Repairing the Empire

Andrew Bacevich published ”How We got Donald Trump” on TomDispatch (Jan. 30, 2018). It’s an ”if” article telling us how things would be different if we had done things differently. Like many of the empire’s unintelligentsia, he seems unaware that the Don is just another clown of the empire. Once an empire, any empire, goes over the hill and starts its decline it produces Trumps, Obamas, Clintons and Bushes or Neros and Caligulas as surely as rats produce rat shit.

As long as societies are money-oriented instead of people-oriented we are going to have empires run by rats, snakes, weasels, earwigs, slugs and all manner of slimy creatures shitting on everyone below them. Although history shows not a single exception to this standard rise and fall trajectory, the unintelligentsia keep trying to freshen things up by painting over the rust and rot with if-ism.

Like many of his peers, Bacevich draws the conclusion:
”Our president is a product and beneficiary of several decades worth of vainglory, cynicism, epic folly, political cowardice, missed opportunities, and a public not given to paying attention. … in a very real sense, we all put him there.”

You noticed, of course, OUR president and WE put him there. You should also have noticed that he ”forgot” to mention the billionaire corporate commanders. You know, the people who just happen to be at the receiving end of ”our” president’s policies. I guess he’s just an absentminded professor (of history and international relations) in the bosom* of the empire.

*(Bosom might be a bit higher and on the other side of the correct location.)

*

”If? If! If I had balls I’d be your grandfather.”
Grandma Rose

*

The West Bank is now the Judea-Samaria area.