Andrew Mitrovica on American History's circus of malicious fools

25 November 2024

Popcorn and war

Andrew Mitrovica's Al Jazeera column, today, may resonate with the handful of actually thoughtful Americans who still exist, somewhere:

[R]ather than recoil from the spectacle of Trump’s clown car cabinet when it takes the helm early next year, I plan to dip into a well-deep bowl of popcorn and enjoy watching America implode by its own glorious hand.

You know America is circling the drain when a minor TV sitcom personality and D-list comedian-turned-podcast host is considered a formidable political force capable of offering a sitting president trenchant geopolitical advice.

Some of you . . . may think that opening sentence, laced, admittedly, as it is with condescension, is meant to offend the legion of mostly mixed-martial-arts-addicted men who listen religiously to Joe Rogan for his trite life lessons and juvenile soliloquies about all sorts of serious matters from pandemics and global heating to presidential politics.

It is not.

It is, instead, not only a statement of fact, but persuasive evidence of how stupidity has become the principal prerequisite for success in a decaying country that, long ago, abandoned the idea that governance required intelligence.

I am not blinded by gooey nostalgia.

I am not hankering for a return to the sensible old days when the unindicted war criminal and, apparently, new-found resistance leader, Dick Cheney, was the vice-president of a criminal regime that set up torture “dark sites” after having trafficked in trumped-up “intelligence” to justify the calamitous invasion of Iraq.

I do not hold that stocking an executive branch with buttoned-down, think-tank types like the late Donald Rumsfeld or corporate executives, aka, Robert McNamara, necessarily means that America will be led by thoughtful, temperate doyens.

America’s disastrous quagmires in Southeast Asia, Central America, Southern Africa, and, of course, the Middle East are proof of that.

The United States has been murderously nasty for a long time

And thus:

Wiretaps, assassinations, ruinous invasions and near-nuclear war [in our serial past] . . . I’d reluctantly say, Donald Trump’s motley cabinet is getting a bum and dumb rap.

So far, they look like a bunch of (sheet white) boy scouts and girl guides in comparison to the largely Ivy-league trained men in tailored suits who preceded them.

The moral? — Ignorantly foolish maliciousness is our shared American commonality?

Viewed this way, one can understand the rest of the planet's revulsion.

And do notice that China, culturally, has put a premium on attracting intelligent — broadly peace-oriented and commerce-attracting — competence into its own system of governance.

Is it any wonder then, that Americans — who are (arguably) the opposite in institutional nature — are so fearful of China's coming ascendancy in human affairs?

Where would the US economy be, without its fascistically profitable warmongering?

The Founders warned against this trait, for exactly the reasons so visibly surfaced in recent decades. Constant war kills both liberty and economic well-being.

PeteFree.com

Andrew Mitrovica on American History's circus of malicious fools