Garbage Time: Running Out the Clock on America?

“Do you not weep? Other sins only speak, murder shrieks out”

Webster is well known for the darkness of his plays. When he says murder shrieks out, I wonder which murder he is referring to. Or, perhaps, what is being murdered? These are dark days for freedom and democratic governance.

Yes.  I am grumpy this morning.  And so …

Wasn’t it Lenin who said that nothing happens for decades and then decades happen in a week?

Something like that.

The sudden collapse of American stature and reliability on the world stage has caught the breath of everyone.  What was once the center of a system protecting and valuing certain norms is now the rogue aggressor tearing down those very same norms.  

Yes, decades have flown by in the past few weeks.

And, no, this is not normal.  Not normal at all.

Some of us have been accused of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.  This is a disease, apparently, that afflicts his opponents and prevents them from seeing the logic, the greatness, the sensibility, and the general “normality” of his every action.  So deluded are we by TDS that we cannot understand now utterly normal this all is.  Trump is simply one in a long line of normal presidents.  That we disagree with him on policy ought not make us so agitated.  And such is our agitation we display must mean we suffer from TDS.  It us, not him, that are abnormal.  So we are told.

Lies becomes truths.  And truths become lies.  The way of tyrants is ever thus.

So, no, this is not normal.

But it might have been predictable.  After all, we entered the garbage time of history some time ago.  Here in America.  Lesser players enter the game.  The stars all sit down.  The result a certainty.  The crowd can start to file out.  Why watch the clock run down when there is no excitement left?  We all know what’s going to happen.  We have better things to do.  We shut out this game and turn to the next.

The garbage time of history is a recent invention of someone in China.  He was referring to the sense of hopelessness he felt as the Chinese regime stopped worrying about getting good results for its people and turned inward to the protection of its own status and power.  During periods of such inattention to their interests the people have to fend for themselves the best they can.  Uncertainty, chaos, and arbitrary decision making dominate the mental space.  People retrench and have to wait out the storm.  They postpone anything too dependent on predictability.  They shorten their focus.  Survival is all that matters.

So here we are.

America’s garbage time.

The collapse of its institutions has been swift and distressing.  They had decayed long ago.  Their decadence and corruption was evident to those who studied them, but like all things they lived on past their peak.  Shells of what they once were, they were occupied by people less committed to their sustenance and more interested in their personal gain.  Greed became acceptable.  Self-serving, self-regarding, and self-sustaining, all the so-called lines of defense against tyranny simply rotted in place.  So when the storm hit, they fell apart without resistance.  Their moral core had been eaten away by complacent occupants who took for granted their own importance.  Instead of earning strength through continual effort and investment they cashed in the capital created by others.  

They lived off the past.  They lived in the past.  They ignored the present.

The surrender of democracy and the acceptance of oligarch-supported tyranny did not suddenly break upon us this year.  The roots of decay emerged decades ago when we abandoned any semblance of collective coherence and surrendered to the re-assertion of elitist power — this time expressed through the capture of corporate management and the legislative process.

Government stopped governing on behalf of the many.  It reduced itself to the care and feeding of the few.  The nurturing of society was tossed overboard in favor of the extraction of rents by the lucky few who attached themselves to the elite.  Inequality was fostered and encouraged.  Its as expounded upon as a valuable force — rewards were flowing to the strong and mighty.  Those with energy and brains were being paid appropriately.  Those lacking in both were being cast aside.  Or so we were told.  That it was those benefitting from the loss of social coherence telling us that they had the energy and brains, and that we did not, ought to have warned us about the fraud being committed.

But … garbage time.  The lesser players bask in the spotlights and pretend to greatness.  And in garbage time we pay no attention.  We have other things on our mind.  

Of course there were moments of regression back towards those days before garbage time.  The Great Recession, caused by the greed of the few and yet blamed on the greed of the many — those bankers, we have been told by our libertarian friends, were victims of endlessly corrupt borrowers all seeking to exploit the availability of absurdly reduced credit standards.  How could the bankers resist?  Poor things.

Yes the Great Recession produced a brief reversion to a sort of democracy.  The tepid expansion of health care, albeit via an engine that produced great profit for the insurance industry, suggested that the embers of social caring still existed. 

But the wise people warned us of not going too far.  We cannot afford too much generosity.  The budget cannot sustain the stress of paying for what the people want.  But it can sustain the banks.  They have priority.  The people will have to wait.  And wait.

Garbage time indeed.

History can judge those four decades of increasing corruption and declining standards.    The garbage time of history has accumulated sufficient evidence that we not not reprise every moment and mistake here.

What we can recognize is the end result.

When the constant fight to preserve democracy comes to an end and is replaced by the decadence of its complacent aftermath, and when we bask in the glow of the past rather than foster the fires of the present, we have ended the input of energy needed to create the future.  We have allowed the future to create itself.  Or, rather, we have handed the act of creation to someone else.  In those circumstances, history warns us, tyrants are only too keen to take up the challenge.

So here we are.

Just a few days ago America was humiliated by the sight of its leader associating publicly with what appeared to be his peer.  It was humiliated by its association with a an obviously corrupt and tyrannical despot whose presence in the center of American power suggested an equality that demeans everything the America might once have stood for.  Worse, this despot leads a tiny nation.  

So the world could see with clarity the new alliances that America is searching for.  It could see the sort of character America values.  It could understand the full import of garbage time.  America was treating El Salvador as the sort of ally it now sought.  

With friends like these …

But it gets worse:

The humiliation of the meeting was not simply the association with a tyrant.  Nor was it the suggestion that America itself is now subject to similar tyranny and arbitrary government — people being grabbed off the street and denied due process is so overtly an abdication of America’s claims to modernity that to deny it is to deny everything that has come before.  No, it is even worse than that.  It is a capitulation to the defense of any sort of standard of decency necessary to even the most basic of ideal of freedom.  America was announcing to the world that it is no longer free.

Garbage time.

The very public defiance of the wishes of the Supreme Court was a stunning rebuke of the rule of law.  That it was on display in the White House is worse.  That it was abetted and agreed to by every senior leader with the admionsaratiuon, and especially the leader of the so-called Justice Department, turns everything upside down.  

Americans are now only free if their leader says they are.  Caprice.  Whim. Grudge.  Perhaps the time of day.  Who now knows what the basis of freedom is?  For it is no longer the rule of law.  Not if the courts can so easily be defied. 

Raw power is the new basis of everything in America.  Personal whim.  Personal peeve.  Personal.  We have been cast back to the days before the modern struggle for freedom was fought.   The king is untethered.

The ramifications are profound.

The world is watching.

The world is watching the absurdity of the trade war.  Each day brings a new policy.  Tariffs rise or fall depending on the slightest grudge.  They go up or down depending on the level of corruption supplicants are willing to debase themselves by indulging in.  And it is all taking place behind closed doors.  There are deals, we are told, being struck.  By whom?  And with whom?  Are these deals nation to nation?  Or are they nation to king?  Are the favors being offered to escape the tariffs personal donations to the king’s coffers?  Or are the benefits to the people of America?

Whose business is it, exactly, that is being conducted by our leaders?

That we have to ask is embarrassing.

Garbage time.

But it is not just on the world stage that the corruption of tyranny is taking place.  The so-called efforts to make our government more efficient — a laudable goal on the surface and in a democratic setting — is simply a feeding trough for greed.  The elimination of those departments dedicated to the provision of digital services and to the improvement of service within the government is no accident.  It creates an opportunity for outsiders to step in and provide that exact same service for profit.  And who might that outsider be?  Perhaps the very people doing the elimination?  

And Congress sits by, dominated as it is by mere sycophants.  And the Supreme Court?  Riven through with overt corruption and unable to reform itself, it sits ineffectively and watches.  Businesses, law firms, and universities — except one — all fall into line fearful of the likely revenge of the king were he crossed.

Arbitrary government.  Institutional failure.  Loss of the rule of law.  All hallmarks of weak, diminished, and decaying nations.  Hallmarks of failure.  Hallmarks of collapse.  Hallmarks of the end of stature and the admission of a decline that has taken place.  Not that is taking place.  But a decline in the past tense.  Garbage time is the acknowledgement of the end having been reached.  The reality is before us.  It is present. It is not ahead of us.  It is now.  America is playing out the clock on its phase of global glory.  The next game awaits.  Perhaps with new rules.  With democracy dead and its hypocrisy exposed it needs refreshment.  It needs to start over.

Meanwhile …

The world is noticing.  The world is taking note.  American regression so that it sees itself on a par with El Salvador allows the world have insight into American reality. The pretense is done with.  

Garbage time.

The Constitution provides no defense against raw power.  It never did.  It was always a gentleman’s agreement.  But that requires gentlemen.  And it requires vigilance not complacent appeals to the “American Experiment”.

An experiment that is manifestly failing.  

Or has failed?

In garbage time.