Notes From The Rubble
America is over now. That is sad, and I do not relish this tone of catastrophe, but I believe nothing can save it from here on out. Wealth exists there, and may continue to exist for a while, because the country has been reduced to little but wealth production, and the government is owned by people who, to put it mildly, will not give up their economic advantages easily. But wealth is not a country, nor is it a sufficient condition for the survival of a country, at least as anything more than a geographical location where wealth is exchanged — but that is not what anyone means by a country. Half of America’s population is spiritually Marxist and despises self-determination, human nature, and free will. The other half is the completely dispirited monolith of a frightened mass-mind cult clinging to a fantasy protector who is, on a daily basis, selling them and their former dreams and beliefs to their country’s enemies for a song. That is what he means by “the best deals.” He has made this more explicit than ever over the past week. And in the aftermath of his public and emotionally unstable surrender to the wishes and methods of Vladimir Putin, his supporters, from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and anything-for-a-buck Lindsey Graham down to the millions of best-remain-nameless lost souls in the hinterlands clinging to their fake idol’s apron strings for fear of living and thinking like self-respecting adults, are out there cheering for their treasonous hero and his slimy sidekick J. D. Vance, while spewing venom (as they have been ordered to do) at the “arrogant” and “ungrateful” man who is actually trying to lead his sovereign nation through the most terrible trial in a dignified way, and to do so while simultaneously swallowing his pride to act civil with Viktor Orban’s American counterpart, in the hope that if he knuckles under and pays the protection money being extorted from him by the Trump faction of Putin’s mafia, he may be allowed to save a few more Ukrainian lives or a few more miles of territory.
The standard line among the Trump cult’s Zelensky haters is the hokum that he is “arrogant.” (The standard propaganda technique of accusing the other of one’s own sins.) Arrogant? How? Where? What — and I am asking this directly to the absentee ghosts of some former friends of mine who lost their minds to the cult years ago and who, I have learned to accept, will never come back — what do you know about him, really know about him from a source not rooted in Kremlin troll bots, that suggests arrogance? And yet they all say it, they all believe it, they all act and think on the premise that he is driven by personal vanity and arrogance, and of course that he is ungrateful. And if you point out to them that he has been extremely thankful to the American government and people throughout the three years of this war, you will be met with derision, for the same reason that Trump and his slimeball sidekick feel they can get away with throwing that accusation at him in the first place, namely that they mean Zelensky has not expressed enough personal gratitude to Donald Trump. As though Trump has done something for him. As though Trump deserves thanks for trying to steal his territory on Putin’s behalf, trying to thwart his efforts to strengthen his security alliances with Europe, trying to renege on promises made to him by the previous administration or to radically alter the terms of those previous arrangements retroactively, trying to undermine his authority and legitimacy on the world stage, and trying to tell him — to tell him, the president of Ukraine, at this very moment — that Putin deserves trust and good faith, that Putin wants peace, and that he, Zelensky, is the obstacle to ending this war. For that crock of Russian propaganda, Zelensky ought to express gratitude? For the honor of being calculatedly ambushed, and his righteous position misrepresented and mocked in a televised press gathering, by an overt and obvious Putin asset and his self-seeking slimeball sidekick?
One can only wonder with a shudder what is going to happen to his mass-mind millions when Trump is gone, which he will obviously be relatively soon. The show will end, as all such authoritarian fantasies must finally end, and then what will his lost sheep do? I have given up any hope that what they do will entail any sort of overcoming of this insanity, or a return to some semblance of reason. They have devoted too much of their lives to this now, and the ego naturally protects itself. There will be no turning back. But who will step forward to take control of their reins when Trump has let go?
It cannot get better, but — hard to believe, but when I watch Vance’s smug mockery and smirking in the face of real leaders, real courage, real nations facing real extinction, I have to admit this to myself — it could get worse.
There is no surprise here, since of course it is precisely the sort of response Trump was cultivating, but I note that Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s rhetorical (and moral) equivalent of J. D. Vance, offered a social media post on Elon Musk’s platform, in which he cheered on the Trump-Vance “slap down” of Zelensky, referring to the latter with the carefully chosen epithet, “insolent pig.” There it is, precisely what the Trump cult and its unofficial supporters (i.e., echo chamber) throughout social media are hoping to hear: antisemitic slurs. The Jewish “pig” Zelensky. How clever and how rabble-rousing for the in-crowd of alt-right populism, i.e., Putin’s global outreach program. After all, reminding us of his Jewishness obviates any need to justify the constant charge that he is merely trying to keep the war going in order to keep his “gravy train” and buy all those private mansions and yachts. What else should we expect from “one of them”?
There are indeed pigs in this scenario, lots and lots of them; and they are insolent ones too. They know who they are, and which trough their snouts are in. The disturbing part is that they no longer mind if you know too.
