For the past 5 years (and a lot more) many of us have wondered “what are they thinking” as Trump’s Marching Morons and many of the Republican Party have gone from one attempt at social destruction to the next. The end game for these people appears to be the total breakdown of anything that might resemble organized society and a libertarian free-for-all. When you look at the faces of the January 6th Heehaw Rebellion you have to assume that none of those people are able to sustain any sort of serious relationships or jobs. The hoard of stay-at-home moms, angry and unemployed Millennials and X-gens and Boomers, retired and active duty military and police, and the rest of that crowd of people who have never had a productive, useful moment in their lives has to make you wonder “what do they think will come of the mess they are trying to make?”
The answer is chaos. They live in a delusional world where they imagine that when order and civilization fails, they will come out on top. And the fact is, they might; for a while. The mislabeled “rebels” in places like Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and the world’s other hot spots of disorder and instability, plus many members of almost every country’s military and police, are not serving some greater good in their fight. They are simply taking advantage of the opportunities chaos creates. Since they have no useful purpose in an organized 21st Century culture, they are trying to drive back progress and civilization to a point where they would at least be able to have a few moments of pleasure out of arson, theft, murder, rape, and kidnapping. It’s not like any of these people have a long-range plan for their life’s purpose.
The problem is that there are so many of them. In fact, it is entirely possible that at least half of every nation in the world is filled with what was once nothing more than cannon fodder for pointless regional wars and territorial pissing matches. A few thousand to a few hundred years ago, “excess population” (mostly male) was easily eliminated with hand-to-hand combat in large scale relative to overall population. A Bronze Age battle from 3200 years ago was discovered in the 90s and the grisly remains have been . . . enlightening. The remains of a few hundred expendables have been dug up, which indicates that at least 4,000-5,000 were involved. According to a Science Magazine article, this describes “picture of Bronze Age sophistication, pointing to the existence of a trained warrior class and suggesting that people from across Europe joined the bloody fray.” It also provides evidence that humans have needed to slough off excess and mostly-useless young men on a regular basis. One of the side effects of a large invading army is that a fair number of equally unproductive young women get used up, as hookers, rape victims, and camp hangers-on. So, all sorts of useless humans get used up relatively quickly.
In modern society, we don’t have a mechanism for ridding cultures of excess mediocrity, unless the culture collapses into chaos. Syria, for example, was the post card example of a moderately-functional Arab state. Then it wasn’t and the gangbangers have been having a field day since. That is the kind of “state” that Republicans appear to think will keep them in power and money, indefinitely, and for a few of them that will be true and for the majority, like the rest of us, they will discover the cost of “reaping the whirlwind.”
When your long-range “plan” is to wildly hope that a mobster faux-millionaire who has never done anything in his life to benefit anyone but himself, blowing up the world might seem like that act would create “new opportunities” that won’t exist any other way.
No comments:
Post a Comment