Mirrors can be useful things if used objectively, but the truth is frequently uglier than we care to bear. Who we’ve become politically, perhaps who we’ve always been, is an all too accurate example.

A reflection of sorts:

The voting dead used to be a reliable Democratic Party constituency.  They won the presidency for young John Kennedy in 1960.  In Illinois.  In Chicago to be precise.  Home town to another slick president almost half a century later.  It’s a bit trickier nowadays to convince the deceased to continue to exercise their political rights, but the concept has morphed and we have voters who’ll vote as their told, no matter what.  To vote as if they were zombies.  Whole “blocks” of them, … Well almost, there are always those inexplicable few who insist on exercising their own judgment, but they’re pretty few.

A “motley bunch” is a misunderstood expression.  It does not denigrate the nature of its members, rather, it makes clear their diversity and perhaps even, their diverse goals, backgrounds and aspirations.  Today, the Democratic Party is a motley group comprised of one large ethnic group, African Americans; women desperate to preserve their ability to discard their would be progeny; those unhappy with their gender; feminists who have a flexible approach to misogyny depending on the political leanings of particular misogynists; the rebellious children of the very wealthy; artists of questionable talent other than their ability to self-promote; pseudo journalists much more talented in creative writing than in seeking the truth; creative academics and historians interested in molding the past as they wish it had been; and, government bureaucrats, especially of the quasi-permanent mole variety.  But it is a “motley” which rather than generate synergy, is merely subservient to the billionaire classes who own the Deep State, the potentates who, like Sauron’s ring in Tolkien’s novels, ruthlessly rule us all.

The GOP is not a motley, it is much more homogenous than the Democratic Party, albeit now divided into two ideological groups: traditionalists like the Bushes, the McCains, etc., also owned by the Deep State, but now a majority seems to be comprised of right wing populist libertarians who in some, but unfortunately not all, aspects, oppose the Deep State.  Too often all of the foregoing are supportive of the Deep State’s primary business, perpetual conflict and a quest for global hegemony similar to that once enjoyed by the Roman empire, not cognizant of the fact that the human cost is all too similar quantitatively to that paid by the victims of the Nazi’s own pursuit of hegemony.  Unlike the Romans though, who cared not a whit about moral justification for their actions, the United States is compelled to justify itself through hypocrisy, deception and self-delusion, something it inherited from the British (from who it inherited its own hunger for hegemony).

Political independents, a heterogeneous group whose members  purportedly form a larger block than either Democrats or Republicans, together with members of minor political parties like the Greens, the Libertarians, etc., could theoretically change the current United States cascade towards mutually assured oblivion but seem trapped in a quagmire, hypnotized and unable to move or act, as though charmed by a snake, the snake being the corporate media that convinces them, briefly but regularly (during electoral cycles), that the exercise of their better judgment would be anathema and would assuredly bring on an apocalypse.  And that their efforts would, in any case, prove futile.  The current apparent only choices, choices between a bombastic and childish lesser evil (Mr. Trump) and an utterly corrupt war monger (Mr. Biden, the clear Deep State designee), illustrate the foregoing.

Thus, we, as a People, become more and more polarized, more prone to violence and psychological and sociological anomalies (like mass murder both abroad and at home).  We sit sort of idly watching and perhaps kvetching as the Deep State destroys more and more of everything around us, whether our environment or our fellow men and women, especially the aged and the very young.  Destroys them sociopathically and amorally for the profit of the billionaire class, to the delight of the laughing and smirking hyenas (my apology to hyenas) who comprise our purported cultural leaders (i.e., massively overpaid albeit usually ignorant glitzy entertainers and athletes).

A conclusion:

That is by all appearances who we are today.  Ugly is as ugly does.  Perhaps it’s just the predictable evolutionary path of who we’ve always been as a group, although perhaps individually most of us seem very different.  One wonders if nature’s purported natural selection of the fittest still applies, and just what that might imply.

A sort of Cassandric entropy seems to shout that we’ve already passed the point of no return, hence, our current epigram at birth would seem to be “abandon all hope ye who enter here”.

To which, unfortunately, no pithy rejoinder comes to mind.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.