The Course Of Human Events

History, in the creation, does not go according to some master plan. This is true in general and in particular, because it is also true that the master plans proposed from time to time by individuals or governments never proceed as intended. History is better seen as countless precipitating events that send everything crashing into each other, which in turn set off countless unpredictable chain reactions.

In other words, human history is chaotic. Evidently there's a Yiddish proverb that goes: we plan; God laughs. (Paraphrased by Woody Allen: if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.) You don't have to be a Rebbe to know that that's true. 

This is never truer than in the case of war. The Iraq War in 2003 was a minor example. The original plan seemed simple to its designers, but it all went terribly wrong very quickly. The resulting chaos is still spinning through Iraq and several other countries in the area, and American military personnel are still being killed.

Many times the resulting chaos utterly destroys the initiating countries. In the matter of Germany and Japan in World War II, the master plan was to seize vast swathes of land from numerous countries by military force, achieving huge empires and world hegemony. The chaos left both countries kneeling in the rubble and choking on their own blood and the dust that had recently been their infrastructures. That was chaos at its finest.

Governing human events, the business of politics and statecraft, is an overwhelming challenge. Everything is usually out of control. Governments ride the wave while times are good. When times are bad they try different strategies to fix things, and then when events move into the good part of the cycle, usually on their own, the governments take the credit.

The men, almost always men, who are in positions where they can initiate great events are a mixed group. The list includes many men of measured temperament and great ability, from Emperor Augustus of Rome to President Obama in the United States, and many men wild or reckless in nature like the Emperors Caligula and Nero to President George W. Bush. The former can create progress and order while holding together disparate elements and without setting off on the path to chaos. The latter blindly sow the wind of inadequately considered plans and personal fantasies, later reaping the whirlwind of insecurity and economic ruin.

Aside from the individuals who display true mental aberrations, one major problem is that most of the politicians, in any era, are not students of history. Frequently, many of them are also intemperate men who lack the gene for caution. From time to time truly maniacal narcissists become the rulers of major countries. These men may lack not only the basic knowledge required to make plans that will affect the future of their countries, but also lack the ability to evaluate plans presented to them by others. They are like an inexperienced doctor who has little idea what his patient is suffering from or what the patient needs. Let’s try this! Didn’t work? Okay, let’s try this! And so on. In extreme cases these men may even have their own agendas and set in motion wild schemes to achieve personal goals, wealth or historical celebrity. Things can get ugly very quickly. I might be thinking of someone in particular. 

Perhaps the greatest generator of chaos, along with war, has always been revolution. No nation or culture on earth is safe when its very structure is seized, from without or within, by a group whose only wish is to destroy the existing structure and replace it with . . . something else. Here the nature of unintended results leading to chaos is the most stark. Well intended revolutions have taken entire continents into misery and destruction. I’m thinking of the French Revolution. God knows they had a good reason to wish to restructure their governing situation. The most immediate results, though, were terror and the Napoleonic Wars.

So, Fred, is there a conclusion here? Why yes, dear reader, there is. The current ruling clique in Washington, and in about thirty-seven state capitols, is a revolutionary mob that has taken control of all of our democratic institutions with the stated goal of tearing them down. Most of the good things that our politics have created over the last century are under immediate threat of destruction. I shouldn’t have to tell you what they are, and honestly, if there are any Americans that haven’t seen it yet, they have their heads thrust so far into the sand that no kind of common sense appeal could reach them. For those of you who know of which I speak, there is nothing to do but resist by whatever peaceful means are available. What can we do? Talk to people? Let our friends and family know how we feel about all of this? Get involved in planning for the mid-term elections? At the very least, don’t let weird anti-American comments go unchallenged, not at work, not in your neighborhood, not on Facebook. This whole thing is about to get out of hand. It’s close to spiraling down the drain out of control already. It’s past time to start trying to do something.  

Note to the Surveillance State: I’m sorry that most of my e-mails, Android chats and blog-posts are so dull. My browser history has not been scrubbed. It actually is that uninteresting. I do get carried away sometimes, but please believe me when I say that I have never counseled any actions that are violent or illegal. I am not a danger to myself or others, and I remain a loyal American citizen. I have never, to my knowledge, known or even spoken to anyone who wished to harm the interests of the United States or individual Americans.  In fact, the mere possibility of unintentional contact is remote in the extreme. So please don’t charge me under some new anti-dissent statute. If you want to stifle me, just let me know! I’ll stifle! 

A Future That We Can Live With

Ladies and Gentlemen of the United States, we need to start thinking about the future. Okay, sure, the global climate change thing is important, but the basic challenge that we urgently face right now is returning to some kind of normalcy in the realm of politics.

We’d all like to think that there is a future for American politics. A good future, I mean, a future in which we have climbed out of the hole that we are currently stuck in, a time when things are working more smoothly. You can’t just stumble along, not in life and not in politics. There needs to be a goal, that’s the “vision thing.”  But what might such a future even look like? And where is the door that we may pass through to get there? That last part might be the real stumbling block. We need to work out what kind of political future we want, but maybe seeing the future itself is easier than the process of getting there.

What about envisioning the desirable future in the first place? I have read that Mr. Nostradamus used an ancient technique to divine the future. It might work not only for seeing the actual future, but also for imaging a livable future. He carefully prepared a darkened room, hanging a large, angled mirror above eye level. Maybe he lit a feint candle; maybe there was a source of smoke. It is said that he would sit looking into the dark mirror, trying to detect the movement of the spheres. Depending on whom you ask, he had considerable success in the prediction business. Seeing where politics is leading us might be a good first step. I believe that what we saw would be so terrible that it would lead to desperate measures to avoid it.

Then there would be the getting there part. Moving forward in our present political and economic climate is going to be difficult. There are many important people today that will tell you that the system is working just fine, while even a blind donkey could see that it is not. These Champagne Charlies are raising hell and spreading ruin and insecurity, but they don’t care, because they themselves are making money.

The number of people raising hell and painting pretty pictures far outnumbers the precious few that may have a sincere wish to move America towards the good. There are probably more than a few, but it seems like only Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have the courage to stand up and speak out.

I read recently that the century between 1870 and 1970 saw the greatest advance in human living standards in all of history. I substantially agree with that assessment. Most Americans can look to their own family histories for evidence that it is true. The Industrial Revolution, unionization, the New Deal, and World War II brought Americans to a high state of prosperity and security. (Most Americans, anyway. All generalizations are, in a sense, lies.) The great part was that the prosperity and security were shared; all classes saw big upticks in living standards across the board. Maybe the century ending in the 1970s saw such progress because some of our leaders recognized that sharing as a priority. They created a strong middle class and raised the really, really poor by quite a measure as well. The rich were not apparently hurt in all of that raising up; in fact they got richer themselves. The decades since 1970 have also seen huge increases in productivity and prosperity, but all of the new prosperity has gone to the one percent, the very top class of wealthy families. Our leaders, beginning particularly around the election of Ronald Reagan and continuing to our own day, lost the vision and the will to share America’s prosperity and help people in general to lead more productive, secure lives. This is substantially true for both political parties. By now, it’s easy to see that the old prosperity has evaporated, and that the strong, secure middle class is a receding memory.

What went wrong? Now is the time on Sprockets when we make lists!

Was it the fiat money that was created in the 1960s? Workmen’s wages began to suffer immediately, and the rich started to pile it on. Was it the afore mentioned Ronald Reagan? He started the anti-Washington establishment crusade and the culture war against the poor, and he invented “trickle down” economics, which is still with us. (Not to mention all of this “personal responsibility” bullshit.) Was it Vietnam and Watergate? They certainly did hurt America’s self-confidence. Was it computers? They have allowed the financial sector to rush ahead at light speed with the process of making money from nothing. Did the John Birch Society just convince everyone that they were right? Their ideas sounded crazy to everyone in the 1960s, even to conservative politicians, but by now their ideas have become mainstream. It was something, that’s for sure.

Or maybe it was only a case of too much, too soon. Prosperity is a pendulum that swings, especially if people are not careful.  

I hope that someone is working on the problem that is our future. Working on the vision of the future that we wish for ourselves and working on a plan for getting there. Looking at the globe, however, I somehow doubt it. It’s not the fashion among today’s political elite. How many failed states are there in the world already? Huge swaths of land, which include many countries, seem to have gone spontaneously insane. The number of failed states grows by the year. 

The terrible truth of the matter is that this is happening at a time when mankind has all of the tools, and all of the money, that it would need to substantially solve every one of the world’s problems within a relatively short span of time. This could be done simply by exercising self-control and cooperating with each other. Greed, competition, revenge, corruption, religious exclusivity and war are certainly not the way to run a planet, but I don’t see anyone in authority proposing any different ways to proceed. Maybe they’ve given up.

And so, we Americans find ourselves in a country that, being in the northern hemisphere, is whirling rapidly clockwise down the drain of time. Will there be any lovely countries in the future at all? And, if so, will America be one of them? If current trends continue, I doubt if anyone will even find anything about America particularly interesting with a couple of hundred years. America may become just another failed experiment in the dustbin of history.

Although some may remember American music fondly.