“It’s now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea,” Senator Lindsay Graham says. The drums of war beat louder each week, but Americans are too willfully deaf to hear them.
There are junctures in history when some things are inevitable. The collapse of the Soviet Union in early 1990 is the most obvious example, though most experts were still saying it would take another generation. But the end of Pax America was also foreseeable long before Donald Trump began swinging his wrecking ball as President of the United States.
It’s incredibly behind the curve to say, “with the power he has Trump thinks he can shape an alternate reality and persuade enough Americans of its authenticity to perpetuate his power.”
Illusions, when willfully maintained, are also a form of lying. The intelligentsia is propagating the illusion that Trump is increasingly stumbling over the hurdles that an intact American democracy is putting in his path, and is even being driven mad by our “our checks and balances.”
In truth, Trump is knocking over every hurdle, and hurtling the world down in his race to the bottom. The more he’s cornered by the Mueller investigation, the more likely war with North Korea is.
The commentariat pronounces, “Truth telling is the fundamental, unpardonable offense in any unfree society.” But that’s been the condition of this country for many years. It is precisely what brought this cretin to power, and what will prevent him from being stopped.
The best scapegoats are those that deserve the blame that others project onto them. Trump is the perfect scapegoat because he’s such a stupid, ugly man that it’s easy to believe he’s the problem. That’s why commentators say absurd things like, “Trump attacks truth because he cannot bear the mirror it holds up to him, the emptiness it unmasks.”
Donald Trump is a mirror of the emptiness at the core of America, which has been growing unexamined in the dark for many years. It’s provided fertile ground for evil.
To understand Trump, one has to understand evil, and how it can take over a people. Is there one American in a million that cares to examine and learn from the darkness within?
The truth is that Trump rode a wave of cynicism after Obama’s “hope and transformation shtick ended in sophistry. Trump attacks truth because Americans ceased believing there is such a thing.
If Trump’s base is only one-third of the American electorate, and he plays only to his extremist, racist, misogynist, xenophobic base, why doesn’t the other two-thirds of Americans rise up and impeach a man that hates the Constitution and everything America has supposedly stood for?
Misanthropy is all the rage. Trump is wrecking what is left of American democracy and the international order because that’s the job the American people elected him to do. And not just his base. Americans don’t care, and whoever tells you otherwise is lying.
Let’s get serious. Humankind faces the greatest crisis in our evolutionary history, and we have to change course. There’s a complete vacuum of global leadership in the global society. Neither the post-World War II international order, nor some even more self-serving order from communist-capitalist China are capable of addressing the immense challenges that humanity now faces.
If a psychological revolution ignites, humankind will change course and the fragmentation of the earth and humanity will abate before man plunders the earth and destroys the human spirit. Without a revolution in consciousness however, nothing will change.
Politically, a psychological revolution means the end of the domination of tribalism/nationalism, and a redefinition of sovereignty as the sovereignty of humanity.
The United Nations, a flawed international (as opposed to global) institution, is the only political organization the world has. It is in grave peril.
The use of even one nuclear weapon, without the foundation for a true global order having been poured beforehand, will spell the end of the UN. Counter-intuitively, only the creation of new global body, which philosophically supersedes and politically complements the UN, can salvage it.
I propose calling such a body a Global Consultum, after an effective advisory and accountability body in ancient Rome that initially held no power, but became ineffective when it began to accrue power and became corrupt.
A Global Consultum will have no power but great moral suasion. It will make incisive, workable policy proposals for international institutions and national governments for the foreseeable future.
It’s a sign of America’s core weakness that a superpower with a military ten times greater than all the rest of the world’s militaries combined pits itself against a tiny, backward, totalitarian state that can’t even feed its own people.
A real war is coming. It will completely destroy the old order. The foundation for a genuine global order can and must be poured before it happens. Personal survival is meaningless without also looking to humanity.
Martin LeFevre