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from TruthDig Website
The final days of empire give ample employment and power to the feckless, the insane and the idiotic.
These politicians and court propagandists, hired to be the public faces on the sinking ship, mask the real work of the crew, which is systematically robbing the passengers as the vessel goes down. The mandarins of power stand in the wheelhouse barking ridiculous orders and seeing how fast they can gun the engines.
They fight like children over the ship’s wheel as the vessel heads full speed into a giant ice field. They wander the decks giving pompous speeches. They shout that the SS America is the greatest ship ever built. They insist that it has the most advanced technology and embodies the highest virtues.
And then, with abrupt and unexpected fury, down
we will go into the frigid waters.
Men and women of stunning mediocrity and depravity led the monarchies of Europe and Russia on the eve of World War I. And America has, in its own decline, offered up its share of weaklings, dolts and morons to steer it to destruction.
A nation that was still rooted in reality would never glorify charlatans such as,
...as they pollute the airwaves.
If we had any idea what was really happening to us we would have turned in fury against Barack Obama, whose signature legacy will be utter capitulation to the demands of,
We would have rallied behind those few, such as
Ralph Nader, who denounced a monetary system based on gambling and
the endless printing of money and condemned the willful wrecking of the
ecosystem. We would have mutinied. We would have turned the ship back.
There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling toward oblivion. They retreat into the sexual, the tawdry and the inane, retreats that are momentarily pleasurable but ensure self-destruction. They naively trust it will all work out.
As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel 'Oryx and Crake,'
And absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that 'God' will always protect them.
It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.
Culture and literacy, in the final stage of decline, are replaced with noisy diversions and empty clichés.
The Roman statesman Cicero inveighed against their ancient equivalent - the arena. Cicero, for his honesty, was hunted down and murdered and his hands and head were cut off.
His severed head and his right hand, which had written the Philippics, were nailed onto the speaker’s platform in the Forum.
The roaring crowds, while the Roman elite spat on the head, were gleefully told he would never speak or write again. In the modern age this toxic, mindless cacophony, our own version of spectacle and gladiator fights, of bread and circus, is pumped into the airwaves in 24-hour cycles.
Political life has fused into celebrity worship. Education is primarily vocational. Intellectuals are cast out and despised. Artists cannot make a living. Few people read books.
Thought has been banished, especially at universities and colleges, where timid pedants and careerists churn out academic drivel.
And ours have been destroyed. Sensual pleasure and eternal youth are our overriding obsessions.
The Roman emperor Tiberius, at the end, fled to the island of Capri and turned his seaside palace into a house of unbridled lust and violence.
Tiberius trained small boys, whom he called his minnows, to frolic with him in the water and perform oral sex. And after watching prolonged torture, he would have captives thrown into the sea from a cliff near his palace.
Tiberius would be followed by Caligula and Nero.
The anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book 'The Collapse of Complex Societies' looked at the collapse of civilizations from the Roman to the Mayan.
He concluded that they disintegrated because they finally could not sustain the bureaucratic complexities they had created. Layers of bureaucracy demand more and more exploitation, not only of the environment but the laboring classes.
They become calcified by systems that are unable to respond to the changing reality around them. They, like our elite universities and business schools, churn out systems managers, people who are taught not to think but to blindly service the system.
These systems managers know only how to perpetuate themselves and the system they serve, although serving that system means disemboweling the nation and the planet.
Our elites and bureaucrats exhaust the earth to hold up a system that worked in the past, failing to see that it no longer works.
Elites, rather than contemplate reform, which would jeopardize their privilege and power, retreat in the twilight of empire into walled compounds like the Forbidden City or Versailles. They invent their own reality.
Those on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms have replicated this behavior. They insist that continued reliance on fossil fuel and speculations will sustain the empire.
State resources, as Tainter notes, are at the
end increasingly squandered on extravagant and senseless projects and
imperial adventures. And then it all collapses.
In Roth’s hotel the first three floors house in luxury the bloated rich, the amoral politicians, the bankers and the business owners. The upper floors are crammed with people who struggle to pay their bills and who are steadily divested of their possessions until they are destitute and cast out. There is no political ideology among decayed ruling elites, despite choreographed debates and elaborate political theater.
It is, as it always is at the end, one vast
kleptocracy.
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