With a president suffering from main character syndrome coupled with a steadily deteriorating mental state, so much ‘seems’ to be going on that keeping up with it in whole much less in part can itself feel maddening.
Two days ago, he gives a televised exposition of just how adrift he is, boxed in by an ill-considered military fiasco and hand-picked, grossly incompetent and corrupt underlings. Ardent, patriotic citizens try to keep up but mostly what’s on offer is the unwillingness to describe a massive, practically unimaginable strategic defeat.
In pondering what are we still wondering about, some well-framed context about some things we already know clicks a light bulb in a closet blocked behind an old armoire. It’s not reassuring but it is forward, and perhaps desperately needed correction against meaningless reassurances:
For more than a century, the political and moral imagination in much of the Persian ecumene was shaped by an urgent quest for alternatives to the pitilessly exploitative regimes of capitalist imperialism. For Gandhi, a historical experience that began in the late nineteenth century in South Africa made him see fascism and imperialism as inevitable features of capitalist states overdependent on violence—disguised and softened at home, extreme and explicit abroad. It was the fate of a later observer like Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, the twentieth-century novelist and essayist, to endure, while still analyzing, the insidiousness of neoimperialism: economic modernization under Western auspices that condemned postcolonial states to perpetual underdevelopment.
Given the religion-capitalism pairing that has defined the very essence of the American experiment since its inception (ask any Republican candidate for any office), it’s fair to ask whether we’ve always been headed here. Not karmically, though there is that; but just as a natural effect of the causes as they have hatched. Every other country and alliance has already figured out that dependence on the US is toxic to their national interests, while we try to make sense of the nonsensical. It feels sped-up, fast-forwarded, still a bit out front of our ability to conceive, believe. He is referred to as the American id. Maybe that’s it and this is all of the accumulated skullduggery, laid bare.
But I did learn a new word.