Isn’t our national discordance and confusion unsettling on the way to unnerving?
Ours is not the sure-footed America most of us of certain ages revered. This America recalls a period of misgiving which bred unease that eased the way for pre-Second World War right-wingers to undermine democracies.
Unlike then, though, we’ve participated in making our system vulnerable. We’ve weakened our capital institutions.
All that’s missing is an updated film mélange of muddled masses. In the aforementioned earlier era, some filmmaker used a cinematic collage to illustrate the dilemma of his or hers time.
In these scenes, a moody voiceover describes the uncertainly which drives surging crowds up and down, back and forth, across streets. Interspersed with the aimless migrations are close ups of anxious faces furtively glancing left and right. Edited into these crowds are clips of calmly self-important figures. Notables step out of limousines then walk into state edifices or emerging from same to reenter the cosseted vehicles.
Arriving, departing, their expressions do not reflect any reassurance in the least.
While Americans throughout the late 20s into the nation’s World War II entry had right-wingers who sought to lead the nation astray, solid confident leadership blunted a great many blandishments issued by those black shirts at home and abroad.
Today, who’ll disagree that instead of being guided by stalwarts we are being misled by grifters and other swine who’ll gladly sacrifice the nation to achieve their selfish goals?
Who hasn’t read or heard or seen plenty about social media diffusion of messages meant to weaken Americans’ resolve in our system and ourselves? Of course lack of priorities being what they are, the corporate entities, the policy institutions devoted to advocating and advancing exploitive American economic and social positions, are jockeying for their most insistent voices to be heard from atop the heap rather than join any accommodation and cooperation which best serves the nation.
Increasingly our voices don’t matter.
We know today that propaganda and agitprop are best disbursed through talk radio, advocacy television broadcasters, and social media. While all are nefarious, only the last is insidious.
Back in the newsreel era, when printed words and shouted invective across the ether sufficed to beguile the susceptible, the forces of clarification rebuked and disproved manufactured outright falsehoods in much more orderly maintained rings. Those in the arena possessed more knowing. They were sensible. They were certainly erudite.
Unlike now.
There was always someone bearing authority, or if not that, then trust, who could flatly state something untrue.
If Bo Diddley were alive to write and caterwaul a rewritten version of his Who Do You Love? now retitled Who Can You Trust?, his cobra-snake tie would be a noose that strangled the truth and that 47 miles of barbed wire would imprison clarity.
Listening to snippets of right-wing barking head radio, watching knowingly subjective news people present news skewed right, reading brown-tinged columns on editorial pages coaxing contrariness, and being deluged by left and right fringe elements on social media, who mustn’t imagine how simple it is to knot the straightforward? All it requires is one scratch of an itchy public’s disbelief – or in its readiness to disbelieve.
While the Russians are handy foils for mis- and disinformation, they’re just making hay from our confusion and lack of any resolve. Let’s give Bad Vlad and his Kremlin Krew that.
Carpe diem.
The Russians have goals. Doesn’t matter that the soviets steeped their nation’s previous czarist history deeper in blood. Same goals. Mature nations develop eternal objectives. For the Russians, it’s being taken as a global heavyweight.
Barack Obama assessed today’s Russia correctly. “They’re a regional power.” That must’ve infuriated Vladimir Putin. Good. Because this correspondent remains an unrepentant cold warrior, and Obama’s observation was correct.
Putin is lost in the hollow glory that was the old Soviet Union. That empty bunch intimidated the world as if a colossus – until its brittleness became apparent and those subjugated saw the fissures then turned them into cracks, which brought the whole tumbling down and freed themselves.
This irks a still proud soviet like Putin. Understand he’s looking to get his back. Or as we know it, he’s severely driven by nostalgia.
So instead of facing Hillary Clinton, another unrepentant cold warrior by the way, for at least four likely humiliating years, given the most pliant clay imaginable in the form of the dupe Donald Trump, must’ve made a faking it for the Orthodox Church apostate like Putin start revering every smudged icon the FSG could unearth that the old KGB commissars hadn’t smashed to bits under Stalin’s express orders.
Therefore, presented the opportunity to make America bark like a pig, Putin embraced it. That’s all there is from Russia. What more can be expected from an adversary?
More bothersome are the Americans seeking to undermine our nation. Surely a good number are in the employ of foreign antagonists. No. Russia isn’t the only one. There are so-called allies who have no compunction against making the United States taking a broken-off broom handle up the chute minus any grease. Especially now under Der Trump.
Yes, my fellow Americans. Under the real estate fraud that’s how reviled we’ve become around the globe.
However, aren’t the most dedicated to hobbling America and making her bow our own citizens?
In regards to screwing America from within, a Pyrrhic Alliance comprised of so-called progressives are doing their utmost to follow in the steps of earlier disruptive tools. If any possessed historical knowledge, as well as bent romanticism, they’d realize themselves aligned through destiny in the cold-blooded footsteps of Ramon Mercader.
Like Mercader, the Pyrrhic Alliance places its ideology above people. Also like Mercader’s masters, the Pyrrhic Alliance intends imposing its dogma by any means even if it destroys the United States.
Our nation is in peril. And today’s fringe self-absorbed leftist saboteurs, a k a Bernie Bros, are whining about how primaries were stolen from their candidate. No. The Vermont senator lost because many more Democratic voters preferred voting for a Democrat rather than some guy who only caucuses with the party to maintain relevance.
Math is obviously not that part of the left’s strong point. Neither is pragmatism or rationality. Childish petulance is.
And in order to commit this hijacking, they’re willing to abandon the United States to another four years of our present horror. Donald Trump. Tough to disagree their treachery is lower than Der Trump’s and the mongrels following his criminal path.
The Pyrrhic Alliance believes further damage wrought upon the United States through four more disastrous years of the short-fingered vulgarian’s “leadership” would drive Americans into their arms. Therefore, they somehow see the four more years of Der Trump as necessary “short-term pain” for their sole egotistical gain.
As adults know, our world seldom spins so surely.
The Pyrrhic Alliance fails seeing, or outright ignores, that another Trump term would core and dismantle the United States. Believing a new society based on their narrow goals could be erected from eight years of Trump ruin is harebrained.
If we must and can survive eight years of the grifter-in-chief what might recognizably remain of America? Little and next to nothing. The Pyrrhic Alliance assumes our basic pillars would remain standing; that to these they could affix their notions and proceed.
What they dismiss outright is Der Trump, his criminal administration, the fellow grifters attaching themselves to both, other provocateurs foreign and domestic, plain old caprice, reducing those columns to rubble. In essence we’d be left to start anew. Not renew. Hampering that, remembrance of what was. They’d be busy trying to reconstruct the past until reaching a critical moment. Now.
History is not a Jello mold. There is nothing in human existence confirming rebuilding upon ashes and memory enough to recreate much beyond familiarity. The idea of restoring exact instances then returning to previously unworkable pursuits defies logic.
It doesn’t even work in science fiction.
Hoping to burden America with their peculiar order after Der Trump’s devastation, the Pyrrhic Alliance would willingly and blindly cut the throat of the present United States. Doing so just wouldn’t derail their futures but also those of us clear-sighted, level-headed, and sober who simply know better.