The End of the World

A weekend away from the Institute, the dawgs have gone on in another direction.  Is it possible to rig up a muzzle loaded ice cream machine?  Then when your were at your lowest and no hope was around the corner you could put the machine in your mouth and get a blast of delish chocolate cheese ice cream right down your despairing gullet and realize that life has its cookies to hand out and you might as well hang around to get the next one.


Anyway there we were walking from Grant Park with our Obama signs whisking around our heads and our hearts filled with, what was that suff?  Oh yeah, Hope. And then he took on health care.  A glaring problem to be sure, but not very leftist.  The reps had brought up the subject during the W years, and acted like they were interested, but there didn't seem to be any way for the richer to get richer out of reforming health care so they weren't very interested..

A lot of talk had gone around about  Obama being very leftist, so maybe by taking on health care which was kind of middle of the road he hoped to ally suspicions, or maybe it was a death wish.  I don't want to get into too much detail, but the reps immediately pounced on it as a government takeover, and they were pretty successful with that.

And then in the middle of the road there were these guys with actual muskets, not the ice cream machine kind, and tricorner hats, and those sissy pants that only go down to the knee.  Don't Tread on Me flags were quite chic. Who were they?  What did they want ?  When you asked them what they wanted you got all kinds of answers, some were libertarians, some were bible thumpers, some wanted to turn the land of the Islamofascists to glass right now, and so on.  But they all knew what they were agin: Obama. But strangely, they also appeared to be against (gasp) big business.  How very unrepublican of them.  But the big business guys pumped up their Pacs and led them by the nose and all their votes went to pols who said anti big business things but who were firmly in the pocket of big business.

But still there was some ferment in the Republican party, not necessarily in it but within those who flocked to join it so that they could vote in Donald Trump.  Ridiculous.  I laughed until election day when I stopped laughing.

And these people, many of them the fabled blue collar whites, whom we dems had championed their unions, their obtaining of health care, tried to keep their money from going into the pockets of the fat cats, they left us in sufficient droves in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc that they elected that guy.  And so far he has given them nothing, lined his pockets with their money and the basically are still with them.  Why?  How?

I think it's us, we liberals.  They don't like us.  We are like the teachers in their schools who wanted them to read the right books, study, do the right things, be tolerant, think about things in their own minds.  And they hated that shit.  They hate us hectoring.  When we want them to share with the Blacks, they think food is coming out  of their mouths.

The whole idea of progress, back in the day, if you think back to your grade school graduation, was education.  The forces of regression were the forces of ignorance and when the bright light of knowledge (aka truth, which makes us free) is shone throughout the world will be a better place.

Nobody believes that anymore.  Nobody knows what truth or knowledge is anymore.  If there are no truths, no facts, how can we convince others of the rightness of our cause?  We can't.  We tried, we failed.  It is The End of the World.


Phew, that was quite a slog.  Next time I'll do economic inequality and then we can get back to whatever for the rest of the year.