“How the mighty have fallen.” So writes King David, in 2 Samuel 1:19, lamenting the deaths of King Saul and his son, Jonathan. This mournful passage, often called “The Song of the Bow”, was originally quoted as a portion of the lost Book of Jashar (The Book of the Just Man), which is mentioned in, but does not form a part of, the Hebrew Bible. In the lament, David mourns his two friends, felled in the bloody clashes of the Battle of Mount Gilboa.
This is the closest I can come to describing the destruction that is haunting each of us in this country today—the ongoing and wanton destruction of the reputation and standing of the United States by the orange menace over the last 16 months. “How the mighty have fallen.” There is, however, a radical difference these two stories. Whereas King Saul fought to the end, the fool in the white house is brandishing the sword that is bringing down his own castle—and ours.
Brick by brick, insult by insult, cravenly displaying obsequious toadyism to our former enemies, China and Russia, the faux king president is giving away our reputation, our weapons, our good will and our international leadership. He is not even attempting to maintain ties with those who have historically depended on us for partnership. According to Rachel Maddow’s Monday report, out of 185 possible placements for Ambassadors, he continues to leave 115 unfilled. Think about it. He has made no Ambassadorial appointments to 115 different countries.
And even those nations who have welcomed new United States Ambassadors have been appalled by the insulting placement of unqualified, undistinguished presidential bootlickers who have been summarily dismissed from other administrative positions due to their incompetence.
He has hollowed out what used to be the governmental framework of agencies by reducing personnel to such a level as to render them useless. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been gutted so thoroughly that deaths have soared around the world from lack of AIDS treatment, inoculations and desperately needed medications. The breakout of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo runs rampant with no CDC presence to spring into action to deliver prevention protocols and help. Add to these losses (many more than listed here), the weakness of the tiny oval office occupant in the face of the very strong men he is jonesing to emulate.
Like a mindless mule, he carries the water for the men who outthink him at every turn, Putin and Xi. Believing his own lies, he repeats that he has won the war in Iran, is able to open the Strait of Hormuz, and can stop the fighting whenever he wants. All blather and hot air. And the world knows it.
Ironically, he has already created the baseball caps we need for the glorious time when we are, finally and forever, rid of him. Before the regime change that brought us this puerile purveyor of juvenile AI images, America WAS great. Once he is gone, our task will be……you saw it coming……Making America Great Again.
And so we will. Like the phoenix in another set of ancient writings, America will rise from his ashes. We simply need to pry that boot off of our necks and remember who we really are, and who we must continue to be, to the world. Resurgemus!
Virtual Unreality
I was thinking, the other day, about the term “Virtual Reality” and concluded that those two words bear no relationship to each other.
Okay. I have lived through eight decades of American history, so far. This makes me uniquely qualified to reflect on the loss of reality in our lives. As things once stood, we took our money to the bank. In our hands. The bank took it and kept it in safes (hence the profession of “bank robber”). When we withdrew it, money was placed in our hands.
Admittedly, we knew what we had only through the handwritten numbers in our bank books, but it did, after all, involve real bills and coins, and a book we could hold in our hand. It was real.
And now? Money in savings, stocks, bonds, or any form exists only as virtual numbers in a virtual account. It may as well be bitcoin, for however real it is. We hold nothing in our hands that is permanent, and, now that Anthropic’s updated virtual genius, Claude, can penetrate any firewall, what might our holdings be if Claude should simply undertake to erase them? The projected date for the unrolling of even more powerful Quantum Computers has just been moved up to 2029. These are computers that can, among other things, make themselves more capable, more powerful and more inventive, as well as inter-communicate in one vast hive-brain network. How shall we know and prove our (material) worth then?
Take also, for example, the fact that now, when you endeavor to send a manuscript to a publisher, it’s certainly not on paper. Oh, no, it is nothing but pages in the ether, in a Word doc, perhaps. It is sent through the air, or the wire, and read on a computer. It is not corporeal. This has, undoubtedly, saved thousands of trees. But, might we need to plan a way to retain the total output of human civilization in some form you can hold in your hand? I remember, when I was on the Harvard Board of Overseers, I served as a member of a “visiting committee” to the incredible Widener Library at Harvard. I was struck by the fact that each iteration of media, over the centuries, was more ephemeral than the one before. We reviewed bronze tablets, ceramic urns, papyrus, books, microfiche, floppy discs, and, in many forms, the virtual representation of our history and literature. Each more vulnerable to time than the last. What might be next? And how shall we save it?
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