Mourning Has Broken 1

SITREP U.S.A.

Been thinking about this for quite a while. Been fighting it for 50 years now. Recently fell mostly silent after so many years of battle. What nobody wants to hear, but also what nobody will read because they haven’t the tools to listen or understand. So I write it here because I have to, for myself only.

Done. Finished. Caput. The United States is dead.

I had toyed with a beginning quote by Charles Dickens from his Tale of Two Cities about the French Revolution: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” After all, Trump is the best president in 30 years, the first in all that time to see his job as securing the well being of the United States first and foremost in a constantly dangerous and inimical world.

But that doesn’t make it the best of times when it’s truly the worst of times in American history.

Every level and every institution of society is broken, and there is no way to repair what is broken.

There’s an easy way to see it. Every notable accomplishment in every realm has been forgotten, no longer taught, nor the skills to see or appreciate anything in context. Our generations since the last half of the last century are eating machines. They’ve eaten everything, so that nothing provides comfort, familiarity or even a touchstone anymore. Ignorance and solipsism are predatory beasts. The foundations of everything have been ridiculed, misinterpreted, or simply ruled out of existence. The fuel, the power, behind this predation is illiteracy, innumeracy, and amorality.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t listen to old music anymore, see old movies anymore, or read old books anymore without hearing the jeering of the nearly three generations of people who are committed to rewriting, reconfiguring, and destroying every past value, including the moral framework that has driven the enormous progress of the last 2,000 years. Bach and Mozart are Christian junk, John Ford is American chauvinist junk, and the entire canon of English-language literature is white man junk. This is not simply a millennial phenomenon. We have spent a hundred years pretending that women have produced writing  works comparable to the works of Cynewulf, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Blake, Wilde, Dickens, Poe, Bierce, Twain, Eliot, Orwell, Waugh, and Thurber. They haven’t.

Case in point. I have a station I listen to by default in my car when I drive anymore. 102.9 WMGK in Philadelphia. Classic Rock Oldies, featuring many of the same bands I heard in my twenties, though their preference now is seventies and eighties rock and roll. Better than the news channel with the constant teletype and the talk shows with dummies getting into it with other dummies, but mostly a species of elevator music, irrelevant to the victim identity world we live in now. It sounds, well, quaint.

The contemporary music stations don’t have any music anymore.

When you don’t know anything, the past is junk, unworthy of any kind of attention. Why? Because you don’t know anything about it unless you’ve heard it to death like TV reruns from a time you never lived in. We’re that closed off. Which means we’re doomed.

Why a man as old as I am must ruefully accept that there is no lesson of history so indisputable that it can’t simply be flushed down the toilet and then repeated with exactly the same results it’s always had.

And nobody the wiser. While the half-educated poseurs defending irrefutable verities simply mount new arguments against ludicrously ancient mistakes, as if they needed to persuade rather than simply denounce and discipline the failures their audience represents.

Failures is the right word.

Let’s all be reasonable in an an age of utter unreason.

Not me.