Earth Day At 50: Mid-Life Crisis. Collapse Accelerating, Democracy Broken

Everything Is Broken, The Game Is Rigged, And Everybody Knows

Rebellion Is The Only Solution

[Update: 4/26/20: even liberals at The Atlantic know:

• We Are Living in a Failed State ~~~ end update]

Yes, everybody knows, even Princeton professors:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. ~~~ Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014)

And here’s another Princeton man: (Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism):

Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive — and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a “managed democracy” where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls.

If there is perhaps one positive thing to come of the coronavirus catastrophe, it’s that we don’t have to suffer all the Earth Day hype and bullshit this year.

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour’s getting late. ~~~ Jimi Hendrix

And there’s nothing worse, at this point in time, than a naive faux innocence (e.g. see Chris Hedges’ most recent book  (YouTube – watch “America: The Farewell Tour”):

I don’t share this country’s mania for hope. I think it’s very dangerous. (Listen to Hedges on WGBH interview)

Writer James Baldwin was perhaps the most compelling truth teller about the sham of American innocence.

[Update – 5/29/20 – Just found a perfect Baldwin quote in this Counterpunch piece:

…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. ~~~ end update]

In his classic book “The Irony of American History”, philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr explores the folly and tragedy of a demented US innocence.

More recently, the climate catastrophe – and what scientists say could mean the collapse of civilization and extinction of the human species – has spawned an explosion of literature about the dangers of illusion, false hope, naiveté, and faux innocence.

But remarkably, there are some in journalistic and political circles who still don’t get it – who desperately cling to and embrace the illusions, myths, lies, and magical thinking.

Has Donald Trump finally shattered our illusions, so that we can see clearly the forces—economic, political and technological—that are plunging the planet toward a man-made heat death? Is he, in fact, a kind of clarifying agent for the real state of things?

One can hope so.

Except one mustn’t hope.

As Kafka, the High Priest of Realism, admonished his readers, “There is hope. But not for us.”

Hope is an illusion, an opiate, an Oxycontin for the masses. Instead of hope, we need a heavy dose of realism. A realism as chilling as reality itself.

Case in point: today’s NJ Spotlight pretend muted celebration of Earth Day and lecture on democracy and government. For cluelessness, check this out – a criticism of which I hardly know where to begin:

The answer in a democracy is with clear, fact-based, courageous leadership that is willing to take on this difficult task of informing citizens of their available options in forming public policy that is in the public interest. Not always an easy job since it may entail taking on the status quo. And not for the faint-hearted.

An essential component is getting citizens engaged and informed. Engaged, because this is the way our system is supposed to work, with participatory democracy. The system does not work unless we all work at making it work. Informed, because you can’t fix a problem if you don’t understand the problem. Worse yet is if you don’t even know there is a problem.

Howard Zinn pretty much destroyed the myth of “courageous leadership” and top down approaches, by showing that social change is the product of movements and change comes from the bottom up – that “leaders” are educated by and follow the people.

The aforementioned Princeton professors destroyed the myths of participatory democracy and public policy in the public interest.

Covid-19 has exposed the rot of the rest of it.

But, we’ll let the artists take the rest of the critique from here:

Broken lines, broken strings,
Broken threads, broken springs,
Broken idols, broken heads,
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain’t no use jiving
Ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken. ~~~ Bob Dylan

Leonard Cohen got it right – and everybody knows:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows. […]

And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it’s moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past. ~~~ Leonard Cohen

Yes, the truth is bleak indeed: