Racing apace

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Everything everywhere all at once. The breakneck speed and urgency of Donald Trump’s first days of imposing his will on government and the American people is dizzying to anyone trying to analyze and comprehend what is emerging. Confusion is enervating and Trump is the master of manipulation, adept at bending anger and mass hysteria in his favor, and tweeting doublethink for and against nearly every issue. All the while, Congressional members are trembling in their suits in fear of stirring his anger. Welcome to 1984. George Orwell was eerily prescient in showing the overwhelming power of Doublespeak in propaganda messaging when it is omnipresent and unquestioned. With the rise of social media and data mining, personal privacy no longer exists, and Big Brother, aka Donald Trump, is ever watchful and demanding.

RP

Wave Boarding

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Leaders of nations around the world, autocratic and/or elected, are all riding varying waves of political and cultural history and momentum. The United States is no exception, but what Donald Trump has ingeniously done is change the American ethos from one of being an amalgam “Melting Pot” of diverse peoples and cultures to the earlier one of “Manifest Destiny”, the belief that the bounty of New World was God’s gift to enterprising, primarily white immigrants claiming ownership of land and utilizing the newly arriving labor to create personal wealth and build a nation of winners and losers based on capitalist exploitation. Black slavery was eventually abolished, but “people of color” and women have long belonged to a distinctly lesser class to be put to use. In Donald Trump’s view, America has always been a white man’s world.

For those who thought and hoped his semi-coherent rambling was merely political bluster and posturing are today waking up to the realization that America has elected an ego maniac who fully intends to do everything he said he would do in leading the free world into the 21st Century. Those less zealous riding his coattails into the future should be questioning just what exactly they have signed up on.

When the unelected million/billionaire Tech titans are seated in the front row with the incoming Cabinet members behind them at the inauguration, it is clear who Trump sees as the best Americans to be rewarded, those making the most money. His pardon of the Capital rioters indicates his concept of law-and-order is that criminals supporting him are heroes, not criminals, and he intends to “weaponize the Justice Department” against his perceived enemies. The talk radio spin and doublethink on all this is mind boggling, but having January 6th made a national holiday looms as an actual possibility. Further, on the subject of mania and beyond, Elon Musk, the Buck Rogers dreamer of space travel and the colonization of Mars and self appointed Czar of government efficiency is not the first genius mind in history to go off the rails. His dalliance and embrace of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany is more than sadly disturbing. It is dangerous in our next four year journey into the future.

RP

Money

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Year after year, election after election, it is increasingly clear that the most significant Supreme Court ruling was not overturning Roe v. Wade, but granting unlimited power to money as a weapon of free speech. Money is now a dominant force in politics, leaving Parties racing to raise money. Combined with our toxic concentration of wealth and the ability of media platforms to control information, this further weakens public influence in political dialogue. We no longer have a government “…for the people…” but one controlled by a wealthy elite legislatively protecting its hold on power. To a degree, this is exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind in writing the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence applied only to British rule.

RP

Pac-Man

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My initial exposure to today’s technological revolution was occasionally playing Pac-Man in bars around town. Great marketing strategy no doubt there, but it didn’t hold my interest long. There were more interesting things to capture my mind. I imagine this distinctly marks me as a gaming and techno dodo bird, but what comes to mind now is just how prescient this simple introductory game was. The tech world is constantly racing to gobble up, with profit ever in mind, everything in its path, our shopping, communication, work, entertainment, homes, cars, leisure time, sanity, money, and war, in short everything integral in modern life, creating on its way constant distraction from the realities of the physical world around us, often with addictions that further diminish our singular human capabilities. This is not to say there are not positives in technological advances, but the mass collection of personal data, our likes and dislikes, is an invasion of privacy from which we have virtually no protection. It matters not if one calls it Big Brother, big government, or corporate greed and power, the feeling of losing control has entered everyone’s life, on both sides of the political spectrum. Further, technology’s thirst for electricity to function and store all that data is insatiable. Just trust us, we have all the answers you need for life today. As a cautionary warning, however, the substantive definition of “artificial” in AI is “not real”.

RP

Destiny in Question

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Donald Trump, his MAGA acolytes, and his millionaire/billionaire supporters are simply a continuation of America’s “Manifest Destiny”, the belief that this New World continent was God’s gift to White men. That the birth of the United States included the genocide of the America’s First People, slavery, women regarded as second class citizens, and the exploitation of the Earth and human labor is not important to these “true” American patriots. Everything was for the taking, a concept that has not left the country. With its belief that racial and cultural diversity leads to the undoing of American values, the Trump phenomenon has deep roots in our history and heritage, and can be seen as an heirloom fruit of the Founding Fathers. Countering that embedded cultural momentum and its resulting concentration of wealth and power, and addressing human-caused global warming will require a monumental shift of national and human ingenuity and identity. It is not just us, the entire world faces a daunting future. There will be no easy sailing for whoever is the next President.

Media Machine

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Between Elon Musk’s Twittersphere and the country-wide talk radio echo chamber Donald Trump’s Republican Party has a media propaganda machine equal to that of the Communist Party in China, Vladimir Putin’s autocracy in Russia, and Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. Information available to the public is to be tightly controlled and manipulated to favor the ruling regime. 1984 explores, in combining Orwell’s experience and insights expressed in two earlier novels, the callous oblivion of British capitalism in Burmese Days and Stalin’s betrayal in the Spanish Civil War of a truly populist people’s rebellion in Homage to Catalonia, the end of truth, love, and caring in power politics. Like Big Brother, Trump continually expresses an aura of absolute certainty of his correctness. More than ever Orwell should be required reading for everyone of voting age.

The Future of Trumpism

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The MAGA rioters who stormed the Capitol and the Neo-Nazi Fascist Klansmen marching at a Trump rally in Charlottesville regarded themselves as patriotic revolutionaries acting under a romantic illusion that brute force was a realistic means to keep Donald Trump in the White House. The real insurrectionists today are the authors and proponents of Project 2025 who recognize that the true power in capitalist America is money, even more so since the Conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that it had unlimited “free speech” power. Project 2025 is structured around a Libertarian ethos of freedom from regulation, maximum profit, and concentrated wealth that will radically alter the historical arc of American democracy. It has deep pocket corporate and individual backers. Donald Trump aspires to personal autocratic power, able to hire and fire as he sees fit, but at the forefront of Project 2025, he is largely a storefront manikin and incoherent entry level drug to an authoritarian rule of wealth. J D Vance has had a few opening glitches, but with his manly White embrace of religious and family values, his roots in the Midwest, and time spent in the tech world of Silicon Valley, he stands as a reliably malleable successor to lead the Project 2025 revolution. In this election, America stands at a crossroads of its self-definition.

RP

God is on our side

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The God of Abraham, the patriarchal deity of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, militant factions of which are currently waging horrific war across the Middle East, each claiming to have his favor, is portrayed as being all-powerful and occasionally vengeful toward those not giving him due honor. To a degree, this explains the death and destruction raging in the region. We are fulfilling the wishes of our God. Christianity began as an alternative to old-world ethics. “Love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, practice charity” were its directives, but with the weaker, darker elements of human nature, a thirst for power and wealth, and a strong tendency to larceny, these were cast aside in favor of militancy. Sadly, feeling powerful, in all its manifestations, has become “the human way of life”. All three religions do profess to have a gentler ethos. It simply has been buried.

– RP

Palantir

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It is hard to describe how thoroughly depressing is Maureen Dowd’s interview with Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and its revelation of the disconnect humanity is able to make from the reality of death and destruction in modern warfare. Herman Melville’s poem on the battle of the Monitor and Merrimack during the Civil War includes “War yet shall be, but warriors/ Are now but operatives”. The glory of individual valor has been usurped by armored machines. Dr. Karp finds his personal valor in Palantir’s ability to direct Israeli air strikes against Hamas and Hezbollah fighters all across the Middle East with no more moral attachment to the death of innocent Palestinian women and children, “an acceptable level of collateral damage”, than to a “kill” on a video game computer screen. A target shooting enthusiast, Dr. Karp declares himself “an artist with a gun” who does not kill things. His information algorithms, however, do with great efficiency. For those who regard the existence of Israel (and its boundaries) as Biblical destiny, any and all opposition is the enemy. Palestinians have been in the way since day one, and they pay for it day after day. Dr. Karp and his business partner Peter Thiel are making millions with Palantir information-gathering technology being used in Israel’s war of vengeance against Hamas for challenging this hegemony and bringing the realities of war to Israeli soil. Information is a high-value commodity in today’s world, be it in war, business enterprise, or law and order (to use or to abuse). Such is capitalism’s “law” of supply and demand, privacy and conscience be damned.

-RP

Double Think

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The true official language of America today is George Orwell’s Double Speak, the ability to simultaneously believe and profess two diametrically opposed concepts. One might call it the “Yeah, but” syndrome. It was enshrined by the Founding Fathers with conflicting tenets and words in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, and, spilling across multiple sectors, has become the lingua terra of all American life. There is no escaping “double thinking” everything. The result is that truth no longer has solid substance, reality no steady footing. One can shape it into any convenience one wishes it to be. Whatever one chooses to believe is all that matters. This is steeped throughout political policy, conventional morality, religious doctrine, and commercial advertising. “The more you buy, the more you save” is a prime example. Both spending and saving are regarded as being true. The simple reality is that you are spending, not saving. The free market, money is free speech, and waging war for peace each amplify conflicting words working in opposition. Life is complicated but a universal truth is that feeling powerless is a frightening, all-powerful emotion, and all stops must be pulled out to feel being right and in control. Real power is not so easily attained.