Editor’s Note: We are running a twin spin on current events this morning, featuring both existential threats and an appreciation of the natural world this morning. The Writer’s Section at Refuge Farm is unified in support of the approaches taken by our Shipmates Arrias and Marlow. The situation confronting us will take some honest, serious thought. And mitigation in our raucous laughter at the earnest folly of our species and the magnificence of our world.
– Vic

Author’s Note: I silently mused while watching PresBid’s Arte Johnson tricycle moment. He claimed bad toe clips.

Then this morning W and I woke quite early to drive out to Tybee Island to observe the pre-dawn planetary alignment across the eastern horizon.

We came home to see reports of another public mass shooting in our nation’s capital at a Juneteenth music concert. The attached piece resulted.

Sheesh.

– Marlow
As I see it

America’s republic might will fail when the foundation of its political
philosophy becomes fully in error with its central dogma becoming the transference of original sin from Man to society. It seems that both American political extremes are on this rosy-visioned course that by nature Man is good, and that he is only corrupted by a mal an incorrectly organized society.

Thus, they aim to destroy the offending social institutions, tinker with the machine a bit, et eh bien voila, we’ll have Utopia with natural Man back in all his goodness. So said Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Excuse me while I gag with laughter.

Sure, it’s a very attractive idea politically speaking and why politicians endlessly run on its resulting ideas/policies, but it simply isn’t true. They have had and still have the whole thing backwards. Society is corrupt because Man is corrupt — because he is weak, selfish, hypocritical, and greedy. He is not made this way by society — he is born this way — and, we can see it even in our youngest children. Parents, relatives, friends, neighbors, and teachers do some seriously heavy lifting in these things.

It’s no good trying to build a better society on false assumptions — to my mind, our main job as citizens is to keep Man from being at his worst and, thus, make life tolerable, for the greater number of people. Hence our republic as it was originally envisioned and established.

Try teaching that in public school.

Excuse me a second time while I try not to gag with laughter.

-Marlow

Postscript: As if overly superstitious, we seem mesmerized by some sort of mystical belief in our partnership with fate, a sense that we can only do so much, and that events must somehow complete our decisions. And, so it was during the plague until America’s drug companies bailed us out and we hope for the same during the following war with Russia, where, without confidence and full of apprehension, we cheerlessly and cluelessly pursue our manifest and exceptional destiny, unaware that fortune, which had so often smiled upon us, has now abandoned our cause just when we require miracles of her but not any steadfastness of purpose on our part.

Three years ago, the whole world was marching alongside of us. Today, a three headed monster of recession, looming unemployment and vast inflation also bears down on us while the whole of eastern Europe and China marches towards us and our soon to be chilled European allies.

We have escaped the worst of the plague and we hope for the same in Europe and east Asia as we slide along with our slo-mo surrender to greenishness and in congenial exile as prisoners of our island between two oceans and thousands of miles from our nearest former friends.

We write our electronic memoirs with a trans-Pacific steamer trunk sized portmanteau of notes, papers, maps and books overcrowding us as mice, some as big as rats, scurry around unnoticed and ignored.

We hurry to our task as our lives’ shutters continue creaking to close and the semi-darkness of our room is broken by bright slivers of moonlight.

Maybe we should rename the White House Malmaison in our retelling we sarcastically chuckle as we continue to lay out the facts of our decline? Nope.

Just the facts.

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