Oh my what you would have made of this Iran invasion. Oh my god it defies belief that you would have lived in times so absurd. You spent your life in a troubled preparation for an unstable moment that never came, and it seems to be imminent the very moment you leave this earth.
You'd be aghast at the incompetence, and I would be arguing to you, as ever, that the incompetence is deliberate. The whole point is to pursue it incompetently. The whole point is to make the war go on as long as possible, because the longer it goes, the worse it gets, and the worse it gets, the more indispensible Trump and Netanyahu seem to their followers. As a dog returns to his vomit, the fool persists in his folly (Mishlei 26:11), so the more incompetently both Trump and Netanyahu pursue this war, the more they create an argument for their own indispensability, both countries have grown so gullible because to cease in their folly would be to acknowledge it. It's precisely the 'sunk cost' fallacy you talked about ad nauseum.
Ultimately, I'm not sure it matters whether it's deliberate incompetence to plunge us into a state of desperation for a leader, or whether it's the blunders of two malignant narcissists living reality as a fantasy. What matters is us, not Trump. What matters is that the most mendacious, venal, and stupid man in America sailed over the machinations of 10,000 cleverer candidates to put his stamp on this country that will alter the world's axis forever, and the 80 million idiots who support him. Why did they support him?
No liberal wants to hold Obama responsible for it all, because to hold Obama responsible would be to acknowledge that the vision Obama conjured in us of what life can be is false. Well, you can't, not without an equal threat of force. Republicans were always right about that. You can't negotiate with your opponents be they Vladimir Putin or be they the Republican Party. Only the threat of something worse brings them to the table, and Obama, optimist that he was, thought he could lower the temperature by bringing us all to the table tax free in an exchange of ideas that would eventually make everyone realize that his ideas were the best. What Obama did not realize is that the lowered temperature was the temperature we were already sitting in. Temperatures don't get lower than they were during my childhood, and even in the 2000's, all the old legislative barterers and exchangers of ideas were still in the Senate and House and judiciary, the temperature only raised because of the determination of a new generation of leaders to raise it.
I find conservatives and socialists so overwhelmingly un-self aware in their constant accusations that we liberals are 'condescending.' OK, so the best of us are condescending to them, but conservatives and socialists are nothing short of hateful to us, and the worst of us can't help responding hate for hate. We all are what we were formed to be. I grew up in the era of FOX News and talk radio. Both on mass media and in person, I spent decades of my life hearing conservatives inveigh every day against everything I believe, everything I value, every choice I make, everything I am. I have watched the dozen and change close republicans in my life spend their lives accusing everyone who is not part of their movement of irredeemable corruption; and then watched them be shocked whenever I got mad, shocked whenever I called them out on their spreading obvious propaganda, shocked whenever I implied or said that their behavior was not worthy of dialogue when they take opportunities every day to either imply or say outright that they look at people exactly like me and you as moral inferiors.
You didn't really care about that. For you, it was just another excuse to be condescending to them. You viewed us all a bit like pets, and when people got mad at you, when people insulted you, you thought it was cute, and you'd keep baiting and encouraging us to keep insulting you. As weird as it might sound to those who didn't know you, you loved it. Getting made fun of was another way of being the center of the room, and you were secure enough to know that if you wanted to, you could say the perfect three words to squish any of us like a cockroach. At least you could until we mined a real insecurity of yours, at which point you inevitably became extremely hurt and sometimes incensed.
But now that I'm middle aged, it's not just the right, it's a left too of online hornets and committed friends (who sometimes become ex-friends) who similarly can't be bothered to see how their behavior embraces everything they supposedly hate. At least I'm self-aware enough to see the ugly contradictions between my aims and my results, but I doubt any of them are.
Nevertheless, in spite of this and millions more variables, Obama thought people were rational, and when presented with the best possible options, reason would compel them. Like all progressives in all eras, more than 50% of Obama's ideas were great, but the ones that weren't were inevitably disasters (we won't get into which right now, you know them as well as I do...), and just like Woodrow Wilson the progressive of 100 years ago, this Presidency of optimism ultimately ended in national nihilism and worldwide despair. There are so much worse things in the world than being condescended to, but people HATE being condescended to far more than they hate things which are infinitely greater dangers to them. If people think they are being taken seriously, they can be convinced to die and kill for those whom they think esteem them. If people think they are being looked down on, they would rather die and kill than improve their lives.
Why did so many millions find Obama condescending? Well, why did people find you the same? Well, partially because you clearly thought your solutions were better than theirs, and it's because you clearly thought yourself smarter than them. The problem was, like Obama, you WERE smarter than us all, but the best solution is almost never the solution that works best. The best solution is usually not the preventative one that eliminates the problem for decades, it's usually the duct tape solution that comes apart next month and lands us right back to where we started. At least with the duct tape, we know how to fix it. What Obama wanted was change, but he wanted change to happen from the bottom up, and as Eric Hoffer would say: 'change is the biggest ordeal on the planet.'
When our worlds change, we have no idea what would go wrong and the anxiety of the metamorphosis is hell on earth. It turns out (and I was very wrong about this) that America would be far more secure if Obama simply did everything he wanted by executive fiat and ignored all his critics. But the idea of persuading the entire country to see themselves in a way that might improve their lives was nothing short of a trauma for this country. It forced the country to come face to face with the idea that we might not be as great as we think we are, that other countries have surpassed us in quality of life, that the world no longer looks at us as the beacon of freedom and hope. So much of the country resented that look. Some simply thought Obama was wrong about America, and many of them thought Obama a simple America-hater (a sentiment beneath contempt), but a large part of Trump's appeal was precisely that millions of the forgotten America realized that in some way, Obama was right. Trump was in many ways elected to restore everything that Obama showed us we lost.
Every day of your life you got some new solution in your head that would maximize people's efficiency. You wanted to impose changes on people's behaviors, their routines, their entire mentalities and work ethics, but you were completely unprepared for the idea that other people might ultimately be better off with the way things were. In going about things how you did, you taught the lesson that we were (meaning I was) unsatisfactory to life's demands, and you certainly taught that we were (I was) unsatisfactory to your demands. This is what happens from liberal condescension. There are so much worse things in life than condescension, but no one can make us feel more fearful than we can within our own mind, and nothing in the world spurs the mind to the worst possible self-opinion more effectively than does other people's condescension. I unfortunately spent decades of my life making sure you didn't get away with your personal insults. I wish I could have figured out how to ignore them, but if the whole country can't figure out how to deal with condescension from a smart President with good ideas who barely ever insulted them and would be gone in eight years, how can one man figure out how to deal with withering condescension from the only father he would ever have?
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But if there was one thing you never were, it was full of shit. You spoke your mind every minute of every day, sometimes down to the second, and seemed utterly heedless of the consequences. Amazingly..., whether due to environment or heredity, I picked up this behavior, and when I did it, you would act as though the world had ended.
People say we're now living in a post-truth age. That's a load of shit in itself. We've been living in a post-truth age at least since my adolescence. Bill Clinton based a whole career on composting truth into law-evading bullshit, and Republicans of the 90s with their accusations about 'liberal media' declared an outright war on truth.
I'm sure we could date the post-truth age even further back, but the truth is that the entirety of human history is based on having an extraordinarily fungible relationship to the truth. Truth is something so easily abused, so easily manipulated, so easily coopted for propaganda that what does it mean to tell it?
...I need to read more before we go on. Sorry Dad.
