? Not in the least. It is the outcome they have been envisioning and planning for decades, to bring back the old days, the great days of Bleak House, Oliver Twist; and it is not with poor Esther or her guardian John Jarndyce, nor with Oliver himself that they identify or relate to, no by no means. It is with Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. To accomplish this regression the gap between rich and poor must be widened, so a “bad” economy is only bad on one side of the looking glass, where in the words of the Red Queen, “It takes all the running you can do to stay in one place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run twice as fast as that!” The Far Right is succeeding, but their utopia cannot be a stable reality. They are a small minority representing a hard scab over a great festering lesion.

Lemmings

In this post, dear readers, I will explore a question you must have asked yourselves, as I myself have: why am I stuck in this awful place, which at the will of a benighted electorate is being stripped of all that is good and holy for a coterie asserting its claim of self-evident supremacy? Why indeed! First, I feel a certain journalistic duty to bear witness amongst the lemmings as they bound en masse toward the unseen cliff, where many have already been cast into oblivion. Second, since I wrote my essay on travel, which you will find in my last book, the experience has devolved further. It is become ghastly. Great hordes of aging people stampede to airports somehow in mortal dread that they will soon face death before having seen a penguin, in the wild of course. (I am a penguin!) But it is not alone the perils of flight. The northward journeys I have made by car in recent years, hoping to escape summer heat, have instead been spoiled by extreme weather. No matter now far north I got, there was record-setting heat in September. When I went the first week of October, Shenandoah Park was enshrouded in fog thanks to hurricane Helene. So much for escaping, fellow lemmings!

Meanwhile, as we busy ourselves arranging the deck chairs, destruction proceeds at a rapid clip, while consequences are slow. Tariffs are threatened, postponed, threatened again. A judge orders an unlawful action of the masked Gestapo to halt; another court, even the Supreme Court, rules it may continue - until it can be litigated - which will be never, while innocent people rot away in foreign prisons. Accountability is hidden, obfuscated, so that it is applicable to no one. The bending of media has so far been slow. The Washington Post walks a fine line, avoiding controversy, but its editorial page is not at all what it was. Gone is Ann Telnaes, the liberal political cartoonist, leaving Michael Ramirez, now daring to be critical of the regime he promoted to power. Half a page is given over to Edith Pritchett’s political if primitive cartoons, and another half to Post readers. Go ahead, write it yourselves!

But about those lemmings: it is a myth that they throw themselves over a cliff in a mass suicide. The Wikipedia article on the subject cites an infamous Disney documentary, “White Wilderness,” alleging to show this phenomenon, when in fact lemmings were brought in from the north and dumped over the cliff from a truck by the camera crew - which serves even better for my metaphor!

Mrs. Gaskell

Mrs. Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, was an esteemed Victorian author, and a contemporary of Dickens, who serialized the publication of many of her works in his periodical, Household Words. Her life paralleled his; just a year older, she died five years before him in her fifties of a sudden heart attack, her last novel, Wives and Daughters, not quite completed. The wife of a Unitarian minister, she lived in the manufacturing town of Manchester and shared Dickens’s deep sympathies with the poor and the working classes. Her works were popular in her day, falling into obscurity after her death. A quote from Lord David Cecil in the Wikipedia article epitomizes the assessment: “She makes a creditable effort to overcome her natural deficiencies, but all in vain.” In the twentieth century she was regarded still as a minor figure in English literature, yet considering the progress made in women’s rights a reassessment has since improved her reputation as an early and vocal champion of women. 

My readers know that my immersion in such classical literature began with the pandemic, and with the current atmosphere still toxic it continues to be a most effective anesthetic in which one may become totally absorbed. And Gaskell grows on you! As I began reading Cranford, for example, it seemed a rather simple tale of village life, but before long I was caught up in the characters. Indeed a great strength of this writer is her exquisitely fine drawing of characters, showing remarkable psychological insight and powers of observation. Not far into Ruth, which I am now reading, she tells her secret: “The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise and to break when the right time comes. Her wisdom is her lasting gift to us. 

The horrific conditions of poverty in those times, described and decried by Gaskell as well as Dickens, were commensurate with the extreme wealth and privilege of the upper classes. Today when history has enabled the same enormous gap, we cannot but wonder that the wealthy are bent on using their privilege to crush the poor. Unspeakable is the fact that in a nation, itself a refuge of freedom, the poor classes chose servitude.

"Fight for America"

You will not be at all surprised, dear Readers, that my interest was piqued by a report in my morning paper describing a performance being staged at Stone Nest arts centre in London entitled, “Fight for America,” a giant board game created by multimedia company American Vicarious to reenact, in the manner of a war game, the January 6 insurrection in Washington DC. There on the cover of the Style section was a photo of the stage upon which stands an impressive fourteen foot replica of the US Capitol building. The production took years to prepare as one might imagine, there being 10,000 hand painted miniatures: all the people, vehicles, signs, weapons, etc. These are used in this elaborate board game by twenty audience members who have paid extra to participate. They are divided into two teams, a red and a blue, and guided through the process by game masters to make decisions which will shape the outcome of the game. The purpose of this project as stated by its creator is “to explore the fragility of democracy and consequences of political extremism.” In the end it appears to be a psychological experiment. When the red team succeeds in finding Vice President Pence they must decide whether to hang him. So far to my knowledge the verdict has been “no.”

Then, however, comes the gut punch. Before the event is over the audience is shown footage of the deadly riot. It was real, not a game. The people were real, the violence, the consequences were real. As they came out of the theatre, the reporter who wrote the piece for the paper asked for reactions. Some said they had been given a better perspective on attitudes of the opposing sides. Of great interest to me were those who confessed surprise at how easily they had succumbed to a mob mentality. In other words, their disappointment about human nature. Do read my essay in Ruminata, “Decline and Fall,” subtitled “The Tribal Mindset.” Democracy is indeed a tender flower, instantly trodden underfoot by the mob in its tribal fury. Look only to Syria for a paradigm of tribal brutality. No sooner had the heinous Assad regime finally been overthrown than the splintering began, each religious or kinship group, however tiny, wanting to take over and if thwarted, to annihilate all others. No, no, the sweet freedoms of democracy wither easily if not appreciated. 

God's mills

“The mills of God grind slowly…” I daresay is my most beloved aphorism, assuring us in the wisdom of that godly poet of the English language, John Donne - among others - that justice will prevail in the end. Indeed, and when we watch those mills slowly grinding “exceeding small,” it even forgives our schadenfreude. Extreme weather events around the world, bringing disasters with growing frequency, are clearly consequent of unmitigated climate change. When they strike in overpopulous areas like India or Africa, they are more easily dismissed. Now they are visited upon the First World - Europe, America - on the very people who at one time might have done something about global warming. Instead, millions of ignorant bigots in the greatest of those nations, with extreme chutzpah aiming to make it great again, have inflicted on us a regime bent on the exact opposite. When those proud bigots in their stronghold are swept into oblivion by a biblical flood, a suppressed murmur goes up, “Good riddance!”

These red state voters, who claim superior righteousness, thumb their noses at God and his mills when with supreme arrogance they reject all of science as political conspiracy. Climate change? Liberal nonsense! Vaccines? Too dangerous! I’ve never seen a case of measles. Great lovers of the Bible, coauthored by their chieftain who sells them for $100, they have forgotten Deuteronomy 29, which describes the destruction of Sodom: “Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this land? What meaneth the heat of this great anger?” Granted that hypocritical sanctimony has often distorted such ancient stories, surely those who have crawled out from under the mills of God, surviving with their lives, must observe that “sin city” so far has not been swept into oblivion, nor have other cities they abhor as iniquitous. 

Not to be outdone by nature’s wrath, humankind, ever apt and now more adroit, destroys itself. In expanding war zones, do we not see “civilian targets” wiped out until whole cities are erased as if by wildfire? We may end as the only species in planetary history that has purposely brought about its own extinction. But don’t look back - or you may suffer the fate of Lot’s wife. 

Nature may save us

My friend Anna, who collaborates on the blog, fears that topics have been too somber, suggesting that jolly duo of Cassandra and Jeremiah ought to cool it; and in that vein she pointed to a recent report in The Atlantic by assistant editor Marc Novicoff regarding population studies by a macroeconomist at the University of Pennsylvania, Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde. The latter professor has delved deeply into the United Nations' biannual projections of population growth around the world, finding that in the past decade these projections have been alarmingly inaccurate, indeed giving the rosy scenario when compared with data from the nations themselves. In short, the human population is already shrinking. The UN model in making its projections is outdated and still contains two fallacious assumptions accounting for their inaccuracy: one is that a population having rebounded from a low fertility rate will always do so, in perpetuity; the other, still more astounding, hard-coded in the model, is that there will never be a fertility rate lower than 0.5 children per woman. Apparently that possibility in unimaginable. 

Japan remains the poster child for population decline leading to low growth and an aging populace left without caregivers. Personally, I have always felt that the idea of having children solely as readymade servants to care for a person in old age is cynical, self serving, and these days not even practical when parents find themselves supporting adult offspring who have “failed to launch.” Here in the States perhaps the most curious aspect of the new despotic regime is the determination to deport the very people who have come here to work, wherever jobs are, including in hospitals and nursing homes caring for the aging populace. But those benighted despots have it covered: they will encourage higher birth rates by giving each new mother $1000 and opening a bank account for every newborn. They will create their very own servant class, de novo. Not bloody likely! No, we better hope that robots with highly advanced artificial intelligence are ready, at such time as we are enfeebled, to care for us. A further quote from The Atlantic article: “There is at some point a minimum social capacity to adapt…” I would call this phenomenon the vindication of Calhoun - John B.

Scouts honor

As a lad on the home farm in my native Yorkshire, I was a Boy Scout, only briefly but long enough to remember the Scout Pledge and the motto, “Be prepared!” Any prudent adult will of course recognize the validity of that injunction. Against unforeseeable risk we insure the car, the house, our lives for the benefit of dependents, and we make wills to direct the disposition of property when we die. Depending on our tolerance for uncertainty, we may install a security system, and keep a firearm. Recent months have brought a very high degree of uncertainty indeed, when absolute power over a wealthy and mighty nation has been given gratuitously to an incompetent, witless man who asserts boastfully that no one knows what he will do next, not even he himself. With high uncertainty comes high anxiety, especially when there is talk of nuclear proliferation. Even in my neighborhood there are murmurs among us of bomb shelters and evacuation routes. We are on the outskirts of the capital after all, in the crosshairs. I daresay I am having deja vu. We have been through this before, but not like this.

Times have changed, even as human nature remains intractable. The nature of warfare, however, evolves. Ancient civilizations used the tactic of the “shield wall,” combatants lined up shoulder to shoulder with their shields touching as they advanced toward the enemy. Romans made famous use of this method in suppressing native tribes. Even with the advent of munitions, war has still meant armed combatants facing off in lines. To this day on their eastern borders, Ukrainians hold  back the Russian army in a territorial struggle. Now though, munitions have advanced. There are missiles, drones, and of course nuclear weapons. When we hear distinctions being drawn between military versus civilian targets, I am compelled to observe that we are regressing to the most brutal form of warfare, i.e. tribal. It is guerrilla war, using stealth, ambush, and not only for the spoils. The purpose is slaughter - of every man, woman and child - and the favorite sport of those tribal warriors is torture. It is what goes on in the Middle East, an area of the Western world that never was fully civilized. In comparison, those old fashioned soldiers facing enemy troops on the battlefield seem positively civilized - Scouts honor!

The day after

In just six months of the Republican regime in the US, we do not need Cassandra to tell us we are rushing headlong into a one-party, one-man system of governance turning history on its head. With carte blanche from the Congress, the new rulers have knocked down all guardrails, shredded the Constitution, erased Federal agencies established by law, and sought by fiat to menace the independence even of private entities, in the arts, education and beyond. Anyone and anything not embracing their ideology is now imperiled. Looking to the future we should be asking ourselves what follows the takeover, the descent into tyranny, and studying the historical record.

An autocrat is a despot, a tyrant, and as such a megalomaniac whose sole aim in life is to maintain and increase his own power and glory. With democracies expunged from human society and all eight billion of us living under tyranny, we can hardly anticipate a peaceful world. Even now there is a high risk of world war breaking out as autocracies yearn to test their relative powers. If we survive the holocaust, what comes after? As always, ancient Rome is a template. The first thing to note is that after decline begins centuries might pass before we may say the empire has fallen. We observe, nevertheless, that when the last Roman Emperor was deposed in 476 AD the vast territory for so long ruled from Rome had been shattered by the barbarian tribes: Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Thuringia, Angles, Saxons, Britons, Jutes. It was every megalomaniac for himself!

As I wrote here metaphorically about cutting diamonds, the cleavage planes around the world today are clear to see. America is self-segregated politically into red and blue states. Europe has not a long history of unity, thus its EU is vulnerable to breakage. The Russian despot struggles unprofitably, without popular support, to reassemble the Soviet empire that fell in the last century, the latter itself having risen from the ashes of cruel monarchy, another lesson from history. In a populace oppressed and terrorized, a tipping point will come when anger mixed with despair combust in revolution. But what follows? The next despot: Stalin, Napoleon, the Islamic mullahs. No, no, democracy is the diamond - in the rough.

Coup d'état

Even here of all places on earth, the United States of America, we are now bounding towards a coup d’état. When the new dictator starts holding his political rallies at military bases to troops handpicked for their political sympathies, the evidence is in. The military is the final piece. Once assured that a military force will back him up, the despot may send them anywhere to do his will, and they will not be constrained when ordered to kill fellow citizens. Soon they will storm the Capitol again, to disband the Congress, then move on to the Supreme Court. This is not hyperbole. The process has played out innumerable times in history. The last hope always has been that the army will not submit; soldiers will mutiny rather than deliberately to kill civilians. But here we are on the eve of a great parade in the nation’s capital, to celebrate the army’s founding with a grand display of its military might, surely equivalent to that of China, North Korea, Russia. Once those autocracies have joined in alliance with the US, won’t it be a mighty force to shrink the human population to a more manageable size!

There is opposition still, but what are they doing? They fret, they dither, they hem and haw and equivocate, ever in the most courtly, tactful manner. They meet the brute force of malicious lies, virulent mischaracterization, barbarous threats with benign, inoffensive decorum. In the hostile media environment we cannot blame reputable sources of news for holding the volume down, even when their partisan counterparts are wailing banshees. But all others, when beset by a flock of perversely empowered harpies screaming about illegal migrants as the worst of the worst, criminal gang members, murderers, alien invaders, on and on in these terms, all others have an obligation to speak out bluntly, fiercely! Where is your evidence, your warrants, your right to judge? Without which your true meaning is clear as day: Every person whose skin is not as white as yours does not belong in this country, and you want them out of your sight at whatever cost; anyone who does not bow to your dictator must be imprisoned as a traitor.

Such is the playbook of the autocrat, the antithesis of freedom. It is subjugation. Now too many free people have chosen it voluntarily - and will have no more chance to choose. 

Feudalism

The term feudalism describes sociopolitical conditions in medieval Europe for hundreds of years, beginning in the ninth century after the Roman legions withdrew. It was based on the relation of a land holding lord to vassals owing him homage and services such as rent, crops, and military protection. The article on the topic in Wikipedia is so uncharacteristically disjointed that as I read I suspected it reflects the chaos among historians of the subject. The period is known after all as the Dark Ages. I saw an opinion recently that in the current morass of world affairs the right wing agenda bespeaks a yearning after regression to that Dark Age of feudalism. The Wikipedia article does offer eerie hints of similarities, and I quote, “Feudalism in its various forms usually emerged as a result of the decentralization of an empire.” And this in a related article, “The process of rural self sufficiency was given an abrupt boost in the eighth century when normal trade in the Mediterranean Sea was disrupted.”

Vestiges of feudalism remained into the twentieth century in Europe and the British Isles, the wealthy class holding on to the land, the manor houses, the money and prestige. After the enormous debt inflicted by the two world wars, it all fell apart. Today we once again have a great wealth gap, but it is not based on land holdings, not agrarian, not even industrial, as with the robber barons of yore. Now enormous wealth has been amassed through technology, creators who pulled over the world population a global web upon which others - businesses large enough or individuals savvy enough - have likewise prospered. But are there common denominators with those feudal conditions yearned after by supporters of the right wing causes? While politics, foreign affairs, even global trade have become noisy distractions, the giants of high tech have been busy gaining the power to control, manipulate and distort, so that now they filter the population, sorting those able to use technology from those who cannot. Then in order to shrink and to limit that privileged class of the tech savvy, they persist in changing the rules, the processes, the prices. They will have the manor houses, the rest of us their vassals at their mercy, paying their rents, fighting their wars. Heaven, m’lord! Right?

O Canada!

(32)Here’s to Charles III, by Jove! I salute His Majesty on his recent visit to Canada, taking that occasion to give the throne speech opening the parliamentary session, which function had not been performed by the monarch since his mother was the first to do so in the 1950s. The ceremony reasserted the King’s sovereignty over the commonwealth in the face of aggressive threats and malicious calumny on the part of an outrageous bully presiding over Canada’s southern neighbor. That bully and his party are indeed a threat to every free nation, their chaotic destructiveness driving anyone who pays attention to despair. In that state I had some relief to see an article in the Atlantic headlined, “American democracy still has a lot going for it,” in which enumerated were various strengths peculiar to the USA making it a hard soil for the seeds of tyranny to take hold. The article, for example, mentions Alexis de Tocqueville, who travelled in the young nation and later wrote of the people’s penchant for civic engagement. Then the article noted a strong independent judiciary and a still free press, a network of advocacy groups, and a federal system of government, all available tools for rivals and opponents of the would be dictator. 

America had a long colonial history before its successful revolt against George III, and it has been an independent nation for over two centuries. Some may contend that even this span of time is relatively brief. I will assert nonetheless forcefully that the true foundation of this great democracy rests on millennia of British history, starting with the Roman conquest. Five centuries of Roman rule brought the heritage of the ancients, both Roman and Greek. After the tattered legions were withdrawn, even in that medieval darkness, came the Magna Carta at Runnymede in the thirteenth century, limiting the absolute power of King John. The British royal family today symbolizes through its long history an enduring continuity, strength and stability. Considering the recent turn of events in their rebellious former colony across the pond, even the most cynical Brit, who might consider the monarchy merely symbolic, should think again. Indeed, perhaps those colonials who fled to Canada during the American Revolution were prescient. Long live the King!

Cracks

A fragile thing is something that is easily broken or destroyed, like a china cup. It may fall and break suddenly, or even in normal use may develop cracks, which can grow causing its eventual breakage to seem sudden. Even the hardest known mineral, a diamond, due to its crystalline nature, is fragile in the hands of a skilled cutter who knows the stones cleavage planes along which it will break into smaller gems. Have you surmised, dear readers, where I am going with his topic? If so, you may share my amazement at the fractal nature of perceived reality, when similar patterns are seen between stones and societies.

Democracy, and its protection of cherished freedoms, is extremely fragile and has for generations been cracking along partisan, i.e. tribal, lines. It is truly among the most worthy creations of society, yet unfortunately it's cleavage planes have been all too obvious throughout history. In cleaving a diamond, a groove is made on the given plane, and a gentle tap with a steel blade breaks the stone. I have written often in this blog, using the pendulum as metaphor, regarding the danger of an extreme amplitude - too far to the left and it will swing equally far to the right. Now for the perfect mixture of metaphor: the pendulum of politics throughout the free world has worn the groove in a cleavage plane of that precious gem, democracy; and dare I say it, the steel blade is in place awaiting that gentle tap.

Power hungry men in the democracies, knowing the cleavage planes, have been plying that groove for generations, until now we see the divisions clearly: race, religion, gender identity. In hindsight we may even see, as with a broken china cup, where the cracks began. Free people have been swayed to choose their own ruin, bondage over freedom. Just when good leaders are needed, the dupes are unable to put the good over partisanship; and we should not expect the gentle tap of a diamond cutter from despots whose sole aim is to smash democratic freedoms for their personal enrichment. Look how easy we have made it for them by highlighting the social fragments: Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander Month, among other monthly commemorations celebrating shards! Who is the better for that?

Harpies

Stereotypes should never be used to generalize, yet in some cases they may be instructive in explaining our reactions. For example, gender stereotypes: a man is expected to be masculine, strong, coarse, insensitive to the point of cruel. This stereotypical machismo has throughout history brought untold grief to humankind, individually and collectively. A woman is opposite, the yin to his yang: feminine, soft, yielding, empathetic. With these sentiments in mind, as tyrants at the helm of great nations around the world link arms and cooperate to maintain power and to further enrich themselves, the male stereotype is portrayed in caricature, Kabuki indeed. It is the women in this terrible performance who chill the blood with their discordant apostasy to the stereotype. They are the Harpies, monsters of Greek and Roman mythology, half woman and half raptor. 

These creatures of myth were described variously over the centuries as hideous hags or beautiful maidens. Our current iteration of them in their appearance is the picture of femininity. They have the perfect fair skin, the long blonde hair deftly arranged with the curling iron into the obligatory Rapunzel locks. Often there is the delicate gold cross adorning the Harpy’s throat as she declares herself the rightful judge of whomever has sinned. Thus it is in their behavior, their voices, that they defy their sex, overturn the stereotype. Loud, strident, more fierce than any man would dare to be, their caterwauling resembles nothing so much as the scream of the harpy eagle. The disconnect between the image of this person and the cruelty of her intent enhances the intimidation. Here is a woman ordering people swept off the streets and whisked away to foreign prisons, claiming they are vicious gang members. Her eyes flash fire in the accusation, proof of which is never shown leaving us to deduce it is only the color of their skin. 

The article in Wikipedia references Homer’s Odyssey, “When a person suddenly disappeared from the Earth, it was said that he had been carried off by the Harpies.” And here they are again. The harpy eagle is native to Central and South America, though populations are in decline. Perhaps, in the form of these savage women, the predatory birds have come to replenish their native territory with more of their prey.

Decline and fall

The term “tribe” and its adjective “tribal” are becoming so common as to verge on cliché. There it was in that Atlantic article I posted about in the definition of patrimonialism: a style of governance seen “among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.” The frequency with which the term is popping up causes me to remind even my loyal readers - you saw it here first! And when tribalism comes up, I always associate it with the primal state of human society seen to cycle through history with civilizations. The recent currency of the term therefore is troubling, as it speaks of this unravelling.

A tribe is our natural state alike with all other pack animals. It is a kinship group. In the great span of our history and prehistory, civilization is very recent, occurring when many tribes unite, through trade, intermarriage, or most often coercion. No civilization has survived for long, relatively speaking, against the tribal mindset. My essay on the topic in Ruminata is titled “Decline and Fall” in fact. The tribe represents the comfort of familiarity, cohesion, comradery, esprit de corps. Compare that with the extreme alienation in modern society, constantly being exacerbated by isolation, and since the pandemic enforced by viral contagion. No surprise then that people are yearning and searching for their tribe, its territory and its chieftain. Missing the tribal life, they grow angry.

That anger, however, is ironically the scourge of the tribe. The tribe is repressive, violent, barbaric against the enemy. Enslavement, grotesquely unnatural forms of torture, cannibalism among primitive tribes is documented by archeology, debunking the myth of the “noble savage.” Watch the news today to see a rise in violence motivated by tribalism, as the unravelling proceeds. The fall of Rome is often seen as a benchmark in this narrative. The Roman Republic lasted for a few centuries BC before it gave way to dictatorship, marching on to empire for centuries more of ruthless conquest. Some historians believe its fall began with the end of the Republic. Might that be where modern civilization now stands, as that most imperious “leader of the free world” threatens aggression? No, I believe the similarity ends there. This wannabe Caesar is not Roman - he is Sicilian. 

A trapdoor tax

The very morning I was about to begin this post on the arcane subject of tariffs there appeared a column in the paper by Ramesh Ponnuru on the same topic, which is a hot one lately, given the bizarre thrashing about by the newly installed dictator here. Ponnuru tends to lean rightward, but not irrationally, and the article was informative, even droll. Quoting the new treasury secretary, “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream,” he comments, “Perhaps a man with assets above $500 million should have found a better way to phrase this opinion.” In truth trade between nations involves a complex balance of forces from natural resources to consumer behavior, and nations play to their strengths. One with cheap labor might manufacture inexpensive clothing and sell it to another that excels in technology. In the latter country the garment industry would suffer. A tariff high enough to cover wage standards might be imposed to protect garment workers, but then who would be able to afford the clothing? That is but one example of the intricate web of global trade.

Tariffs have their place in protecting vital industries or nurturing a new ones to success. They should not be used as a cudgel whenever a vengeful ruler has a fit pique. The danger if they are normalized is economic stagnation as industries without competition grow complacent. Even worse, a trade war results in a depression. The contortions of apologists for tariffs, addressed by Ponnuru, even speak of currency manipulation. He rejects all such theories, concluding they only “distract from the unsettling truth: The president has an obsession with tariffs, and it is impervious to facts and logic.” 

Personally, I believe these grotesque machinations with tariffs may be a backdoor tax on the American consumer, or should I say “trapdoor.” Whatever revenue might accrete to the treasury the regime will claim is reducing the deficit, relieving them of the hideous necessity to raise taxes, which mega-corporations will celebrate, while the rest of us will be reduced to grinding chicory root to substitute for coffee.  For generations that drumbeat of tax cutting and the expected “trickle down” of wealth has drowned out all considerations of common good. Now this…

The terror of guns

One reason I follow the news, grim as it is these days, and read the daily paper is in order that I may avoid boring you, dear friends, with tropes on any given subject, but offer a perspective I have not et come upon. Indeed, after I have written about something I more often see the idea pop up elsewhere, not that I credit my influence; but born in 1945, I often find myself ahead of the curve, now better described as a tsunami.

Thus to the matter of guns in America, a colossal crisis that positions this powerful country in the eyes of the world on the edge of a precipice and a plunge into anarchy. After yet another slaughter of babes in school and ensuing response of photos, crosses, hearts, and teddy bears, the sickening cant of news media of “thoughts and prayers,” and authorities “searching for a motive,” as though any disturbed juvenile needs a motive to kill, a thoughtful column by Paul Waldman was in the Post. He pointed to the fact of liberal successes on social issues, making for a more open society, the very thing that conservatives abhor. Only on the matter of gun laws does the rightwing prevail, obstructing any and all reasonable restrictions, and of late even refusing to justify their untenable position. Waldman concludes with this: “Our terror is their achievement.”

Terror is the playing field of dictatorship, and this observation of Mr. Waldman is the first inkling I have come upon of my own view that the politics of guns is not simple obstinacy, not malfeasance but deliberate dereliction with the aim of creating a reign of terror. The legislators standing in the way of sound laws are far from conservative; they are cold blooded killers who want your children to die horribly, want you to live in fear. Consider: it is their only route to overcome the will of the majority, which in their view is decadent and sinful, to install in its place a theocracy, sharia law, with their chosen overlord atop. 

Dysphoric, or not

While my high opinion of my local paper, The Washington Post, has recently been known to falter, I can always trust that someone on the staff will soon write something to redeem that institution in my eyes. This week it was Megan McArdle writing on the subject of gender dysphoria and the extreme positions in the uproar it has raised with respect to pubescent children. She begins by acknowledging that in seeming to equate the extremity of opposing sides she risks an onslaught of brickbats. In other words she takes the middle ground and proceeds to illuminate the matter with a perspective I have not seen from anyone else. In so doing she exposes, intentionally or not, a generalized suspicion of modern-day parents, either as ignorant bigots or panic-stricken hysterics rushing to intervene at the earliest signs of puberty. 

In her column, McArdle goes on to say that “everyone seems far more confident than they should be, given how weak the available research is.” Then she describes that weakness, quoting one Finnish researcher that “a child is not a small adult.” The conclusion, attributed to that same researcher, is that “emerging identities may not be as stable, or their grasp of the consequences as firm, as trans adults, who are of course fully capable of making their own decisions.” 

In my day, gender dysphoria was simply known as puberty, and any perceived anomalies on what is now recognized as a gender spectrum might be anticipated to go away. Historically, this was true for a “significant fraction” of such cases, as McArdle also observes. The only thing she does not speak to, and which, being based on a personal inference, you will read nowhere but here, is the “cool factor.” Not long ago, homosexuality was regarded as a sin and a crime. Thanks to modern science, there is now a cultural enlightenment that has allowed a persecuted minority to come out of the closet and into the mainstream, where their signature style and creativity have a visible impact, especially in the media - an influence that surely is not lost on a child entering the chaos of puberty - dysphoric by definition.