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The Inverse World Cup

Demonstration of the critical importance of soft power embodied in a ludicrous whimper (not a Tragically Hip song title, amazingly enough). What now? What next?

Dr. K brings the heat light:

[Europeans’] willingness to de-Americanize partly reflects recognition that reconciliation is hopeless: Trump is who he is, and a nation that elected him twice simply can’t be trusted.

However, Europe’s turn away from Trump also reflects plummeting perceptions of his power. At one time the world feared Trump although it never respected him. The silence that met his renewed demand for Greenland shows that the world no longer takes him seriously.

America remains an economic superpower with an enormous military budget. And the combination of a supine Republican Party, along with a Supreme Court that shamelessly greenlights Trump’s authoritarianism, has given this president more control over U.S. policy than any president has ever had, or ever should have. But while Trump is able to run roughshod over Americans, he can no longer bully the rest of the world. Thanks to Trump, the U.S. has seen its global influence plunge.

Implications of the word continue without relent. Even if even he was fit [he was not fit], hire an unprepared, incurious clown for a very complicated job and predictable results arrive only too soon. It should be noted how much he and his team make the job look so much more difficult than it already is – it’s quite the Inverse World Cup, where experienced professionals make an impossible sport look simple. So much of the grievous iniquity of ‘greatness’ had been laid bare that we would do well to lay off of it for a very long while.

Can a society beg to be humbled? The answer questions itself. Don’t be afraid of confronting faults and failings, they only wax the more dastardly. Humiliation of equality is as fake as his bluster and we’d best move on from it with some haste.

 

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Steady in One Desire

The Roman stoic Seneca (5 BC to 65 AD) was a philosopher and statesman whose writings have made to our own day in several forms, including a Penguin Great Ideas series. The slender volume On The Shortness of Life, Life is Long if You Know How to Use It is three sections full of gems. Is the life we get in fact not short – we just make it seem so? This from the first section, which is along letter to his friend Paulinus, On the Shortness of Life:

But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. When they come to the end of it, the poor wretches realize too late that for all time they have been preoccupied in doing nothing. And the fact that they sometimes invoke death is no proof that their lives seem long. Their own folly afflicts them with restless emotions which hurl themselves upon the very things they fear: they often long for death because they fear it. Nor is this a proof that they are living for a long time that the days seems long to them, or that they complain that the hours pass slowly until the time fixed for dinner arrives. For as soon as their preoccupations fail them, they are restless with nothing to do, not knowing how to dispose of their leisure or make the time pass. And so they are anxious for something else to do, and all the intervening time is wearisome: really it is just as when a gladiator show has been announced, or they are looking forward to the appointed time of some other exhibition or amusement – they want to leap over the days in between. Any deferment of the longed-for event is tedious to them. Yet the time of the actual enjoyment is short and swift, and made much shorter through their own fault. For they dash from one pleasure to another and cannot stay steady in one desire. Their days are not long but odious…

Even their pleasures are uneasy and made anxious by various fears, and at the very height of their rejoicing the worrying thought steals over them: ‘How long will this last?’ This feeling has caused kings to bewail their power, and they were not much delighted by the greatness of their fortune as terrified by the thought of its inevitable end. When that most arrogant king of Persia [Xerxes, ed.] was deploying his army over vast plains, and could not number it but had to measure it, he wept because in a hundred years out of that huge army not a soul would be alive. But he who was weeping was the very man who would bring their fate upon them, and would destroy some on the sea, some on land, some in battle, some in flight, and in a very short time would wipe out all of those for whose hundredth year he was afraid.

And what of the fact that even their joys are uneasy? The reason is that they are not based on firm causes, but they are agitated as groundlessly as they arise. But what kind of times can those be, do you think, which they themselves admit are wretched, since even the joys by which they are exalted and raised above humanity are pretty corrupt? All the greatest blessings create anxiety, and Fortune is never less to be trusted than when it is fairest. To preserve prosperity we need other prosperity, and to support the prayers which have turned out well we have to make other prayers. Whatever comes our way by chance is unsteady, and the higher it rises the more liable it is to fall. Furthermore, what is doomed to fall delights no one.