It is the actual Ides of March today, actually, and according to lore, there is not a lot good that will come of it. The ancients were right. I wrote about the Ides of March and the assassination of Great Caesar the other day. It was intended to be a (cough)likemetaphor about the turmoil in Rome and us being sort of like an American version of the late Roman Republic.

There is already some amazing stuff coming from the campaign trail, and even more candidates than what the GOP fielded in the race to the 2016 election. Some of the policy initiatives, well intentioned or not, will fundamentally change the relations between Ruler and Ruled in this Grand republic.

But like I said, we have a lot to talk about on the road to the election next year and I have suspended panic about the primary antics.

I was prepared to catch up on Beto’s announcement for his candidacy for the Presidency. He is a pretty amazing guy. Better looking than RFK, and gesture manners that outstrip any recent Chief Executive. He is a handsome candidate. Kind of reminds me of rock-star AOC, except she at least has a platform, something of which Mr. O’Roark seems to be currently bereft.

Or purports to be. Did I mention he was charismatic?

Of course, that is what media phenom AOC does: she is a neat kid, good looking, good teeth and apparently a great dancer, from what I could see. She has a plan, a cool plan, that will save the planet in a dozen years and only make me re-wire the farmhouse and walk the four miles one-way to the Safeway and back. AOC may be delusional, but she is definitely sincere. I think.

I was talking to a real Russian yesterday who grew up in the old Soviet Union. She escaped while the Berlin Wall still stood, and is appalled by some of the bad Ideas of her past experience being recycled as something new.

Anyway, I keep the sound off on the television until the light comes up over the south pastures. It helps me ease into the stress of the day and the news jolts. Sure enough, the first thing that came up on the cable news was a banner- silenced at my request to the remote- that 49 people, including children, had been brutally murdered at a mosque in New Zealand.

The call to prayer, a ritual I respect as I do Sunday service, normally separates women and men for worship, so I had a horrible feeling the shooter- reportedly a blonde-haired white guy- had started his rampage on the Women’s Gallery.

Later in the morning, on the heels of an herbal tea and a shot of brandy, I found there was not only a manifesto from the murderer, but a second attack and additional conspirators were in custody. Also, a Go-Cam feed of the slaughter was streamed to social media. You understand how this all works- it took about fifteen minutes for someone to blame Mr. Trump for something that happened a very long way from Mar a Lago.

But in my experience, the first account of these things (we just saw two large ones) is almost always wrong, and tailored to a prevailing narrative.* If true, this is something we have been watching for. An actual, declared white supremacy group carrying out an act of brutal mass murder, supported by high-tech media and a live imagery feed from the shooter.

I watched in horror. This was the inverse reflection of what I did in service to Uncle Sam. One of the experiences I am never going to fully cauterize from memory is the evidence of one of these horrors, and then the workaday job of lethal military response.

Like a lot of folks, I just internalize the whole thing and go on with whatever it was I was doing. Age is great. I just don’t remember what I was doing.

But the slaughter in New Zealand caught me unaware as the bomb blast in Oklahoma City. It was sort of like the coverage from Paris a couple years ago when more than a hundred were mowed down by religious zealots.

It has been a while since there was a white supremacist mass murder. McVey is the poster boy for that, of course, and that deranged kid who shot up an African-American church group which had invited him in for fellowship. I think they have in common the idea that the John Brown approach to things is the way to go, with improved communications.

I could be wrong, but this seems a higher-tech information operation appended to brutal murder of innocents, like the mass shooting in Norway a couple years ago.

It appears that two great tides of history are colliding, just as some like Huntington have predicted. Only to be shouted down. I wonder where this will go from here?

Getting out of bed this morning, I thought Beto would be the big story. Instead, this feels a lot like the tumult of the 1930s in Europe only on a global scale. I hope I am wrong.

Copyright 2019 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

· Note: I do not recall when the specific term of art for bullshit changed from “narrative” to “meme” to “trope.” I am not smart enough to follow the changing definition for public communications and virtue-signaling, so as a helpful hint for the language challenged, remember all three terms refer to the original. Bullshit.