After 87,765 days

Must be a new year...I just got back to make a new posting on July 8, 2017...

Always time for a rant and never more than now, four days after the Fourth of this year:

360x241years=87,765 days. The 87,765th day of the republic, +/-, and it seems too small a number to encompass all of the 241 years since the signing of the Declaration. "A republic, madam, if we can keep it," Benj. Franklin is reported to have replied to a woman's question re: the government of the new country. So. how are we doing? Ben, would you say? What would you think of our government's direction? What's your prognosis? Will we survive--should we survive?--Trump and his depredations? What about the trajectory of the nation, besotted now by wealth, money-grabbing, overweening influence of special interests, "corporations regarded as citizens" by US Supreme Court ruling, incivility, disdain for learning, experience and scientific evidence, such that we voted in such a one as our president? And, what of the electoral college and its legal precedence over the popular vote? Wasn't it designed as a last measure against demagoguery? a safeguard against rabble vote?

We're in a mess, Ben, and this one citizen, at least, though I know of many who are equally worried, sees no path ahead.

The one possibility for future sanity may be that Trump's inept shenanigans may bring us down a peg internationally--we've gotten way off track there, arming the world, meddling and messing with others' affairs; maybe this period will knock some sense into us? Maybe strengthen the hand of those who've been warning against our near-mindless policy in the middle east, et al.)Maybe, but I don't count on history's rewarding the stupid, not for long. We have, via our election, destabilized international affairs. Is China really the nation the world wants to look to for leadership?

(Ours has been an imperium that has nearly bankrupted us, not so say made a mockery of our ideals of self-government, democracy, liberty et al.) Trump has been let loose on us--our bad--and on the world--our bad, their bad luck.  His vanity, desperate personal insecurity--his insecurity of person--his coarse language, simplistic and vindictive language, deliberate ignorance--or maybe he really doesn't know anything much--his lack of learning, his vulgarity, to say nothing of his appalling behavior toward women--is all of this a mirror of who we are? Is this caricature our nation? Is my ideal so far removed from what the whole body of this nation wants?

Mass pop culture spawned Donald Trump--TV, reality (!) shows, glitz, five minutes of fame, low voter education, little interest in history--he is this culture's baby, and he plays out its baseness.  There is nothing that such a world finds too base, apparently. Even our quite a few "educated young people" our new writers, seem to fear sincerity, clarity, deeply held beliefs in their writing, favoring instead an adolescent preference for a shrug, a joking sneer, an ironic pose.  Even if they don't express Trump's views, like Trump they have no shame. None that they are willing to claim out of fear of derision by their peers. And, by saying all of this, I do not support the right's so-called values of a blind belief in the bible, its distortion of science, and its insistence upon the subjugation of women, however couched in laudatory platitudes about motherhood, femininity.

No doubt, we are in crisis--so many people without work; so many who have no skills for the work there is; so much poverty; children without proper care and parenting; parents without any help when in difficulty. And what about health care?--you legislators in Congress who have your own superb health care, good salaries, and generous pensions, and offer no hope for those less fortunate?--Why do we keep voting in these jokers? Watch them in an interview. When I listen to their words--blah blah words that bear no resemblance to anyone's truth, I'm almost, almost, inclined to take up Trump's complaint of fake  news!  Almost.  For nearly seventy years the specter of a nuclear holocaust has hung over us and the nations, ours, in particular, have been playing with that fire.  We have within our power to create the sixth mass extinction of the species on the planet.  Plus, we go on, like drunken sailors, drilling, fracking, despoiling the planet, kowtowing to big business' bottom line rather than doing something about climate despoiling.  With all of this on our shoulders it is lunacy to have given the nuclear codes to such a one as Trump.  With Trump at the top, the tool of powerful business leaders, our nation is now securely a triumph of the uninformed, the ignorant, the uneducated--money rules, making money rules. The frosting on this poisonous cake is that looking-powerful  trumps (I can't help it!) being powerful and embraces ignorance of facts and rules: Alice's Wonderland is here.

Each morning, I get up happy to be alive, to be here, and think that we'll get over this. Somehow. Then, as the day progresses, I see this is wishful thinking. I read more, see more, remember more and I despair. Annie Dillard, in her book For The Time Being, writes of the wrong-headedness of thinking ourselves exceptional, of regarding our time as the most valuable, as being the most vulnerable ever, the dangers as the most extreme.  She reminds us that we are in no way exceptional! The world has been ever thus, different, but ever in peril. She reminds us that there already have been at least 5 mass extinctions!  And, further, she writes that reputable scientists assure us that within 400 years nearly all of today's mammals and birds will have been made extinct: The Earth really is bigger than our species, however smart and however stupid we are, and I suppose this is consolatory news.

Really? When it breaks your heart to see how beautiful the planet is, as it is, as it has evolved. Consolation? To be a human being and not kill oneself, finally, seems to involve a great act of hopeful prestidigitation--the sure act of annihilation balanced with Emily Dickinson's small bird of hope against hope.  This is our profoundest tragedy:  We are NOT gods, at all. There is not a god who will come to our aid and undo what we have done. We are not powerful. We are bits of dust. Dust.  Is this consolation?  Neither Annie Dillard nor Emily Dickinson try to paint it as such. This is my cry, not theirs.  How does one face the inevitability of our stupidity, our incompetence, our fallibility and not despair?  Christianity seems to say, lead a life of belief in Jesus and you will be rewarded in the next life. Really, a next life?  Where's the evidence for that? Other religions have their answers to this conundrum. The American answer seems to have been: human kind is perfectible, get involved in your community, help lift your fellow-citizens, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And all around me I see this answer in shreds.  The exceptions (and they most magnificently exist) are lone tattered islands in a vastness, struggling against the disintegration of the continent. Wake up. We are not exceptions. We die.  Versus. Wake up. Get back up on the horse. We live. Then we die.