The Trump Apocalypse is Here
But we probably will not learn anything from the disaster
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 6, 2020
We all have front row seats as the US self destructs. What a fantastic thing. What an awful tragedy. Usually, appalling tragedies, those driven by a failure to adapt, produce positive and vigorous change. But this one may not help.
The US is now the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic because of massive federal incompetence. This health disaster could have been controlled, even with a slow start, as China has shown. But with a corrupt psychopath in charge, the tragedy was preordained.
Everything that the Republican Party has worked for in the last forty years led to this destruction of the US. The disease is now raging through the South because the state governments are natural imitations of Trump’s psychopathology intent on demeaning and destroying all but the ruling elite.
We now live in a Shakespearan tragedy unique to the 21st century. The Republicans got what they wanted with a fool to front their destruction of the modern social state just as that became the only thing standing in the way of one of the worst pandemics in the last 150 years.
Their only voter support has been aging white racists and their clones produced by intense media programming. The result is a minority constituency in poor and repressed areas of the old confederacy and outposts in the Midwest and West. The tragic decline of public life in the US with the collapse of any viable opposition to an extreme variety of fascism has resulted in forty years of growing nihilism.
This intentional destruction of public life became an apocalyptic virtual reality disconnected from the rest of the planet. These people seem to represent only about 25% of the adult population but are dangerously boosted by vote-rigging, gerrymandering, and massive discounting of the dominant urban population’s voting rights. A small minority’s pathology, enhanced by the prolonged collapse of the US political system, created national nihilism and apathy.
The only break in this escalating descent was the election of Barrack Obama, but that proved to be very close to a bait and switch scam. We ended with only fragments of desperately needed reforms in the face of racism and the oligarchic billionaires’ fascist control. It became apparent that Obama, as a milder Clinton version of neoliberalism, was unwilling to take any risks or do anything but patch the failing system. But, at least, he was articulate and not insane. That is difficult to remember as something once thought normal.
Hopelessness, anxiety, and anger are deadly conditions with which to face SARS CoV2. The death rate in the most broken parts of the US has just begun and is already higher than anywhere else on the planet. The reasons are evident, as outlined in the Atlantic’s The Coronavirus’s Unique Threat to the South.
We have already spent three years in a rapid decline with the first reductions in life expectancy in a century. The bipolarity of the Trump/Republican Party displays severe inconsistency as their mentality wars between macho, male risk-taking and all-pervasive paranoia. Trump cannot become sick because he is above such things. Only losers somehow carry germs, and all the bacteria are from anyone that Trump hates. This amazing psychosis appeals to those infected with the diseases that created this ugly, virtual reality, and those numbers are in the millions.
The dilemma for the rest of us is how to avoid feeling satisfaction that it is the people who helped cause the Trump apocalypse who are beginning to pay for their actions? That leads to the same moral swamp inhabited by those who are the cause of this tragedy. Our shared fate is tied to our ability to overcome our tendency to tribalism, greed, and the desire to dominate and oppress others.
Will the planetary pandemic break the hold of antiquated dominance, greed, and easy hatred that has been resurgent for the last forty years or longer? The forces of that antiquated greed and those old hatreds have gained control of US institutions to guarantee their continued domination and exploitation. This has eliminated almost all elements of social democracy, leaving only powerless tokens of representational government.
We see this with the absence of any viable opposition beyond the mass population in social media and the, still limited, but emerging power of our urban states/metropoles. The lack of anything but token oppositional leadership at any level seems to ensure the cascading failures that we have seen over the last three years. Any semblance of competency is attacked and removed, if possible. The official media simply reports this as another in a long list of failures with no action except avoidance of any responsibility by claiming balance.
Corruption is a direct correlation of incompetence. Incompetence always produces corruption to hide the results of that incompetence. Trump and the Trump Party are proof of how extreme this can become, but it is endemic to the US political system and most others. Extreme examples of this produce authoritarian police states as that is the ultimate corruption. Threats are the only way that the massively incompetent can bury their escalating disasters and hide their theft and extortion.
The US in the 21st century has no tools to combat these disasters. Under the current rules, the existing incompetent parties, and aging, corrupt politicians are wholly protected. The end of any political process is the avoidance of any change.
I’m sorry to say that there does not appear to be any way out of the increasingly violent train wreck. The only people who are allowed any chance to be elected to national office are either kept powerless and on defense or committed to keeping everything the same even if that sameness is suicidal. Only minor fixes to horrible conditions are acceptable.
The only positive thing I can say at this point is that it will be over soon. I’m still hoping that the Union can be broken with minimum violence when the wreckage of the hypercapitalist economy and conversion of the US to a North Korean style police state becomes apparent later this year.
The collapse of the hypercapitalist economy has, at least, jump-started us on the road our Paris climate controls. Maybe we can hold on to some of that in the coming mayhem.
