The political world, has been unstable for decades, but it finally went batshit nuts. On my blog I’m carefully ignoring most comments. I write about campouts and batteries because once whole thing starts to collapse what’s the point? It’s simply a fact. I don’t point at the sky and yell that the sky is blue. Why would I?
To one extent or another, everyone saw it coming. Well maybe not everyone. A portion of true believers will deny what they’ve experienced this year, probably for the rest of their lives. Lets just say everyone who’s not currently wearing a covid mask or getting a third face tattoo sensed the jig is up.
Join me in a virtual break. Imagine a beautiful stream nestled among Rockies. Imagine a comfortable lawn chair parked in the shade of a cottonwood. Have a seat, I brought two! Imagine the stream is cold and clear and filled with trout. Imagine the beer is cold.
Nice eh?
Observe the stream. It flows because it must. It cannot stop. Gravity, geography, physics, these things cannot be denied. A bucket of water dumped on a rock in Billings will contribute (in some imperceptible yet very real way) to the flow past Baton Rouge.
No analogy is perfect. The further downstream you go, the more the Army Corps of Engineers faffs about. They nudge and cajole the water at massive expense and with only partial control. No matter what they do, water must keep flowing downhill.
Painting with a broad brush, my little stream is a stable system. Especially far upstream where it’s not being carpet bombed with money, it’ll keep on keeping on… forever. Our hypothetical mountain stream was flowing before you were born. It’ll be flowing after you’re dead. It’ll send rainfall from the Rockies to the Gulf of Mexico long after the spastic monkeys reading social media feeds on the bank cease to exist. Isn’t the stream relaxing to watch?
No one man controls it. There isn’t a secret cabal of Illuminati that meet on Epstein’s Island to teach the water to flow. The stream simply is.
Left alone, the stream might flow for a thousand years with only minor adjustments to the streambank. That’s a stable system.
There’s another kind of system; the unstable type. I lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you forgot. Maybe you’ve been gaslit since. Allow me to offer my take on that long ago event. Here, let me hand you a cold beer to sip as I speak.
When I was very young, it was presented as if the Soviets were forever, stronger than us, and unstoppable. Every school teacher, even in the 1970’s simply assumed we’d lose to the mighty socialist powerhouse. Yes, that was the zeitgeist of the times. Go to any university right now and it’s about the same. Folks who have seen many events learn nothing from them.
I remember watching USSR get weirder and weirder. The State sponsored media, just as trustworthy as our media, would lie and lie. They lied so much that truth became impossible to them. “The people’s glorious tractor factory is making so many tractors that every farm will output ten times more than those idiots in America.” The gulf between reality and their utterances grew. The few and tiny facts which slipped out always told a different story than the “news”. “Russia, which has the world’s most awesome tractor factories, is importing grain from Iowa. This just goes to show that socialism is more efficient.”
You might forgive a young Curmudgeon for asking the obvious; “If socialism is the more efficient system, why are they importing our grain? Shouldn’t we be importing grain from their centrally controlled supposedly scientific system? How can goofball farmers in Iowa who are just winging it outcompete them?”
Teachers hate that shit! I was often in trouble for noticing such things.
As I sip my beer I realize I still am. In trouble for noticing I mean.
Anyway, a system that can’t adapt will inevitably corrode and then collapse. The unstoppable USSR began to fail. The media assured us that each of a series of hopeless, clueless, geriatric leaders were hale and healthy even as every photo showed trampled dogshit in rumpled suits.
Like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Soviets leaders were physically fit dynamos right up until they were dead two weeks ago. When one was planted, they’d prop up the next. Each was as inept and ossified as the last. Meanwhile the US media sternly warned us that the Russkies were large and in charge.
In 1983 we watched Wargames, where an AI tweaked the Russkies until we almost all died. That same year, television had it’s own nuclear war porn with The Day After. This was a pattern in my GenX youth. “Never forget the Russkies are fully capable of fucking you to death. Don’t ask stupid questions and do what your teacher says.”
America was invested in pretending the Soviets were growing instead of fading. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. All of our “intelligence” agencies were caught with their pants down. They had no idea it was coming. Dumb little Curmudgeon had noticed who was importing food and who was buying it. Everyone else was on TV explaining how everything they’d said for 10 years was bullshit but now, in the late 1980’s they were on top of their game.
It wasn’t true. To most it was still 1962. Most politicians are older than dirt now and they never left their youth. They never evolved beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis. The breakup of the Beatles is always a fresh wound. The summer of 1968 is a loop replay in their mind.
The Soviets collapse had to happen sooner or later. An unstable system must be corrected and they refused to correct. Eventually the gap between reality and politics was too large. Nobody was willing to rectify the situation, so nobody fixed it before the collapse.
We’re in another nation with a series of hopeless, clueless, geriatric leaders. Biden first ran for president in 1988. That’s before e-mail, social media, Netflix, and DVDs. Twenty years later Biden was still around. He got curbstomped by Obama.
Obama, for reasons which made sense in the short term, lifted Biden up from the floor and installed him in his seat of grift. He did the same with Hillary, who also got curbstomped. She ran State Department business on a private server and caused mayhem until Obama had to show her the door. He installed hapless John Kerry, who had at least won a few primaries.
Notice the pattern of picking among the losers? We have a system of competitions. It’s supposed to ensure our leaders are competent. Our geriatric would be overlords cannot win in competition, so they win through manipulation. Only one candidate in the last three cycles can regularly fill stadiums, and they hate him.
Obama wasn’t the only one to substituted manipulation for competition. Bernie Sanders was clearly popular even if I’m not a fan. He was swept away in a sketchy maneuver to give Hillary another shot. Why not let them duke it out? Because people who can’t win the people, build systems that reward sclerotic inertia. It’s not just one party. The opposing party runs in terror when any leader is popular with the people. They freaked over Reagan decades ago and they loathe Trump now. They tried to shoehorn Jeb(!) into the big seat, based on the stupid idea that the best possible leaders should a third order retread from the same family.
Biden hardly campaigned at all, yet won with more votes than any other president in history and in exactly the right locations with statistical anomalies we’re forbidden to examine. It’s literally dangerous to question such a thing. Like the Soviets of the 1980’s he jails people who ask uncomfortable questions. Biden ascended to his throne behind concertina wire. He keeps a bevy of political prisoners in jail. The system, long unstable, was dealt a death blow in 2020. We act like it’s still solid, but it’s already half gone.
Just like Obama, Biden selected as VP a loser who barely won any primaries. Since then roughly 14 million people voted for him in the primaries. As of yesterday, their votes are irrelevant. Deliberately avoiding the will of the people and then collapsing at the wheel is a common theme. President Biden is following the path of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Senator Robert Byrd, Senator Strom Thurmond, and all those half dead Soviet dudes of my youth. Like the Soviets before, Biden was unquestionably, fully, completely, utterly in charge, until everyone realized he wasn’t.
After the debate of July 21st, people asked; “If Biden is a vegetable, who’s running things?”
The answer is nobody.
A lot of people like to imagine someone is in charge. That’s simply not true. You don’t have to be a young Curmudgeon, peddling his Schwinn around wondering why Iowa has more grain than Kazakhstan, to come to this realization. Just look around.
As the unstable system collapses, many of us seek to avoid the truth of what we’re actually seeing. The near assassination of Trump on July 13th came with an avalanche of theories, they all boil down to “that thing you saw, wasn’t what you saw”. I view it as merely an unstable system. People bathed in “this one guy is the cause of all that’s evil” getting all worked up and becoming mentally ill is to be expected. I suspect the Secret Service is just as incompetent as the rest of the government. I think Biden is just as addled as he sounds. I think Kamala is as incompetent as anyone else who couldn’t win primaries. Biden withdrawing via text on a Sunday afternoon is exactly what it sounded like when various Soviet stooges cycled through their dying bureaucracy.
Biden can’t decide to shit or go blind but it’s exactly what you’d expect. A guy who campaigned from his basement and took his oath behind concertina wire is going to flake. Now, he’s flaked.
My hypothetical mountain stream will flow much longer than whatever the hell is going in politics. Perhaps we’ll become a stable system once again. A good step might involve seating a man who won the presidency through competition instead of shenanigans. The rest might involve watching losers who can’t compete, fail spectacularly.
It’s an interesting time to be alive. Enjoy the show.
