Let’s suppose there really is such a thing as The Thinking Class in this
country, if it’s not too politically incorrect to say so — since it implies
that there is another class, perhaps larger, that operates only on some
limbic lizard-brain level of impulse and emotion. Personally, I believe there
is such a Thinking Class, or at least I have dim memories of something like
it.
The farfetched phenomenon of Trumpism has sent that bunch on a journey to
a strange land of the intellect, a place like the lost island of Kong, where
one monster after another rises out of the swampy murk to threaten the frail
human adventurers. No one back home would believe the things they’re tangling
with: giant spiders, reptiles the size of front-end loaders, malevolent
aborigines! Will any of the delicate humans survive or make it back home?
This is the feeling I get listening to arguments in the public arena these
days, but especially from the quarters formerly identified as left-of-center,
especially the faction organized around the Democratic Party, which I aligned
with long ago (alas, no more). The main question seems to be: who is
responsible for all the unrest in this land. Their answer since halfway back
in 2016: the Russians.
I’m not comfortable with this hypothesis. Russia has a GDP smaller than
Texas. If they are able to project so much influence over what happens in the
USA, they must have some supernatural mojo-of-the-mind — and perhaps they do
— but it raises the question of motive. What might Russia realistically get
from the USA if Vladimir Putin was the master hypnotist that Democrats make
him out to be?
Do we suppose Putin wants more living space for Russia’s people? Hmmmm.
Russia’s population these days, around 145 million, is less than half the
USA’s and it’s rattling around in the geographically largest nation in the
world. Do they want our oil? Maybe, but Russia being the world’s top oil producer
suggests they’ve already got their hands full with their own operation. Do
they want Hollywood? The video game industry? The US porn empire? Do they
covet our Chick-fil-A chains and Waffle Houses? Our tattoo artists? Would
they like to induce the Kardashians to live in Moscow? Is it Nascar they’re
really after?
My hypothesis is that Russia would most of all like to be left alone.
Watching NATO move tanks and German troops into Lithuania in January probably
makes the Russians nervous, and no doubt that is the very objective of the
NATO move — but let’s not forget that most of all NATO is an arm of American
foreign policy. If there are any remnants of the American Thinking Class left
at the State Department, they might recall that Russia lost 20 million people
in the dust-up known as the Second World War against whom…? Oh, Germany.
Altogether last January the US military deployed thousands of soldiers and
heavy weaponry to Poland, the Baltic states and southeastern Europe in its
biggest build-up since the Cold War(Reuters).
As they used to say in old film noir Bogart movies: what’s the big idea? The
State Department would say they big idea was cautioning Russia against annexing
anymore neighboring states or regions, as they did in Crimea a few years
back. Apparently the public is supposed to forget that the State Department
sponsored and engineered the conversion of Ukraine into a failed state,
prompting Russia to retain its naval bases in Crimea, its only warm-water
outlet to the world’s oceans. Ask yourself: if for some reason the state of
Virginia were plunged into anarchy by foreign mischief, do you think the US
would batten down our naval station in Norfolk?
I think the sad truth of the American predicament these day, including the
ascension of a narcissistic ninny to the White House, is that we’re
responsible for our own problems due, most of all, to the destruction of
boundaries in virtually all realms of American behavior from the things we
put in our bodies to the ridiculous ways that we occupy our waking hours at
the expense of getting our own house in order. I would like to join the party
dedicated to getting our house in order. Anybody else out there feel that
way?
Fourth and final book
of the World Made By Hand series
