THis is basically a long rant about the demise of democracy. Noam Cho,sky weighs in ftom his new "home" at the University of Arizons. It's grim. Bring your grit.

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Democracy's in the Rearview Mirror on the Lost Highway

by John Kendall Hawkins

It's been said often, to the point where it is probably trite, Socrates died in vain trying to 'woke' people into making sense of their own democracy. They just didn't want to; they couldn't be bothered arguing over the fine points, when broad strokes of cudgeling and cajoling would do. People pestered by the Gadfly purportedly wanted to punch him in the face; they didn't give a sh*t if he was a Peloponnesian war vet and had shown his purple heart at the Battle of Delium. All his dialectics wanted to know was: Why do you believe what you believe? Can we get to the bottom of it? Accountability for mouthing off. Socrates knew that he knew nothing. But the plebs all around him were know-it-alls; they'd been filled with the wind of introjected hubris. Elites saw Socrates 'woking' the kids and whispered to each other, "f*ck him" (malaka). And they did.

Because we modernists are basically stupid, we look back at the Ancient Greek model of democracy as the Ideal that we inherited; the decorative night light up on the hill; the raison d'etre of our exceptionalism; the how-come of why we fly fighter jets over ball games during that bombastic anthem of ours. Human kine. Grass is always greener on the other side . Seven Year Itch as planned obsolescence (or ringworm). Ancient Greek Democracy was a failed democracy -- by Socratic standards. It was a road to Hemlock for thinkers and dissidents and counterpunchers of the regime. And everybody laughs at the Progressives!

Okay, so I'm releasing steam from my valve, like one of those old housing project radiators that would whistle shrilly and maybe bubble over a bit and it got so fuckin hot in the apartment that you had to open the window and let the snow blow in, if necessary, and while you had your head out there in the frigid air you'd yell out why have you forsaken me? And someone would call the Calvary cops. Releasing the pent-up. That's the way I felt the other day watching Noam Chomsky get interviewed by the academic head of his department at his new digs at the University of Arizona, where Chomsky presumably went in his old age to get some sun and release from stress after 66 years at MIT -- or because he needed to get away as quickly as possible from the Frank Gehry architecture they housed him in at the end of his career at MIT in a building that looked like someone had punched it in the fuckin mouf.

"MIT Building 32, a.k.a. Stata Center" by mava is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

It was like some 9/11 Truther had assigned his new office as payback for his 'indifference' to the Inside Job.

Whatever the reason is that Noam Chomsky moved to Arizona, if the YouTube interview I watched the other day from the desert is any indication, he's now slummin it. Probably for money. Doesn't mean he's a sell-out; just old; needs that sense of security. It was a move to Arizona -- or Florida. Right? I lived in Florida once. The whole time there was like that scene on the bus from Midnight Cowboy when all the rubberneck geezers are turned around and eyeballing Cowboy who's holding his dead buddy, Ratso, while the soundtrack themeplays the mouth harp blues.

The Q/A exchange from Wonder House was titled, "What does the future hold?" It was hosted by Lori Poloni-Staudinger, Dean in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) at the University of Arizona, where Chomsky has set up shop since 2017. I own that I'm a cynical olds gizz and thought the premise of the interview, embodied in that question, was about as stupid as it could get. Old Man River held his own though; he wasn't rattled by the question; he's always pointing out how important getting educated is and he knows that that requires patience if concept attainment is to ever be anything more than a house guest eating up all the onion dip to your consternation. Still, Lori asks:

So, our first question: Much has been in the news lately about shifting centers of world power, unipolar power, bipolar, multipolar. How do you think the future of the world is going to be shaped by the current crises that are rattling the system?

Presumptuous. Comfortable. Bourgeois. No problem. Noam points out the fuckin obvious:

There are two crises that will determine whether it's even worth talking about these issues. One of them is the growing threat of nuclear war. The other is the. Climate crisis, environmental crisis, which has to be dealt with in the next few years or else human society is essentially finished

What a gloomy prick. And here the U. of A. is trying to attract new applicants for a future. You can see why they sent troops in to get him and trophy-photoed him captured in the spider hole. The little reductive regime-changer was his own smoking mushroom cloud. One word: PNAC.

It went on like that. Crazy, simple questions from the dean. Noam collecting a pay check with his answers. He did answer questions about the polar bears. He said, in effect, the rest of the world wants multi-polarism; the US wants uni-polarism. The US hates Russia. The US was okay with China until they started doing capitalism better and began yapping about changing the world reserve dumpling. Yo no soy can do, said America, and slapped down economic sanctions so fuckin hard that for a moment you had Nam-like flashback to that domnoes game you witnessed years ago at the apple orchard after work when a picker from Kingston slammed down some boxcars and screamed Ras Klat! triumphantly at his mate from Montego Bay. America. does. not. f*ck. around. Chomsky tells her:

The raging issue is the war in Ukraine. The developing issue is the US conflict with China, which in the longer term is far more significant" China is, of course, a second major power in the world. It's growing, developing, it's pursuing its own course, developing loan and investment and development projects throughout Eurasia, reaching to Africa, Middle East, South Africa, South Asia, even to Latin America. It's now the major trading partner for Latin America. The US is determined to try to prevent Chinese economic development.

Now that's a powerful answer there. You know you've been answered. Socrates would have been wowed.

Lori follows with the next question: So what does governance look like in 50 to 100 years? Could multinationals be more powerful than elected or other types of governments? I sh*t my pants laughing. Instead of wasting the loamy loam, I pulled a pudge out and put it on my desk and grew a red rose out of it. (Poets can do that kind of thing.) Noam, on the other hand, decided to humor Lori:

Very extraordinary power in the domestic policy of the United States and other state capitalist countries. How are they going to act when they are told they cannot deal with one of their major markets? Take Apple Computer's biggest corporation in the world. One of their main markets is China. Are they going to agree to lose the China market? That's where if you have an iPhone, it's probably assembled in China under the direction of a Taiwanese corporation, Foxconn. That's the way the world system works. The US is now trying to break that. Us has helped establish that system, of course. Now it's trying to dismantle it. Nobody knows how that's going to work out. But those are the processes that are taking place right at this moment.

Did that answer her question about 50 years from now? I dunno. I was away. Taking a sh*t.

On and on it went though. The thing I noticed was that Noam mentioned nuclear war and climate change right off the bat in the interview. He usually includes democracy's demise, too. He didn't mention it. I worried. I drew conclusions on the wall, as Dylan would say. Got me thinking.

A couple years back I was reading the 7th edition of the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends: A More Contested World. Basically, the report said that democracy is already kaput. There isn't any out there; it's just mirrors and smoke, bread and circuses; Caligula clones feeding postmodern lapsing Christians to the lions of industry for a lark, folks holding up there iPhones with emoji thumbs down, saying, Please, Caligua, we've paid good money for spectacle. Less over the top, the report said,

During the past year, the Covid-19 pandemic has reminded the world of its fragility and demonstrated the inherent risks of high levels of interdependence. In coming years and decades, the world will face more intense and cascading global challenges ranging from disease to climate change from the disruptions of new technologies and financial crises.

Rolling pearl harbors, Batman! We seem to have taken to the theme. Our greatest gift to the Ukraine war campaign may be the "kamikaze" drones pouring into the "theater." We almost got Putin the other day with a drone. Terror! Terror! Terror! Well, he gets ousted next year in the Russian national election anyway.

There are five themes in the report: global challenges; fragmentation; disequilibrium; contestation; and, adaptation. It's grim. In the chapter Scenarios for 2040: Charting the Future Amid Uncertainty, we are offered thoughts ranging from "a Renaissance of Democracies" to "Tragedy and Mobilization." The spooks insist that the US will have to lead that rebirth of the Big D, but don't tell us how they take no responsibility for undermining its integrity around the world with neoliberal claptrap designed to enslave the masses in materialist death spirals. Still, I like the idea of a renaissance. It's sexy. But 2040? What, are you on drugs?

Another book I laughed my way through recently -- and reviewed -- was former NATO head James Stavrisis's novel, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. It's part of a nifty trilogy: 2054 and 2074 follow. Of the latter, Stavridid said, "Climate change comes home to roost." Laughable right? I don't know why he bothered with books two and three, as, a la the bestseller novel of the 60s, Fail Safe, two cosmopolitan cities are nuked, and if you think the sh*t hit the fan after Cheney/Halliburton did 9/11 (just kidding, don't have me killed). In Fail Safe it was Moscow and New York; in 2034 it's Shanghai and New York. Something about New York. Always the target. I don't know why Shanghai (as opposed to Beijing). When I think of Shanghai I think of the fortune cookie-sloganeering of Charlie Chan and his wisecracking first generation American number one son filled with the anxiety of figuring out what Being American means (like everybody else). It's a moveable feast, ontology. Also, I read somewhere that a former head of the FDA (Slaou, Operation Warp Speed) had operated a neuroscience lab in Shanghai and after I got over feeling queasy I thought of the babies cloned by a Chinese doctor who wanted to be a designer kid artiste-doctor, who "accidentally enhanced" the brains of the manipulants. And, of course, there's that expression: to get shanghaied. Ouch. Which freely associates at this moment to democracy. Democracy has been shanghaied.

No, really, the title of Stavridis's book says it all. They have a date set for our end. His book is full of cardboard and cliches and funny ha-has only military types would find amusing -- like sailing in the USS Michelle Obama, an aircraft carrier, during the pivotal, perhaps world-ending dispute between Chinese and Americans in the South China Sea off Taiwan. Funny reference, huh?

And people die in the book like they mean nothing: characters have arrested development; signs and omens abound (remember how they placed that black cat in Zero Dark Thirty just before the sheik blowed up the CIA?) and the sex remains depressingly casual, like a romance novel that's fallen under the new censorship regime at sensitive high schools, whose administrators feel that cupping a breast on page 34 is tantamount to inviting the reader to a casting couch, a gateway to Lolita. (I hear that the rewrite of To Kill a Mockingbird is going to skip the trial.) It's like critical thinking skills were the new lynch target; the Socrates theme again. And Wired magazine, which I've begun to suspect is an asset of the intelligence community (IC), ran the fuckin novel almost in its entirety, touting its end of the world thinking, as if eschatology were the new orange blacked and nine-eyed goat fur was the new fashion craze all the up-noses were wearing to the Fall Ball.

And because I can't seem to get enough of this stuff, I read an obscure General Mark Milley-commissioned Army report a couple of years back that was more telling than I wanted it to be about the likely future of America. It was titled, Implications of Climate Change for US Army(2019). Milley, who has been called a coup-maker and a coup-breaker and seems to hang on from administration to administration, once called the Chinese Army and told them not to be worried about getting bombed as Trump had implied with his recent rhetoric. Perhaps an act of treason. Technically. (It was reminiscent of Sy Hersh's accountof the last days of Nixon when folks were scrambling to keep the football away from the oft-besotted Tricky Dick who wanted to nukesomeone before he left office.)

The low-down is that the Milley Report has a clinically depressing forecast for the Army's ability to do much of anything about Climate Change, due to the intractability of the rigid structure of military bureaucracy, its vested interests, revolving doors, pounds and pounds of headlines still needing to be stapled to top generals's chests, as Dylan would say. The Report implies that the Army's critical mission(s) will continue to be sidetracked by rolling pearl harbors that will eventuate an end to democracy in America and a soft coup that begins with roadblocks and emergency deployments to fend off storms. Then those 450 million guns on the loose in America will find something to do. You'll see, mofo.

Still, I don't personally see that democracy will make a renaissance comeback like They Say by 2040. Because we, the people is daft. Why do we keep proudly voting for the lesser of two evils? Because we're daft. And assassination is out of fashion. Maybe if Robert Kennedy, Jr. gets elected we'll bring it back. 2023 is the 60th anniversary of the Dallas conspiracy theory. Someone has to stop him from talking about vaccines. BTW, what's with his voice, and can an empathetic AI text-to-voice app pave his way to the White House? Ich bin ein Babylon Berliner, sieg heil!

The other thing about Milley's Report, other than the bad news, is the implied Good News. The Report inexplicably drifts to what seems like irrelevancies after establishing that soon you could be shat at a roadblock for bustin' the curfew. Now, we're told that the good news about the Arctic's meltdown is that new oil fields will reveal themselves and fresh wars with the Chinese and Russians can be had.

And then in a brazen nod to the DARPA technologists all around us, the Milley Report offers up Appendix: Weather Control. Out of the blue, we gotta hear about how this is new area of conflict between us and the Chinese, who want to own the weather and how, like with getting ahead of the game on gain-of-function research (speedbaggin fuckin viruses til they sing their poetry to Mama), we, the people have to take to the skies and own the clouds and fix the ozone and block out the sun's rays and everything. The Appendix even crows about how "we" seeded vicious monsoons to wipe out the soft targets manning the rice paddies. Fuckin Ay, we screamed from helicopters. How do they put it? It's worth quoting their mentality at length:

Appendix: Weather Control

Weather control is a fascinating and worrying potential technology. If used with intentionally nefarious intent, its effects could be catastrophic. It is not exactly climate change in the sense that we define it here, but it brings many of the problems of climate change, with the prospect of these problems arising at the time and place of an adversary's choosing.

Naturally occurring terrestrial and space weather events constitute only one set of challenges to national security. The concept of weaponizing the natural environment is nothing new. Congressional testimony dating back to the early 1950s recommends approval of research and development funding for weather modification experimentation. This in response to concerns Russia was beating us in learning how to control the weather and the potential threat that posed to the United States.' The United States has already demonstrated the potential to modify the weather in support of combat operations through its efforts in Vietnam. United States' cloudseeding techniques used aircraft to disperse lead iodide into the atmosphere above portions of Southeast Asia to create a Super-saturated environment during the Vietnamese monsoon season. The increased precipitation produced significant degradation of Vietnamese logistic capabilities as vehicles, carts, and men remained bogged down on certain roadways and paths soaked by nearly continuous rainfall.

When a reporter asked LBJ why we were in Nam if we're certain to lose, he purportedly pulled down his zipper and pulled out his johnson and said, That's Why.No mention of democracy at all. Mao, reportedly, almost choked on a dumpling when he heard of this demonstration of chaos by the guy who replaced JFK in Washington.

And a while back I wrote a review of Astra Taylor's recent book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone. Catchy title, sums it up nicely. Basically, she opines that we, the people don't really have a functioning democracy. She splendidly attempts to bring in the Ancients by alluding to Solon's debt relief program for the masses, the cynic Diogenes telling Alexander the Great to get the f*ck out of the way of his view, and by pointing out the dearth of counterculture clowns, like we used to have, who could lay into the self-seriousness of our executive leaders and light 'em up with lampoon juice. (Abbie purportedly once gained entry into the White House, hair shorn for the occasion, to spike Nixon's punch with El Cid, but was caught before he could strike.) Taylor, the Occupy Wall Street veteran, wrote:

The history of democracy is one of oppression, exploitation, demagoguery, dispossession, domination, horror, and abuse. But it is also a history of cooperation, solidarity, deliberation, emancipation, justice, and empathy.

Then some citizen hollered through a megaphone: "Sit down. My turn to demogag." Democracy is indeed messy.

In his 'facilitated' discussion with the dean, Chomsky presses his dismay at the existential crises we, the people of America (and, by imposed extension, the world) refuse to face. He cites polls that suggest that, well, we're collectively daft. He addressed the need for educating people, and cites dread stats:

The Pew Research Institute, which comes out regularly with extensive studies of popular attitudes. The last one a couple of weeks ago gave people 21 choices and asked them to rank them in terms of urgency. Which ones do you think are the most important? Well, nuclear war was not even listed among the choices considered so remote from concern that we don't even ask people. It's only the most important issue that's ever arisen in human history. Do we need some education? You bet. Climate change was listed. Do you know where it was ranked? At the very bottom. 21st out of 21.

Well, I counted 23, but, yes, climate change is near the bottom and nukes are missing from the list.

Nuclear war used to be well up there during the Reagan years. But now that we're comfortably numb, as Dylan would say. Beware the dark side of the moon. Not all that glitters is gold. And only half of what you see. I recall another book I reviewed a couple of years back now, Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Specifically, in his Cuban Crisis chapters, he reveals that the Event was even edgier than we've been told. It might even be the One Time that the Big Guy Up There actually got off His Ass and pulled a deus ex machina on humanity's behalf, because Ellsberg wrote the missiles we worried about down there weren't the only things to worry about. As worriers and warriors moved toward an invasion of Cuba:

First" the number of Soviet troops'! in Cuba was not seven thousand, as we had at first supposed, or seventeen thousand, as the CIA estimated at the end of the crisis, but forty-two thousand. And second, that along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included. (Internet Archive)

Boom! had "we" invaded, says Ellsberg. Chomsky is right to be concerned, and we should be right there with our Socrates in questioning the Crazies in Charge and their plans. Democracy, huh?

Eventually, Noam does bring up democracy in his speaking duties with the dean. But it is only to show how lost it is. America has long been a two-party representative thing, but Chomsky doubts it's even a lesser-of-two evils thing anymore, having been totally undermined by the Republicans. He seriously confronts the notion that we currently operate under a real democracy. The dean wonders why we are seeing an upsurge in "anti-science" and "anti-intellectualism" these days. Chomsky blames Republicanism:

Well, there's a number of reasons. First of all, notice that it's party based. It's the Republican Party almost, almost totally for the last couple of decades. The Republican Party has just departed from normal parliamentary politics. It's not a normal political party anymore. Not [just] my opinion. Standard political science discussion. People like Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute describe the Republican Party in the last couple of decades as a radical insurgency that has abandoned parliamentary politics, and it's dedicated to running, trying to maintain power. However, it's done as a minority party by legislation, by other means. This is a real serious threat to the existence of a functioning democracy. Democracy's a pretty fragile plant and it barely functions anyway. You start tearing it out by the roots. It's not going to last long.

How would you tweak this? You get the feeling that Noam's about to go the hemlock route. But probably I'm just projecting.

Lori, means well, and closes with a rhetorical question for Noam: "Finally, do we have a future as a country, as a species, and as a planet?"

And that's a wrap.

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Authors Website: https://tantricdispositionmatrix.substack.com/

Authors Bio:

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.