Affairs of State
Somethin’s tellin me there’s a whole, nother world
Truly sisters and brothers, I've tried to become a better American, ignoring the affairs of state as much as I can. Nonetheless, sometimes, I can't help perusing the news. Upon finishing, just like that conspiratorial murderous lady, I quickly seek to exorcise my crime, “Out, damned spot!”
Herein lies the scrub.
I'll start with what I've tried best not to pay attention to for four decades, Donald Trump. What's most perverse about America's politics these days is that you project your crimes on your opponents as their biggest faults. For example, after claiming for four years Mrs. Bill’s general unpleasantness and naked corruption weren't enough for her to lose an election to a rotund carnival barker, the Dems unceasingly and falsely claimed the election was stolen by various nefarious forces, most especially the Russians.
In return, four years later, Mr. Trump claimed he couldn't have lost to a stiff fish like Mr. Biden. He said his reelection was stolen by villainous forces, including Republican county election officials of various states. Then after four years claiming Mr. Trump had stolen the 2016 election, the Dems charge, using a variety of legal maneuvers, Mr. Trump's greatest crime to date is promoting the 2020 election was stolen.
However, one suit not regarding elections is the current trial in New York, though you wouldn't know that from listening to either the prosecutors or most of the press coverage. Hearing some of the prosecutors’ statements you’d think the case was all about the 2016 election, but then these statements are made for Mr. Trump’s numerous partisan detractors, not necessarily the jury.
Most amusing, the prosecutors began by alleging some sort of case against a “newspaper” burying stories. Phew, a main tool of newspaper politics is not covering any given story. “We’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America.” We are at the depths of the Animal House generation’s politics.
This trial is simply about an alleged falsifying of business expenses, otherwise known these days as accounting in most corporate quarterly reports. The only thing better would be the Democrats prosecuting some sort of campaign finance violation, which even they, as of yet, can’t stoop to do. However, most amusingly, in a car the other day briefly listening to NPR, they were doing just that. Saying....wait for it...."It was all so unseemly. No president spends all this time, money, and such effort trying to hide sexual affairs for the benefit of his campaign.” That was half of Mr. Bill's political career. The only connection this case has to an election is if Trump wasn’t seeking to be elected again, this case wouldn’t be prosecuted in a million years. The old moneyed codger is looking haggard by his persecution, yet he couldn’t simply walk away. Power is the greatest drug.
Over the years, I’ve tried to explain Trump was never the concern. What created Trump was the problem and now the political class has done their absolute damnedest to insure those who follow will be much, much worse. These are all just acts of late republic politics. The newest character in this historic tragedy and possibly prove to be the most dangerous is the Speaker of the House. Mr. Johnson has made clear, with the Democrats’ support, he wants to be a DC player. Best, a couple days ago, after being shook-up in a visit to Columbia University, he called for troops to disperse the camp-ins that have sprung up across the nation. What is this Commie Red China?
It made me think about dozen years ago, when I released OF BY FOR where I wrote of the decline of the republic. At the time, I had dinner in New York with a half-clever reviewer. She was aghast. Most amusingly, as a good American cultural revolutionary of the era, she had nothing but derision for anything to be learned from the fall of the Roman republic. Making her case, she pointed to the republic’s tumultuous last years, when Caesar paraded Cleopatra in Rome and was met with, among many others, all sorts of colorful misogynist slurs. Phew, the last years of the Roman republic, the complete collapse of five centuries of unique democratic history, and you think that’s the most important lesson to be gained – higher education in America. I could only laugh, especially when she followed up that I had not mentioned Occupy Wall Street. Going back to the Paris Commune, “the left” has always been infatuated with glorifying failure.
Bringing us to the campus camp-ins. Let me first say, god love every one of them for at least not turning their heads and condoning the atrocity exhibition. It’s amusing to see the panicked reaction of many, Speaker Johnson for example, as a most inoffensive upsetting of the status quo apple cart causes major anxiety in the establishment, provoking knee-jerk calls for violence. This camp-in politics is built on the still-born politics of Occupy Wall Street, which was an attempt to revive the protest politics of the 1960s.
One thing needs to be made clear, the antiwar protests of the 60s and 70s were largely a failure. They did succeed in getting rid of the draft. Vietnam, leaving aside the century of campaigns against the indigenous populations, was the longest war in American history. I suppose you could compare to what came after, two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that's a feeble, bloody correlation. Protest gatherings, without active, long term democratic organizing underneath are of limited value. In this case, it begins with an understanding the present Israel/Palestine situation is a result of the greater American global project. A solution lies in dismantling the Pax Americana, requiring a full scale reformation and renaissance of democracy in America.
It reminds me of the Italian Guglielmo Ferrero's comment in his excellent Greatness and Decline of Rome on some of the republic's last generation misplaced hope in the next. Ferrero notes the youth were even more democratically decadent than their parents. How could they not be? They were taught and experienced all the wrong values and actions.
Which gets to the final note on technology, an essential aspect in developing any democratic politics in the 21st century. The Journal has a terrible piece on a gee-whiz technologist who is an adviser on AI to the White House, Wall Street, and the Valley itself. He's a professor at UPenn, which certainly has compute pedigree as the birth place of the ENIAC, but he's at Wharton. In the words of Norbert Wiener, “It cannot be good for these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the market.”
Nonetheless, what really was concerning about the article is the whack sense of deja vu incurred. Thirty years ago the same gee-whiz, isn't it great technophiles populated the business press gushing how great the Net would be. The only way to judge this next generation of compute technology is its past and that has overwhelmingly facilitated one thing — an historical concentration of wealth and power. Combined with a broken, eminently corrupt, structurally archaic politics, this next generation of compute technology offers nothing so much as more of the same.
Out, damned spot!