[Here it is morning and I just saw it. I was watching it slide down the new diaries list last night almost to the end and had no expectations of being noticed. Thanks to all for finding some value in my thoughts.]
I got carried away answering someone in another thread. But since it is perhaps my first rather personally-felt posting in this very interesting microcosm of America, I thought I would fix iit a bit and use it as a way of introducing myself.
I am not an American, but a Canadian by origin, residing for the past several years in India. So I feel I should really not have anything other than observer status. So I have been reticent about making myself public. After all, this is a rather scary place, especially of late, and I think it is probably impossible to make any statement on any subject without being fact-checked to death by experts in that field. And certainly, like most people and politics, I am an amateur with an inflated opinion of my opinion.
I just watched that John Oliver sketch on Donald Drumpf and he seems to be almost panicking at the possibility that Mr. Trump could be president. I also find it alarming that there is even a whisper of a possibility that this man should become president of the United States which — like it or not — is a big elephant in a rather anxious zoo.
Pierre Trudeau used to say that when a mouse sleeps next to an elephant, then any movement the elephant make can be fatal. In India also, the intoxicated elephant is something that one would have to be very wary of and is frequent used as a metaphor. And unfortunately, as it stands, America is the elephant and the rest are all mice: the influence of America, of American culture, American geopolitics, and the American economic system, is everywhere.
Most of the world either doesn’t like it, or wants to get in on the gravy. So far the gravy wanters are winning almost everywhere. And that leads to a kind of feverish madness that is gripping the world. The malaise is great in America; in fact, I would say that malaise is America’s greatest export.
The pages of Daily Kos steam with it. Humor and camaraderie — what to speak of a spirit of hope, a spirit of “we have the solution to the problem of human happiness” — is not exuding from the United States of America.
In a way, it is self perpetuating. With each cycle of hope and despair, the slow decline that sets in becomes perceptible the moment you get just a little off your beaten track; and you see that it is seeping in through your television sets, with those well-designed and well-produced stories of decadence, with vulgarity passing for humor, with every channel giving you just the same world.
From my life here in India, where I have followed a lifelong mad ambition to be an enlightened spiritual being, I can say you are going about it in the wrong way.
Not just you, the whole world. But the fact is you are misleading the whole world into the same quagmire. America has prided itself on being the leader: now let us look where it is leading. External wealth, inner poverty. External busy-ness, internal anxiety. External knowledge, science, information, internal vapidity. The occasional thrills of achievement, the persistent downs of purposelessness.
I suppose we could say all those things are permanent partners of human life. And so they are. But don’t you think that “progress” has not indeed begun to look more and more like B.F. Skinner’s idea has now come into its flowering in the 21st century, just like in a dystopic science fiction novel from the 1950’s coming to life before our very eyes.
Or like the British “Vote Waldo” TV drama I just saw linked on another thread.
Trump is that cartoon figure suddenly come to life, almost directly out of that or some other an outlandish fiction Broadcast News or another of the dramatized attempts to frighten us into recognizing that we are really being had.
But like in the Matrix, we can’t escape, no matter where we turn. The live, breathe and dream the matrix.
Obama is elected on a wave of hope, but the patchwork he puts on the wounds is not enough to quell the streaming bile tide of malaise.
Indeed the malaise grows and it takes different forms, in the way that inner imbalance means the same conditions will produce a different disease in different people. And so, the various conflicting and usually misguided solutions to the problem of happiness, to the pursuit of happiness, become sources of great tension.
That malaise is on DailyKos in both the angry and increasingly testy exchanges between out-groups and the smarmy self-congratulatoriness of team members. But the same testiness is increasingly present in almost everyone, whatever group or section of society they belong to.
Is it a product of the media, self-reproducing through its constant magnified reflection of evil, until evil has become ubiquitous? The tentacles of the media are pervasive. They create this world, this matrix out of which it becomes impossible to escape.
They tell you: The world MUST be like this. It must be because that is REALITY. This is the way so-called realists think. And so they create their own reality, indeed they do. They create the reality of unintended consequences, both the well-meaning people and those who are evil. It is the kind of reality where the solution is always worse than the problem.
Good luck to you all. Make a decision for the Good. The world needs you to move in the right direction. You really are not such hotshots. Get a grip. We need you to grow up. You have the nuclear bombs, remember?