“History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Mark Twain
I have an idea. I’m not good enough a writer to fully commit it to words but I’m trying. My last post was an honorable attempt. Today I’ll try again.
As I was saying in my last post, I got to live through the dissolution of the biggest baddest scariest system of the last several hundred years. The Soviet Union dissolved while I was still sporting a mullet. What it looked like, from the safe distance of an American who had nothing to do with anything, was a system losing all it’s stability. Internal controls were inadequate or mal-adapted to new conditions. They couldn’t keep the plates spinning. Inevitably, it collapsed. When it collapsed, it went down fast.
During this momentous transition, the press, on both the East and West, were useless. They insisted nothing was happening. The USSR was awesome and unstoppable and would surely outlast us all. Flunkies like the CBS evening news (it seems weird to remember TV “news” but it was a thing back then) worked very hard to not notice what was obvious to everyone who cared to look.
Right now it’s about the same but with a different former bad ass. The media is pretending it’s totally normal for an American president to be too incapacitated to run for re-election but simultaneously super healthy for “presidenting”. And of course pulling out of the race via an unusual memo on social media is totally legit. And of course the man who got more votes than any candidate in history polling lower than whale-snot just a few short years after being sworn in behind concertina wire is totally normal too.
You know exactly what I’m talking about. You feel the “vibe” just like I do. It’s what I consider the “feel” of a collapsing system.
Back to the 1980’s, I’m grateful USSR collapsed as peacefully as it did. It was hard on the Russian people but it could have been worse. It didn’t go WW3 or French Revolution or Great Leap Forward or Rwanda. I will always be glad it was thus. I never meant ill toward the Russian people.
After that long winded intro, I’m going to dive into the near-assassination of The Orange Menace and the massive levels of incompetence (if not deliberate malice) layered on the cake of Fuckuppery that created that event. But not yet! First a walk down memory lane.
Back in 1987 the mighty heartless Soviet Union was still spinning plates. Their military had a well earned reputation for being serious and brutal. Mathias Rust was a novice pilot. For reasons which probably made sense to him, Rust flew clear to the center of the USSR’s homeland. He flew past radar installations and machine gun turrets and military might the likes of which had most of us fretting over total Armageddon.
He did nothing clever at all. He just flew there!
Inexplicably, the huge military meant to stop such things sat there with its thumb up it’s ass watching it happen. He was in a fuckin’ Cessna! Stalin would’ve had that plane blown from the sky faster than you can say “glorious people’s air force turns hippy activist into confetti”. By ’87 the cruel and evil Stalin was gone. The USSR he’d created was (probably due to his excesses) a hollow ineffective bureaucracy.
Just think of the madness or clanging brass balls it took to do something that crazy. Just look at it! (Note; is that little kid in the foreground pretending to shoot the plane with a toy pistol? You go little Russkie!)
You can’t fly a Cessna into the gaping maw of unforgiving totalitarian militaristic machine at it’s peak, but you can fly into its ossified remnant when it’s nearly dead. At some point during the decline a system can’t manage its own affairs and the USSR couldn’t figure out what to do about a silly little Cessna.
Rust was lucky! Don’t think he was a steely eyed fighter, he was a nerd in a rental. As for the USSR? They just sorta’ gave up. Even after he landed they didn’t seem to know what to do about it. It was mystifying. Stalin’s USSR would’ve had the dude ripped to pieces faster than you can say “Gulag for him!” The remnant USSR tried nothing and was all out of ideas. They tossed him in the clink for a couple of months, treating him better than Stalin treated anyone, and then handed him over to Germany.
Rust is alive right now. Stalin’s USSR would kill a man for growing a turnip wrong. The shell left behind couldn’t keep a Cessna out of its airspace. The system had crawled up it’s own ass and died there. Eventually a nerd gave it a wedgie. Just look at this dweeb. This noodle armed fucknut defeated the Soviet Air Force!
That’s all old timey stuff and yours truly is just a GenX guy who never got over not living the plot to Terminator. Right? Nah, here’s a photo of our own system losing it’s ability to do core things.
Last year a “spy balloon” launched by the Chinese, dragged it’s nutsack across American airspace from sea to shining sea. America’s Air Force of past times would’ve blown that fucker up so fast it’d never have seen the continent. But, in 2023 and the system was hollow.
Just think about it. America’s combined military might couldn’t handle a balloon. Which is worse? The Soviet Union that couldn’t stop a dipshit in a Cessna or the American military that couldn’t stop inflated fabric?
Think that over for a second. America arguably has the most powerful military on planet earth. It couldn’t handle a fuckin’ balloon! A balloon has no defenses. It doesn’t use stealth. It can’t maneuver. It’s not loaded with passengers or hostages. It’s not a question of international law; blowing up shit that’s not welcome in your airspace is just as legit in 2023 in America as it was in 1987 in Russia.
Our military can drone strike a goatherder in Syria but it failed to pop a balloon over the homeland!
Why did we put up with the damn balloon? Beats me. I assume a long chain of command filled with gutless career dweebs. Most of them never could make a decision and the rest have been taught to stop making decisions. In 2023 that included the “currently missing but perfectly alert at least until next January” President.
Reagan would’ve whacked a spy balloon so fast it would make your head spin. The conversation would be like this: “I don’t want the details. You had me at balloon and Chinese. Shoot it down before it reaches land and don’t fuck up like Carter with the damn helicopters. Prepare a press release where I look good announcing it.” I would expect the same from any “adult” president. Bush Sr., Clinton, or Bush Jr., or Obama would all be like; “It’s a balloon, why are you even bothering me with this?” Trump would’ve blown it up twice and then blown up the water where it landed, just to freak out the sqaures.
Biden did nothing until at the last possible minute. He shot it down after it had traversed the entire American homeland. (Presumably protecting Spain or UK from having to handle it on the other side of the Atlantic?)
The balloon flew for days. I ask the question; “Who among us is so clueless that they can’t figure out the solution to a balloon?”
I get back the answer; “None of us individually is that incompetent, but we could form a committee that’s dumb enough.”
That’s the “feeling” of a collapsing system.
Now back to one of the many weird things in this very weird summer. A would-be assassin came damn close to nailing Trump. But he wasn’t a hard core, ice cold, steely eyed, killer. Thomas Matthew Crooks was a twerp. Look at this tool!
I’m fat and old and generally peaceful and even I could kick this twerp’s ass. My housecat could probably kick his ass.
Thomas Crooks is the human version of a Chinese Spy Balloon.
Everyone’s stomping about with alternate theories about how the Secret Service used nine dimensional chess to nearly off Orange Man Bad, but life isn’t like that. Systems that do not adapt, die. Often they go with huge kaboom, but other times they go slow and stupid; like a wet fart in church.
Our decrepit bureaucracies are not doing well at anything for which they were created.
It didn’t start in 2020 but it was unavoidable by then. The plates aren’t spinning. The election of 2020 yielded the greatest number of votes in all of the nation’s history while looking, acting, and smelling as corrupt as possible. Short of actually mooning each individual voter by name on live TV what else could have happened to add to the stink of corruption?
The spy balloon of 2023 outwitted the military with the largest budget on planet earth. I repeat, it was a fuckin’ balloon.
In 2024 we very nearly got to watch Trump’s head explode in real time. He was surrounded by the formerly impressive Secret Service. They did nothing until after shots were fired. That the Secret Service is now associated with girl-bosses and obtuse chains of command is not Trump’s fault. It’s not Biden’s fault. It’s everybody’s fault. It’s failure en masse. A collapsed system is a failure that’s nobody’s fault.
We’re seeing what you’d expect for a bureaucracy in decline. The Secret Service once had a very clear mission and they appeared to do it reasonably well. Now it’s part of the clueless foam that surrounds us.
Note: this is a societal thing, not merely the government. If you’re looking for instances of systems failing you can look beyond government failures. Ask Kodak about digital photos. Ask Blockbuster about video streaming. Ask Sears about everything. Ask Cloudfire about network security.
As for the Secret Service, check out Kimberly Cheatle’s wiki-page. I read between the lines that she’s probably never taken a punch in her life. There’s no indication she’s drawn a firearm in the line of duty. She’s the kind of person who’s perfectly suited to run a bureaucracy in decline.
The good news is this; freewill. Even the Terminator series claimed there is no fate but what we make. And shit changing doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll get worse. I’ve seen systems collapse without massive bloodshed. Do you miss Sears or the USSR?
We might get through this (at least most of us). Our systems might even have a glimmer of relevancy left. They might (one hopes) be less far gone than the Soviet Union.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Next week’s Black Swan event (at this point it’s accelerating faster than monthly) is going to happen. It could envelop us into full terror. Certainly I see that the people are easily stampeded. In 2020, it took a week to go from “it’s racists to stop planes coming from China” to fistfights over toilet paper… so there’s that. Avoid crowds.
That’s the thing about collapsing systems, you can see it coming and you can see it after it’s gone but during the middle part all you can do is react. But I’m rooting for us all and I prefer chaos to a death march. Keep your head on a swivel and keep common sense in your heart. You might do well. Chaos is neither good nor bad, it’s just the absence of order.