Saturday Night Fears
Watching the blind chicken
by Mike Meyer
There’s a lot going on and none of it is good. There is great irony in this but no humor at all. We need to get seriously reoriented or our future is going to look like Hitler got the atomic bomb.
The irony is that Trump has, as we have seen is his only act, spent the week making a fool of himself all over Europe. The lack of humor is that no one there looks any better for pretending that Trump is the president of the US. In fact his one skill is making anyone around him look stupid.
Andrew O’Hehir, the executive editor at Salon, who I have slowly built considerable respect for over the last few years posted an erudite and frightening warning today for all of us.
He leads off with a German foreign relations analyst, Philipp Liesenhoff, describing Trump at the the NATO summit by quoting an old German folk saying, ‘A blind chicken finds corn once in a while.’ The point is that Trump has only one interest and that is wrong footing everyone around him so he can feel superior.
The problem is that we are in the last days of the old liberal economic and representative democratic order and Trump’s only desire is destruction. He has no ideas and no policy except filling his pockets and satisfying his pathological narcissism but that doesn’t matter. The whole structure is ready to fall so it will.
While it is interesting, and will be more so in the future, to pick through the absurdity of this situation, the reality will be accelerated collapse before the new sane order is ready to replace the old. The huge risk is to plunge much of the planet into racist authoritarian devastation.
Trump is an idiot but the people who have climbed onto his coat tails are some very ugly people with committed visions of themselves at the helm in vast, corrupt wealth. The oligarchic disaster of America is a hint of what could come unless we reorganize what we are and where we are going very quickly.
O’Hehir’s point is exactly that of many of us, none of the old system will survive, the ‘good’ people we are looking to are products of that system and have no idea what to do except return to ten years ago and stumble on. They are all from the now failing neoliberal mold. And the neo conservative war mongers are fully dangerous and stupid in their own right. They are not allies of anyone seeking diversity and real democracy.
In America we have the beginnings of hope based on Bernie Sanders call for some sanity and real promise with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the new generation . That is what the majority have spent years calling for with no luck. Now we have drifted too long and allowed the old, failing political system to continue to corrupt everything. The best that was offered was Obama as another Clinton technocrat from the end of the 20th century. We were satisfied with articulation, oration, and honesty. It was no where near enough and now we have no options.
I will say this again and again. The old wreckage needs to be removed if for no other reason than the planet is dependent on the American Empire, still, for many things and we owe our clients, if not our own population, something more than disaster and the leadership of a blind chicken.
This is becoming more critical by the hour. We are, again as stated many times, totally dependent on Mueller in the Justice Department of a collapsing system to bring down an illegitimate ruler. What will replace him? And how will Mueller actually achieve this? Trumps incompetence and Russian entanglements are behind the planet wide hand wringing over the blind chicken going to meet a small but dangerous dictator. How bad the outcome will be is totally dependent on Putin. The blind chicken doesn’t care.
Read between the lines in O’Hehir’s article below and in the analysis of the NATO debacle following it.
