Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
Around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.”– Ecclesiastes
I won’t bury the lead:
There are two existential bullet points Americans face along with the entire planet:
Human driven global warming rendering the Earth unlivable for species, including homo sapiens sapiens;
Nuclear war or accident destroying us.
What Can You Do?
Don’t elect a President who believes global warming is a hoax.
Too late for that.
Plan B: Vote out global warming deniers in the 2026 Congressional elections.
Impeachment: Third time is a charm:
Follow where Trump gets the money while President to pay off the more than half a billion dollars he owes in civil penalties for defamation and fraud.
Regarding the second threat to existence, this admonition:
Don’t elect a President who “has no place for ‘mutual good’ or ‘mutual advantage.” (David Frum, “Marauding Nation,” The Atlantic, January 2025)
Too late for that.
Plan B: Get him out of office before he joins the Confederacy of Autocrat Bullies fermenting hate across Europe and each bent on “Their Country First!” advantage. His thinking that he can out-bully this crowd is the surest ride to WWIII. He’ll want them to pay him not to hurt them.
So, a President Trump can do the very worst: WWIII?
Yes, if you first tell him what he needs to do to put you in this condo today.
Serious answer: Because his delusions are so observable in every country but the U.S., he could trigger another civil war but not a world war. I say “could” because a list of folks on Trump’s hit list vs. folks in red baseball caps is a clown show, and does not a Civil War make.
Trump’s erratic, unpredictable cognitive grasp can never be a serious starting point for anything so serious as war in the eyes of those on the global stage who retain focused cognition. Nonsense coming out of a paper bag, that is, the striving after wind of this man’s vanity is too comically clear to precipitate anything of consequence thirty hours after he’s gone. Denmark, Panama, Canada, Greenland, Sanctuary Cities, and the Gulf of Mexico are not preparing for a Trump Wehrmacht.
But won’t another four years of President Donald J. Trump lead to the end of our liberal democracy, our Constitutional order, our habeas corpus?
Flippant answer: Yet again?
Serious answer: The end of a 248 year old institution, of any kind, by a man without a plan or a record of having done anything but put you in a condo today needs to be treated as Hail! Hail! Freedonia comical.
Forgive me, but I see the next four years of Trump as small matter striving after wind, as Ecclesiastes reminds us is what vanity does.
This does not mean there’s no heat here; rather more heat than light.
In fact, the heat of passions (love’s rival: hate) has snuffed out the light of reason. This is not an Absolute and Universal Reason I’m referring to here but rather one in which likes and opinions shut up while serious arguments are presented and a dialectic of such goes on. Of course, “social” media isn’t going to allow that.
However, before the next Pandemic hits, we should be at a point where facts and evidence established by the scientific method earn more respect than our own personal “gut wisdom.” Right now, if the Black Death returned, we’re prone to say it was “Fake!” and “weaponized” by “Elites.”
This does not mean that this vain man’s words aren’t echoed like proclamations of the Oracle of Delphi and that an audience hip deep in passionate politics doesn’t absorb them passionately. We bow to the mayfly flutter of one man’s vanity.
Thing about this sort of passionate attachment is that it flutters away, lacking the unity, coherence and continuity to stick. TikTok ticks on and the passions are enflamed elsewhere, old villains fade, new ones arise, bomb cyclones and rain bomb, and obscure bureaucratic offices become “weaponized” on FOX.
Okay, we can charge Trump with insinuating doubt where we previously did not doubt. And that could have long range consequences. Think of Trump as our Iago who has whispered doubt into Othello’s ear. Nothing sacred. Nothing pure. Nothing innocent. Desdemona dies. Our democracy dies.
We thought we were innocent.
After Black African slavery, Trail of Tears, Nagasaki, Gulf of Tonkin, My Lai, WMD’s, Tulsa Race massacre, Gaza?
Really? We harbor a lot of dark doubts of our goodness in our American mass psyche.
The mortar of trust in everything, including our fellow humans, has techno as well as historic origins.
Hadn’t social media already launched “the first post-Babel Diaspora: “By rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.” (Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” The Atlantic, May 2022)
But go further back:
Skepticism of everything societal, governmental and cultural has been part of the rugged American individualism since Jim Bridger. F.J.Turner’s “Frontier Spirit” and Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.”. That’s why rugged actors with a camera crew show like Mountain Men is a reality TV goldmine. Those folks weren’t too partial to any kind of State, deep or shallow. Only a portion of the country ever had any kind of Government they believed in. Country is something else. Saying what that is –Country — is not part of the plan (Hitler had one) but it rises up when old men in power need to send young men out to protect their predatory profit play in foreign backyards.
How much of the Deep State our two multi-billionaire tech moguls whittle down is a never you mind matter for about most of the folks who voted for Donald. Never knew what it was; don’t care if it goes. Nobody ever pledged the U.S Government Manual, its agencies and institutions.
Discovery will come to all, as the Bible says somewhere, along down the road, piece at a time, as winds blow different. At some point, some wage earner will wonder why two unelected multi-billionaires are in charge of their health and retirement.
Trump didn’t invent skepticism of any kind of authority in the American mass psyche and when he leaves the stage, skepticism will still be here.
But you do need to tell him what he has to do to put you in this condo today.
Seriously, I’m surprised Americans send their kids to school, and not surprised if they send them off with “Don’t believe anything that teacher tells you.”
This is some sad stuff but it’s an ancient blowing wind that goes and comes around. Stupid can’t survive a real need to think to stay alive. And that’s our new “Can We Survive?” board position which is not digital Internet or AI. No matter how many Retweets global warming denial gets, we just can’t get Nature to go along.
Striving after wind:
Election results will be confirmed, juries and judges will render verdicts, Amazon will unionize, investigative journalism will find its way passed Joe Rogan, AI and Crypto will partner in a Marvels superhero interminable series. Congressmen will pimp 17 year old girls, public schools will pay better, Virgin River will continue to flow, and that glory of the Enlightenment – The Scientific Method – won’t be replaced by the Logic of Conspiracy Concoction.
I doubt though that the winds will blow another like Trump into the presidency; Vegas odds are that another sociopathic, sexual predator, “felonious bigot” will go to jail, not into the White House. He’s a one-off but the conditions that brought him to us, though not existentially threatening, will blow in and out as they have since “certain unalienable Rights” were declared.
Labor will take another blow in its battle with Capital. However, the Republican Party Trump has twisted against itself can’t lean on the working and middle classes to win elections without giving Labor more than they want to give or ever have.
Trump has created a mirage of prosperity for his working class voters but mirages blow away with the wind. He’s going to leave the Party of Profit a huge enchilada of a problem as to what to do with all those people it just wants to declare “Extinct.”
Who gets punished here, according to Project 2025? Who goes to jail? Who gets impeached? Who inherits Rush Limbaugh’s Medal of Freedom?” (Rush who?)
Striving after wind.
In between global transactiona- zing and caging the 3 to 4 million dangerous migrants (?!) out there in your yard, the President will make some 3 to 4 million lives miserable, including his sons, receive a Humanitarian Award for doing so by Fox & Fiends, breakup with fellow Alpha Male Musk, read Melania’s book to her, grab some women by the pussy, KGB the Pentagon Power organizational chart, allow some Never Trumpers to grovel before him, eat Sugar Pops in front of RFK, Jr., and so forth.
However, he faces ruin over groceries, a beautiful word, when he tries working the mirage of much, much lower prices, so low nobody has ever seen them that low.
They won’t. He does not know working class Moms and what they know about grocery prices. He won’t fool them.
There are loads of tear spots in Trump’s mirage that will rip open before the Congressional Elections.
But how did this guy blow in?
We can accuse the Echo Chambers and the Mar a Lago bootlicks, the Congressional toadies, and all the ambitious suck-ups (some, like Vance unabashedly suck-up) of being accomplices to the crime. Or we can slap some Hunter Biden size prison sentences on George W. Bush’s WMD hoaxers, or back further and put the Iran-Contra treason crew on trial in wheel chairs, or just re-enact the FCC Fairness Doctrine and shut down FOX fake news. That would leave podcasts an open field in talking trash.
We are striving after wind here.
Trump didn’t invent guilt or is he alone among the historical guilty but never jailed. He doesn’t want us to know “I am not a crook!) (Nixon) but only “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
Now that’s an historical new and low, but those who think they can win future elections by repeating something like that are striving after wind.
But would there not be long term consequences of Trump’s rocking the sacred foundations?
Undermining our sacred democratic, globalized free enterprise discourse, practices and institutions from a presidential position of power for no purpose except to remove them from the path to and exercise of unchecked personal power?
Sad indeed but wreckage going forward?
Trump and Toadies offer no critique of such “sacredness,” perhaps because he hasn’t attended the Critique of Capitalism lectures (Nancy Fraser, The New School) or renewed his acquaintance with the Frankfurt School. What he offers is what so easily blows in the wind: a kind of “Get the hell out of my way approach,” practiced regularly in NYC’s “mean streets back in the day.”
Except for being the wrong messenger to take on our contradictory form of oligarchic democracy as well as being the wrong messiah/autocrat to correct that mess, almost every aspect of our governance has been twisted, corrupted and destroyed by the insinuations of Market Rule.
There’s no “It’s complicated” here. It’s transparent. And what a party representing The Losers (80% of population) has to do is push distributive legislative economics, worker owned businesses, resource sustainable levels of growth.
On Market Rule, Trump rouses no “shut it down!” “lock them up!” Any economic system that leads to a Kakistocracy, a government run by the worst supportive of that system, is like a cancerous tumor in need of extraction. Of course, that Kakistocracy is soon to be confirmed by Congress.
This does not mean that winds don’t go round and round, that the vanities that now strive after wind die down and then just die. Trump will take his vanity with him; the echo chambers will find another voice. Nothing blows away faster on the historical stage than a thoughtless man and the men and women who grovel before him.
What we have is the tragic results of both political parties adhering to an economics that could only lead to an oligarchic immiseration and diminishment of the majority of the population.
That issue remains insufficiently broadcast and understood in the U.S perhaps because a politics of personal opinion had long ago replaced reality based methodologies focused on common understanding.
There’s no tactful way of saying that we’ve collapsed into an irrationalism that can neither identify what is destroying the Many or terminate that destruction.
A collapsed cognition has come up with the Deep State (and a cast of villains FOX will condemn every hour of the day) and a solution, a person, Donald J. Trump, who is the good guy who we can trust to name the bad guys. Unfortunately, the planet doesn’t have time for a vaudeville act in the White House.
Are we striving after wind to be worried about this? Is it a third existential threat?
Yes, to the first and no to the second.
There’s no legacy stupidity and ignorance leave because this is not the stuff in which anything memorable issues.
A position against thinking launched by those who have abandoned the paths to common understanding blows with the wind.
As does a man without a thought in his head beyond doing what he can to put you in this condo today.
