The Distraction That Is Russiagate

Democrats and the corporate media have pissed away nearly two years on Russiagate. That’s nearly two years the Democrats haven’t needed to pretend that they care about progressive issues and the media didn’t have to pretend to do journalism. From the very beginning, they have treated it as though it is a point beyond discussion, while simultaneously giving you inadequate information to make the decision for yourself. Think about it: they have been absolutely convinced by evidence so scant that they have had to beat it into our skulls 24/7 in order for us to accept it. Meanwhile, even as they tell us there is no argument to be made against the official narrative, they actually want us to argue about Russiagate.

They want us to argue about Russiagate because it helps them to frame the debate. They want us to argue about Russiagate because it is another box they can lock us in, just as we had the endless transgender bathroom debate before that. Because even if we disagree with the Russiagate narrative, it forces us to discuss it, address it, become distracted by it. It halts all discussion of other matters, matters that are vital to humanity but inconvenient to those who wish to direct us and rule us.

I myself have been forced to argue against the Russiagate Narrative (formerly known as Russian Hacking, Russian Interference, Russian Meddling, etc.) rather than discuss ways to combat the disastrous policies of Donald Trump. That I am arguing from a position different than the Democrats does not make me less distracted than them.

In the same way sophists in the Middle Ages wiled away their mental energy pondering how many angels could dance on the end of a pin, the Democrats and mainstream media have got us all aware of Buff Bernie images, even if you scoff at the idea that it matters. Two freaking years of this. For two freaking years, your hatred of all that Donald Trump represents has been diverted from you actually taking action and instead allowed you to believe that higher powers in the media or our intelligence agencies are going to restore democracy. You must know deep in your hearts only the people themselves can do that.

Your two years of being distracted has done absolutely nothing to make our democracy more secure. You have merely granted more authority to institutions that were already far too powerful and influential. These institutions that have whipped you into a frenzy have done nothing to insure our information pipelines are giving you informed opinions from trustworthy sources. They have not fought to reduce undo influence by powerful entities both domestic and foreign. I don’t know how I can spell it out for you more clearly than others before but I am obliged to try: if you give too much of your trust to institutions, it will inevitably lead to abuse of power by those institutions. This is not a warning, because you granted the media and the intelligence agencies your undo faith a long time ago and now we are seeing the result. Well, some of us are—many seem oblivious.

As bad as distraction can be, the obedience demanded by the media is still worse. “Just say it, say Russia interfered!”, they demand. Like a cult leader, they will repeat their assertions endlessly. Only they are no cult but an all-pervasive power, like the Catholic church in the time of the Spanish Inquisition, one that demands unanimity of thought. In such an atmosphere, dissent is heresy. Where once you were accused of being possessed or in consort with the devil, now you are called a Putin puppet. The burden of proof is not on them. They only need to speak and you are expected to accept what they say uncritically. They are God’s messengers bringing forth divine revelations from the unseen and unknowable great power, who are you to question them?

It is an assertion of dominance and a demand for obedience of those few still outside the fold, those dangerous free thinkers, those non-canonical blasphemers.

What role if any did Russia play in the 2016 election? We will never know because the media and our government do not feel it is their role to inform us but rather to keep us compliant. The one message they wish to convey? "Obey." And this is what Russiagate is all about, because Russia or your own natural skepticism caused you to doubt your media and your government. And rather than the media demonstrate their essential trustworthiness, they instead demand your trust.

58 years ago, former General and then President Eisenhower warned us of a military industrial complex he saw coming together. At that time he said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

It is now 58 years later and the unhealthy and democracy-killing collaboration of great power has grown unimpeded. Where once intelligence agencies had to covertly insert agents into the mainstream media, they now overtly do so and no one seems to care. The path from Eisenhower’s warning to our present situation is obvious to anyone willing to walk it, but let me make it even clearer for you. To paraphrase our 34th president, every Raychel Madow show, every Adam Schiff comment, every meme showing Trump and Putin kissing, signifies in the final sense a distraction from the poisoning of our waters, the warming of our planet, the extinction of animal species. It distracts from the very real problems we are facing in our nation: income inequality, corporate takeover of our media and every other facet of our lives, and the monitoring and spying capacity over U.S. citizens that not even George Orwell could imagine.

Advice To Democrats

I had another encounter with a Hillary voter last night. I assumed it was a Hillary voter since they are the only ones I know who scream RUSSIA! and call me a Russian troll. I would assume it was a Hillary voter because of their belief that anyone who disagreed with them must either be an ignorant Trump-supporting deplorable or a Putin puppet (they have been amazingly consistent). Mostly I identify someone as a Hillary supporter if they remind me of an over-caffeinated Chicken Little experiencing the D.T.s (Delirium Tremens or Donald Trumps, take your pick).

I understand their anxiety: I’ve been experiencing it for the past 25 years. Because unlike them, I’ve seen this day coming for 25 years, whereas it seemed to have totally blindside them. Now, when you get blindsided by something you never see coming, there are two ways to react: 1) self-reflection, which can lead to questioning why it was you were so unaware in order to avoid a similar situation in the future or 2) spastic overreaction wherein you take no personal responsibility and find others to blame the situation on. I will forego my personal opinion of which path Democrats chose to take.

And I get their distress, I really do. I grieve for the planet, am frightened of rising temperatures and environmental devastation. I want to live in a world where the suffering are aided and I truly believe the government has a role in helping people.

What I don’t understand is their solution. Perhaps it is because I saw so clearly the trajectory we were on while they were lulled to sleep by the well-spoken words of our previous president. The veil fell from my eyes back in 1992 when I voted for the lesser of two evils (Bill Clinton) and watched carefully his actions in the White House. I judged him on his own merits rather than on the merits of his detractors, as most Democrats did. I realized that in some fights there is no good guy and when no one is looking out for your interests it’s foolish to join the fight because you’re going to get beat up and then thrown under the bus.

I watched as Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, a deal that helped neither the Mexican nor the American workers but helped corporations a great deal. I watched as Bill Clinton expanded NATO and led it into its first offensive actions, which was a line that never should have been crossed.

I watched as Barack Obama bailed out banks and corporations without asking anything of them in return. I watched as his administration overthrew the government in Libya and left it a breeding ground for terrorists and slave trading.

I saw oh so much more done by the Democrats, things so many voters were willing to overlook because they feared the Republicans more. And while I see the temptation of voting for the lesser of two evils, I knew it wouldn’t in the end lead to progress but instead drag the dividing line between the two sides further from where I wanted it to go. Because sometimes in a fight neither side cares about you. Or the truth. Or the planet. I understand the argument for making incremental steps, but not when they are taken in the wrong direction. I cannot help but see beyond the subtle differences in order to see the greater similarities, cannot help but feel that the Democrats and Republicans are but two ends of the same vehicle: where the front goes, the rear soon follows.

So if you are a Democrat, let me ask you some questions and indulge me while I imagine your answers. I assure you that I draw upon a wealth of discussion in predicting responses:

Me: The question is, is what the Democrats are offering acceptable?

You: But Donald Trump.

Me: Yes, but is perpetual war acceptable?

You: But Trump.

Me: Yes, but do the Democrats have an answer to global warming?

You: Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate.

Me: And what did President Obama do for the environment in eight years? He was even fine with DAPL until the cries of the ordinary people became too loud.

You: But…

Me: What did Bill Clinton do to combat global warming?

You: But…

Me: What did Hillary say she was going to do to combat global warming?

You: Russia.

Me: What?

You: Russia Russia Russia!

And so it has gone. A hatred of Trump has been used to divert all your energies and attention away from the issues you care most about and which you could be fighting for. All those barriers to real participatory democracy we could be tearing down—the electoral college, gerrymandering, Citizens United, ownership of the media by a few wealthy oligarchs, etc.—we have ignored. And the media has been happy to help us ignore it. They, along with the Democrats who don’t really want to change anything, are happy to find other subjects to amuse you, like how it wasn’t their fault and how bad Trump is. I won’t disagree with the latter.

So let me give you a little tough love. Remember, no matter how tempting it might be to believe it, I am neither a Trump supporter nor a Russian bot or troll. I can’t say for sure if I’m a useful idiot or not, because if I was I wouldn’t be aware of it. But lay not the flattering unction upon your soul, to paraphrase Hamlet, that the flaw lies within me. At least consider the possibility that someone other than the corporate media pundits and anonymous intelligence agents have something useful to share with you. I truly believe I am on your side more than they are.

Here is my advice for those who voted for Hillary and want to combat the Trump phenomenon: don’t trust the corporate media and the intelligence agencies. Don’t look to them to lead you out of this dark time we are living in. Because they, perhaps more than anything, are responsible for the situation we now find ourselves. It is they who are calling the shots and it is they, more than anyone else, that are responsible for Donald Trump. The media has made a hero of Trump for decades and the government has never bothered to go after Trump for the myriad shady deals he’s been a part of for at least as long. Ask yourself why that is and it will go a long way towards enlightening you to the reality that Trump is the symptom and not the disease.

Russiagate As I Understand It

There are certain…peculiarities about the Russiagate narrative. I can’t help thinking George Carlin would have loved to have a go at this one, but he has moved on from this mortal coil. So let me give it a try in my own humble way.

So the DNC servers were hacked but the intelligence agencies never actually looked at the servers but knew they were hacked. By Russia. Non-governmental experts said the servers were not hacked but leaked, which would mean that someone in the DNC did it and not Russia. This idea has been purged from the official narrative like a former comrade of Stalin. Seth Rich, a disaffected data analyst for the DNC was gunned down in an attempted robbery in which nothing was taken from him. Nobody knows who killed him but they know with absolute certainty it did not involve his work or the hacked or leaked information from the servers, even though the person who ended up with the information, Julien Assange, hinted that there might be a connection. In order to clear the air on this issue, no intelligence agency has bothered to contact Mr. Assange and his access to the internet and the outside world has been blocked.

Shortly after this, the Russians hacked the Vermont power grid. Except they didn’t but they were undoubtedly up to some mischief. Shortly after that, we were authoritatively informed that the Russians were involved in hacking the French election, an error that was, fortunately, cleared up after the false claim achieved its desired aim of electing the proper candidate.

For the last two years, Russiagate has been unprecedentedly the main subject of conversation in the media, but all the conversation revolves around conjecture and taking the assertions of anonymous, unelected and unaccountable persons within the intelligence communities, and echoed far and wide through the Washington Post, a paper purchased by the richest man in the world at about the same time as he inked a very lucrative deal with one of those intelligence agencies.

The entire focus of Russiagate has been to reinforce how factual the unprovable assertions are while dismissing any questioning of it as conspiracy theory. Which means that anyone skeptical of collusion, a synonym for conspiracy, is oddly enough a conspiracy theorist. Each unsubstantiated new assertion is either accepted as gospel truth or else placed in the public's mind as one of those ideas too foolish to actually be stated as true but is secretly accepted as such (e.g. pee tapes and Pokemon Go).

The sole lesson to be learned from Russiagate is how bad Russia and Putin is, and that they must be seen as an enemy rather than a country with an elected ruler that has to share the same planet with us whether we like it or not. The goal is not to protect our country from undue outside (or inside) influence, it is to whip up hatred for Russia. In short, it is not a call for defensive measures but offensive ones.

Not once in the last two years has anyone in our government or media discussed ideas of how to diminish foreign intervention in our election process that did not involve censoring independent journalists. Never once has anybody in authority mentioned the idea of using paper ballots. Nor has anybody in that span of time wondered if any other nation might be interfering in our elections. There is no evidence or speculation, none, that any other nation in the world might be seeking to influence our nation, despite the fact that campaign contributions are flooding us from around the world. And every presidential aspirant has to meet and kowtow to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. Crickets.

Meanwhile anyone to the left of Nancy Pelosi is being attacked as Russian bots, Russian trolls, traitors, or useful idiots. U.S. search engines and social media are restricting access to progressive news sites in the name of protecting our democracy.

Elsewhere, in England: 5 years after releasing a spy from their prison where they had him at their mercy, the Russians decided to poison him in England just to show the world how evil they are. Then deny doing it. Russia asks for evidence but is instead given contempt and their ambassadors back. This happens at a most inconvenient time for Russia, as they are just about to host the World Cup Soccer Games. But I’m sure it is all part of grand chess master Putin’s plan.

As Putin behaves, so behaves his Ally Assad in Syria. Just at the time when he was winning the civil war (is that what you call it when the combatants are jihadists from other countries armed with weapons gained from the overthrow of Gaddafi as well as those given by the U.S.?) Assad uses chemical weapons on his own people—just to show how evil he is and to strike fear in the hearts of his enemies. He of course denies it. Just like Lee Harvey Oswald, he committed an unspeakable evil and then claimed he was a patsy.

This leads to an immediate response from the U.S and its allies France and the UK, because they are certain they know what happened, just like they are certain Russia poisoned the Skrypals and needed to respond right away. Just like when they were certain Russia and Trump colluded and…are taking nearly two years to carefully build a case while a president who is controlled by a foreign power is given free reign to destroy his nation. Because delaying a reprisal on the other two issues could have had consequences.

Vladimir Putin, you see, is blackmailing a person utterly lacking in shame with shameful videos, according to a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, an agent of a foreign government who worked with Russians in order to help dig up dirt on Donald Trump, who, after all, is suspected of working with agents of a foreign government in order to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, the Manchurian Candidate, the Putin Puppet, the man who will do anything in order to avoid having the dreaded pee tapes available for anyone to see, is acting more hostile to Putin than President Obama ever did, kicking out Russian ambassadors, selling arms to Russia’s neighbor, adding Montenegro to the military alliance that was formed to combat the alleged threat that Russia once was, and killing Russians in Syria. All part of the devious plan to distract people away from the devious plan.

Oddly enough, everyone who got the WMDs story right has gotten the Russiagate story wrong, claiming it to be, as Chomsky said, “a joke”. Equally as odd, everybody who got the WMDs story wrong has got the Russiagate story right, from Joe Scarborough to Adam Schiff.

The New York Times and The Washington Post, who both issued apologies for not being more skeptical about the WMDs and said they would have to be more diligent next time, are proving they are the respectable news sources by not questioning anything. But we aren’t supposed to talk about The Iraq war because that is called Whataboutism, which is a bad thing because it points out the other times people lied right to your face.

Then the dissident Russian journalist died but he didn’t die, he just faked his death so that he could catch the people that killed him.

I can’t help thinking that in the early days the story was meant to divide us along party lines. Stories like Russia using Pokemon Go to influence the election were so laughable I can’t help thinking they were served up as red meat to Trump supporters. Another was the Reality Winner story—it was a name that most liberals would accept as normal but one that most Republicans would immediately associate with the term snowflake.

Oh, and the prime thrust of the strategic campaign of the tactical genius Putin, besides releasing the truth that was too complicated to make an impact on most people, was to use social media to confuse us, most of the confusing memes appearing after the election, which is truly confusing when you think about it. If this was an event comparable to Pearl Harbor, one has to question Putin's (evil) genius because Japan was able to take out our entire Pacific fleet with their proclamation of war. I can't imagine what Putin gained from this surprise attack other than my confusion, which I confess is profound.

And each time they come out with something new, they say “Ha, everybody has to believe us now because this is indisputable truth that cannot be denied”, but it always boils down to the word of some anonymous person within an intelligence community. And they say “Everybody on the planet believes the story except Donald Trump and his band of nut-huggers.” But Chomsky says the rest of the world is laughing at us. And I’m no fan of Donald Trump but I’m a fan of good journalism and honest and open government, and this aint it.

Top Ten Russian Crimes

I don't know if you've noticed this, but Russia seems to be in the news a lot lately. Not in a good way, either. Always one to jump on the bandwagon, I have compiled a list of evil things Russia has done. Tell me what you think:

10. Backing a coup in Ukraine that led to the overthrow of their democratically elected government, leading to a rise of openly fascist elements in their hand-picked government.

9. Support for Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists in a plot to overthrow the secular government in Afghanistan. Where once women had equal rights to men and held positions such as doctors and political leaders, they are now forced to wear bourkas and have few if any rights.

8. Sabotaging the Bernie Sanders campaign, thereby paving the way for the election of Donald Trump.

7. Unfair treatment of ethnic minorities, which includes police agents killing defenseless ethnic minorities without fear of punishment.

6. Support of an Israeli regime which is an apartheid state.

5. Selling arms to Saudi Arabia, a nation that deprives its female population of rights and is using the arms received to kill thousands with potentially millions more dead before it is over.

4. Supplying arms to outside forces in Syria which include ISIL and other terrorist groups, some guilty of beheading children while others ate the internal organs of dead Syrian soldiers.

3. Violently putting down the indigenous people who protested the installation of oil pipelines that could pollute their water supply.

2. Permitting a group of oligarchs to put down democracy not only in their own nation but around the world.

1. I will leave this one up to you. As I hope you have figured out by now, every other point on this list was referring to the United States and not to Russia. So tell me, and please provide indisputable evidence just as I am prepared to provide indisputable evidence for all my claims, what crime has Russia committed that surpasses the ones mentioned above?

You Are Expected To Eat What Is Put On Your Plate

The difference between an indictment and a ham sandwich is you can serve an indictment lacking any meat and it is quite likely no one will notice. In fact, if the indictment is served to people living in a country that is not subservient to the United States, it doesn’t even require bread. Nobody will notice, especially when the restaurant critics from all the major media are firmly in your pocket.

This is not to say the recent indictments by Robert Mueller of 12 Russians is a nothing burger. I, like you and anyone else commenting on this issue, have not been given sufficient information to make such an assessment. What I am saying is that the picture we are being shown on the menu is nothing but lettuce and bun. I know our intelligence agencies and our media (more and more the same thing) assure us it is filled with USDA prime cuts, but they provide no evidence of it. And unlike the millions of others who have already wolfed it down without bothering to get a sense of its flavor (so hungry are they for red meat), I need to stop and take a sniff of what it is the waiter is placing in front of me. I still remember, though so many others have forgotten, that one time when we were served a sandwich that ended up not being a WMD on rye but instead turned out to be filled with dead children and depleted uranium. You simply must excuse me if my stomach has never forgiven them or that my insides instinctively rebel at any dish they put before me. And after all, is it really me who is to blame? Am I just being finicky? Or did their lies and the lies of their sous-chefs in the media not cause a massive outbreak of slaughter in the Middle East? Not just once, but on multiple occasions?

In short, Mr. Mueller, should you not fully expect me to inspect the sandwich you hand me before I accept it? Is it really me who is to blame? It’s not like I willingly come to your restaurant and place an order. You deliver it right to my door and try to shove it down my throat and then you somehow act like I’m a conspiracy nut for doubting the ingredients you claim are in your product. We are told to eat it the way a contestant on Fear Factor is told to eat a cockroach: it’s just expected of us.

Seriously, take a tip from manufacturers of food stuffs and do some damage control before you expect people to once again swallow what you’re dishing out. Kraft recalled 6.5 million boxes of Mac And Cheese after metal was found in the box. Nobody got hurt, they just wanted to make sure. Whereas a million people died as a result of the Iraq War the media and our intelligence agencies served up and there was no recall. As in, nobody even seems to recall it happened.

In 2015, Dave’s 95% Premium Beef Dog Food was recalled because of an “off odor”. Your story stinks to high heaven and yet no one has thought to recall it. Sure, you quietly retract various aspects of it, you grabbed the Vermont and French Election Hacking stories off the table while we were distracted, and then you insisted we forget they were ever on our plates.

If it is revealed that a cook in a restaurant puts something disgusting in a customer’s food, that cook is loudly, immediately, and roughly fired. That does not happen either in the media or our intelligence agencies. There is actual video evidence of Robert Mueller pissing in the stew and yet he is running the restaurant. How gross is that?

How do you get away with it? Granted, you spend unknown sums of money in marketing and subliminal advertising (read psyops). You somehow manage to get your people on all the major news networks, something the small, independent providers of nourishment can’t do. You have in your pocket the best spokespersons from both parties and manage to keep those who complain far from their customers. And when another outbreak results from what it is you serve, you blame it on the wait-staff, those public servants who are meant to serve us. You have convinced half the diners it is the Democratic waiter who is to blame, and the other half that it is the Republican waiter who is to blame, and somehow we all seem to forget that we can't even get a glass of water that won't make us sick. 

As regards to Mueller’s most recent concoction, his 12-course indictment buffet, we are led to believe that it was whipped up and freshly brought to the table for our delight. The truth is it was most likely sitting in the freezer waiting for the right occasion for it to be thawed out and served. The right occasion turned out to be shortly before the Trump-Putin summit, so that we would have no appetite for what was to follow. In fact, I can’t help thinking the desired goal is for a bad case of food poisoning forcing us to miss the event all together. Whatever the case may be, whether we attend or stay at home, the results will not be pleasant and nobody will be in the mood for borscht.

Massive recalls are typically made when a few people have gotten sick. In the case of our intelligence agencies and the media that never seems to contradict them, a million people have died and nothing is done about it. The guilty parties have been rewarded and the health inspectors that warned about the dangers have all been sacked. And those in charge of the kitchen are currently cooking up their most unsavory and deadly concoction of all. I find it disturbing the amount of people eagerly licking their chops in anticipation for the meal that is about to be served.

America’s Slide Into Infantilism

As children, we have a naïve notion about how when we grow up we will have the power to change the world and the freedom to do what we please. And then we grow up and we learn about responsibility. Most of us. It seems slowly we as a society have been slipping away from the notion of responsibility, at least beyond the paying of bills and showing up to work on time. We still shoulder our individual financial obligations, but beyond personal matters, we have rather fallen away from the whole notion of being grown-ups.

I can’t help wondering how other societies see our own, if there be any yet we have not infected with the inability to reach a degree of adulthood. For all of recorded history, culture has been maintained and passed down from generation to generation, and in that manner, many cultures have matured into rather sophisticated examples of what civilization can be. Sure, all of them are flawed, just as all human beings are flawed. In many ways the youthful society that is The United States has been able to show new and better ways of being and doing to those cultures that have been so diligent in clinging to their past. That has always been the beauty of America, but it is also our flaw. And whenever a positive is too much accentuated, the flaw becomes more evident. The more a foundation is built from a flawed concept (as all concepts are), the greater the danger the flaw presents.

America’s great flaw and asset is its youth. And it has worked so well as an asset that we have built the entire edifice of our nation upon it. It has worked so well we have led the entire world in unprecedented technological revolutions. We have built something incredibly impressive upon a powerful but untested foundation. And it has for so long stood the test that we have ceased to worry about the imperfection that exists within it just as imperfection exists within everything.

We have defined ourselves as the new kid on the block, the young rebel. We are the New World, the pioneers that discovered new terrain, at last making humanity a global and interrelated whole. The only problem is, we are no longer young. We are a nation doing a combover in order to hide the thinning hair, still trying to fit into the jeans we wore when we were eighteen. We had such a good time in high school and were so popular we don’t want to grow up. But we have to. Our situation has changed. There is no frontier we can send people to when the society we have built becomes intolerable. We can no longer run away, we are now as immobile as Europe has been for a while now. We have sown our wild oats, it's time to start being responsible.

Unfortunately, we have done just the opposite. So pleased are we with what we once were and so unwilling to face life as it now is, we are regressing. As Gil Scott Heron said nearly forty years ago, “this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can - even if it's only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards.” Things have only gotten worse since then. Ironically, our desire to retain our youth and innocence has led to senility.

It isn’t just the past that we cling to, any delusional way of seeing life more pleasantly and ourselves more impressively will do. Our movies don’t reflect reality anymore, nor does our music reflect our lives (we would have to outdo Sodom and Gomorrah for that to be true). Our news doesn’t reflect what is really going on in our nation and the world, and our politicians aren’t any better at addressing the issues that most concern us.

And somehow we are all right with that. Because the media and the messengers have done such a good job transforming us into mindless consumers rather than functioning adults. We see the world through the same simplistic perspectives our masters do, a strictly economic one. As teenagers we asked our parents for the keys to the family car without giving any thought about who pays for the upkeep and the insurance and the monthly payments, feeling we have contributed enough by throwing in a few bucks for gas. Today we feel equally entitled because we pay for it all, but we neglect other costs: how it effects our climate and environment, the military interventions required to insure cheap and reliable gas, the taxes required to keep the roads in good shape.

Somewhere along the way we stopped growing up and taking on the responsibilities of adulthood, all the while demanding all the privileges. Sports heroes claimed they weren’t role models, businessmen denied any responsibilities to the communities in which they worked, and our storytellers abandoned the job of passing on the wisdom of the elders and instead went to work in marketing. We are a country utterly unconnected to the kind of wisdom that requires roots, and we are rapidly headed towards utter infantilization.

It can perhaps best be seen in the political leader of our nation, Donald Trump. It is obvious in his four bankruptcies and just about anything he does that he is utterly unfamiliar with the concept of responsibility. It was no less apparent in the alternative we were given, Hillary Clinton, who never seemed to think herself responsible for anything she had done while in government, from her voting for the Iraq War to her active involvement in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi that has left Libya a failed state. Responsibility is for adults, and they are precious few to be found. The cameras of the media do not focus on them because they are not sexy and are no good for selling cars or beer.

We are a nation that never made the step to adulthood and are now rapidly regressing back to the cradle. Our best attempts at politics are no more mature than siblings sitting in the back seat on a long car ride who poke each other and then try to convince their parents it was the other’s fault. But there are no parents, there is no one driving the car except corporations that aren’t paying attention to the road but instead are busily digging through the cracks in the seats for whatever loose change might be there.

If we are not already there, we shall soon regress into complete infantilism, capable of nothing more than mindlessly consuming and creating waste. And there will soon be no adults left who are able or willing to spoon-feed us or change our nappies. Sooner or later, we will have to grow up. Let us hope that occurs before it is too late.