Planning Ahead
Today, I received an e-mail from a good American friend who, after reassuring me (or himself) that he has reconciled himself to the ugly truth of his country’s current predicament, proceeded to offer his comments on the Afghanistan debacle, beginning with the observation that even with years of planning, no one could have done a better job of reducing and shaming America than Joe Biden and his administration have done over the past eight months, culminating (so far) in the Afghanistan humiliation.
To which thought I reply that in fact they have done this with years of planning. When Biden announced America’s immediate surrender (oops, “withdrawal”), Donald Trump jumped out to praise this wonderful decision, which was his way (as usual) of claiming credit for it, since it had been his decision too — before he was talked out of it by members of his administration who actually still liked the United States of America a little bit. And Trump’s anti-American megalomania was following immediately upon that of Biden’s old boss, who also tried to surrender to the Taliban before a few members of his administration mentioned that Americans might not be quite ready for a farcical redo of Vietnam just yet. Apparently, the judgment has been made that after eight years of Marxist Obama and four years of useful idiot Trump, the American public is ready at last.
What I find hilarious is all the “Republicans” (i.e., Trump cultists) out there — particularly in the tribally dutiful “conservative media” — criticizing this humiliation and trying to pin it entirely on Biden, while completely ignoring their own hero’s long-expressed desire to do the very same thing, and his public praise of Biden’s action — until, typically, he recalibrated his praise into criticism, following the MAGA cult winds, which in fact has always been his modus operandi, although he cuckolds them into confusing his flattering mimicry of their anger for leadership.
Needless to say, my American friend is the only kind of “right-wing” critic who has any credibility on this issue, since he is one of those rare individuals who, while despising the neo-Marxist left, has never sold his brain to the MAGA crap dispenser. And God bless him for that, because I know all too well how many good people lost their minds and souls to that stupidity, and how much pressure has been applied upon all American non-progressives to fall in line with the charade.
I said “needless to say,” in the previous paragraph, because my website — indeed, my past five years of writing in any forum — has become a kind of informal survey of attitudes about Trump. That is, I can easily judge from direct statistical and personal correspondence evidence that I have gradually lost all my so-called conservative readers (and “friends”) to the extent that they have been sucked into the tribal vortex.
I say this neither with bitterness nor with lamentation. It is just a fact to which I have become accustomed. Like most non-progressives in the English-speaking world (or elsewhere, I assume), I have learned over these past several years that the number of (at least nominally) kindred spirits I may presume to exist “out there” is far, far fewer than I had previously wished to imagine. Fewer by an almost infinite degree, as it happens. To be fair, I have always known that I was being somewhat generous and self-encouraging in my estimates of the possible percentage of principled and thoughtful individuals — I emphasize that word, individuals — I might find in the world, had I the power to read hearts. However, I cannot deny that even my philosophical, ironic, and relatively objective mind has experienced a certain amount of shock at the depth of the truth about late-modern men’s hearts that has revealed itself to me in recent years, and increasingly so with each passing year.
“We happy few,” I used to like to say in political contexts, cribbing Henry V. Realizing just how literal that “few” really is in today’s context has been an eye-opener. But open eyes see clearly, and understanding is the proper and highest goal of life; hence, in the end, “we” will appreciate the value of these rotten and rotting times for the human race, as they expose illusions and highlight precious truths. The darkness, as always, reveals the rare, distant, and discrete sources of light best of all.
