George Will On The Putresence Of American Politics

Dear Mary,

George Will is such a pleasure to read - even when I disagree with him.

That we are a nation in decay is a difficult situation to reverse - rather like gangrene.

As you may know, I'm pushing for separation of the "United States" into two separate nations. 

Racism, The Division Of The United States Into Two Separate Polities, And The Sudden Collapse Of The Soviet Union

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/09/racism-division-of-united-states-into.html

We have been so inundated by the bootless pleasures of capitalist consumerism, yahoo contempt for learning, and the infernal belief that application of sufficient violence will solve every problem -- social, political and interpersonal -- that it is hard to find a fulcrum where we might leverage our way forward into some kind of sanity and civility, much less compromise-based honorability.

Theocrats want nothing to do with compromise. Nothing.

"God said it. I believe it. That settles it."

 Compendium: American Theocracy

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/10/compendium-of-best-posts-concerning.html

Lamentably -- and it is a lamentation of biblical proportion -- Trump would not have been elected were it not for "the good Christians" who -- here and now -- have replaced "the good Germans" of the 1930s.

I know the adjective "bourgeoise" has an antiquated ring, but it refers to a very real thing. And as soon as "bourgeoise citizens" start clamoring for "law and order" -- Antifa!!! MS-13!!! BLM!!! -- you can expect the opposite.

"Proud Boys": Trump Tells Them To "Stand By" 

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/09/proud-boys-trump-tells-them-to-stand-by.html

The victorious allies forced "the good Germans" to view Hitler's holocaustal carnage.

Notably, Hitler rose to his dictatorial perch by the mechanisms of democracy.

I am always delighted - even thrilled - to see Ortega y Gasset referenced in anyone's writing, and his quotation by Will is to the point:  “Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.”

The genie of stupidity-and-ignorance is "out of the bottle," and the worst minds and most rancorous souls are convinced that they alone are imbued with God's Truth and that only their beneficence will "make America great again." (Hitler literally said the same thing; that he would "make Germany great again.")

I will not go too far down the rabbit hole, but I believe Christian conservatives would rather provoke nuclear Armageddon than risk crossing that imminent threshold where it becomes apparent that a literal reading of scripture is not God's will.

Conservative Christianity, Armageddon As Sell-Fulfilling Prophecy, And Return To The Neolithic

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/10/conservative-christianity-armageddon-as.html

Biblical Literalism And The Cultivation Of Hatred
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/02/biblical-literalism-and-cultivation-of.html  

I will close by encouraging you to read the following essay:

Is Ortega Y Gasset The Most Important Modern Philosopher? The Most Discerning Prophet?

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/09/is-ortega-y-gasset-most-important.html

Love

Alan

PS I have high hopes for Biden's victory, but I also see economic chaos "baked in the cake" so that just four years from now, it is at least conceivable that "the good Christians" will be joined by a groundswell of other volk who are fond of demagogy so that we could easily fall off the edge of our increasingly flat world.

PPS Katie Porter is such a bright light!

"Mighty Whiteboard Of Truth": The Weapon Rep. Katie Porter Used To School A Pharma Exec — And Plenty Others

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/10/mighty-whiteboard-of-truth-weapon-rep.html  

On Thu, Oct 1, 2020 at 4:43 PM Mary W wrote

:

Alan, I'm sure this will resonate with you as it did with me.  I could listen for only a very short time because it was all so disgusting.  A silencer of the microphone was the obvious solution other than to cancel any future debate.  Perhaps Katie Porter and the silencer could work in tandem!  Love, Mary

Begin forwarded message:

For the sake of the country, cancel the remaining debates

Opinion by 

George F. Will

Columnist

September 30, 2020

The putrescence of America’s public life was pitilessly displayed Tuesday when, for 98 minutes, whatever remains of the nation’s domestic confidence and international stature shriveled like a brittle autumn leaf. The national interest — actually, national security — demands that the other two scheduled mortifications, fraudulently advertised as presidential debates, should be canceled: When a nation makes itself pathetic, the response of enemy nations is not sympathy. And an additional 180 or so minutes of ignorant assertions mitigated only by the inarticulateness of the purveyors of them will swell the electorate’s already abundant crop of cynics, well defined as people prematurely disappointed about the future.

Most Donald Trump utterances resemble turbid creeks that are silty at their sources and trickle away into mud. He might finish his presidential term without ever speaking a complete sentence — subject, object, predicate. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who characterized Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose movement as one of “strenuous vagueness,” survived Antietam but might have expired straining to decipher Tuesday’s cascade of falsehoods, rudeness and syntactical tangles.

What to know about the 2020 presidential debates

Some viewers, their minds already closed concerning their presidential choice, watched the debate the way some people watch stock-car races: in hopeful expectation of carnage. They were not disappointed. Others watched to decide whether Democratic nominee Joe Biden has the acuity and grit to remain composed while standing next to someone whose indifference to facts dictates his preferred mode of expression — a tantrum. Among the relatively few voters still undecided about their choice, many probably watched hoping for reassurance about Biden, somewhat as voters did about Ronald Reagan in 1980. 

Post Opinions columnists watched the chaotic first debate between President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden so that you didn't have to. (Kate Woodsome, Danielle Kunitz, Joy Sharon Yi/The Washington Post)

Before Reagan’s 1980 debate with President Jimmy Carter, seven days before the election, the polls were much closer than the election would be. Millions of voters did not want to vote for Carter — the Iranian hostage crisis, a “misery index” of 22 percent (the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates in June 1980), etc. — but they would unless they were convinced that Reagan was not the reckless and nasty person portrayed by Carter’s shrill and nasty campaigning. When Carter attacked him concerning health care, Reagan responded with amiable bemusement and triggered a 44-state landslide with four reassuring words: “There you go again.”

Biden was, at most, minimally reassuring. Allowing himself to be sucked into the vortex of Trump’s cyclonic destruction of the event’s negotiated rules, Biden called Trump a clown, a fool and a liar. Truth was, however, an insufficient justification for Biden’s ignoring of this fact about Trump’s behavior: Following him down is an endless journey.

Presidential debates test next to nothing that is germane to the performance of presidential duties. Biden’s ungraceful scrum with someone unhinged and uninformed was an event with no analogue in a well-managed presidency.

Biden’s aging is a decisive consideration in his competition with Trump, whose reelection depends substantially on maintaining his support among the elderly. For the first time in Earth’s history, there are, globally, more people over 65 than under 5. In 2016, more than 1 million more U.S. votes were cast by people over 65 than by those 18 to 34. However, the elderly, the Whitest age cohort and the most receptive to Trump, are a crumbling Republican foundation: In 1993, Florida became the first state in which deaths outnumbered births among Whites; in 2018, that was the case in 26 states.

Sign up for The Odds newsletter for election updates from data columnist David Byler

This is one reason for the GOP’s downward spiral. In the six elections between 1968 and 1988, of which they won five, Republicans won the popular vote by an average of 8.2 million and 9.58 percentage points, and averaged 417 electoral votes. In the election they lost, Gerald Ford in 1976 came closer to defeating Jimmy Carter than Mitt Romney came to defeating Barack Obama in 2012. But in the next six elections (1992-2012), Republicans lost the popular vote by an average of 4.3 million and averaged just 211 electoral votes.

Hillary Clinton’s 2.1 percent margin of victory in the popular vote while losing in 2016 was larger than John Kennedy’s popular-vote margin (0.17 percent) while winning in 1960 and larger than Carter’s (2.07 percent) while winning in 1976. Since 2016, Trump, with malice toward all who were not components of his popular-vote minority, has shown an indifference to arithmetic that his supporters probably consider evidence of his manliness, as they consider his rancorousness. 

Is Ortega Y Gasset The Most Important Modern Philosopher? The Most Discerning Prophet?

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/09/is-ortega-y-gasset-most-important.html

“Rancor,” wrote José Ortega y Gasset, “is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.” A plurality of Americans have concluded that Trump has much to feel inferior about, and Tuesday probably changed neither this nor the nation’s feeling of dread about its accelerating decay.