Reflections On The Current Mess
There is no country on Earth today with a more reasonable and moderate governmental structure than the United States of America, and yet there is no country on Earth today with a more irrational and immoderate head of state than the United States of America. Can a representative republic with a constitution that meticulously entrenches strict limits on federal government authority transform itself into an outright authoritarian state without explicitly scrapping its constitution and its traditional institutions of representation? We are all witnessing the most ambitious experiment in such a process right now.
Reputed chess grandmaster Donald Trump, along with the band of uniformed pawns he is stage-managing in the Middle East, appear to be on the verge of achieving history’s greatest demonstration of “winning every battle but losing the war.” Trump’s impending abandonment of the Strait of Hormuz, which he has signalled by demanding that the countries losing access to their rightful oil imports thanks to the Trump-Netanyahu goon show in Iran ought to come and “just take it” for themselves, as though this were the simplest task in the world — in which case, why has the U.S. military so dismally failed to accomplish it? — is an impressive confession of historically great weakness. But then again, Trump’s entire life has been little more than a never-ending series of such momentous confessions. Never has a man so loudly proclaimed his manly power while so consistently exhibiting pre-teen girlish insecurity in all he says and does. (Though I must qualify that point with apologies to insecure twelve-year-old girls everywhere, most of whom would probably be able to muster more strength of character in the face of a real crisis than does America’s sissified president, a man who has somehow managed to make even Barack Obama look like Hercules by comparison.)
Trump as president has exhibited two basic modes of operation. The first: Create a looming disaster through megalomaniacal incompetence; then abandon his own mess just in time to avert final collapse, while taking credit for saving everyone from the crisis that would never have been on the horizon in the first place had he not caused it. The second: Create a looming disaster through megalomaniacal incompetence; then abandon his own mess too late to avert final collapse, while seeking to lay the blame for the whole problem on people who had little or nothing to do with the mess he created and would never have made the same catastrophic decisions he made, but who are now on the hook to clean up after him in order to save themselves, because Trump lacks both the intelligence and the basic human decency to help those people recover the losses that he himself precipitated.
