Thanks a lot, Osama bin Laden

 When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday, his speech demonstrated just how far the United States has fallen since the attacks on September 11, 2001, tipped us over the brink of fear and paranoia.

The forces behind Trump include more than just voraciously greedy billionaires. The likes of Stephen Miller care much less for riches than they do for the perceived safety of a monoculture hiding in a fortress, surrounded by a huge buffer zone of vassal states that will keep the bad brown people from hurting them.

September 11 was an act of terror, and it worked. It's been a slow-acting poison. Some consequences manifested themselves immediately, like the Patriot Act and our involvement in Afghanistan. The Iraq war was another highlight. But even without those, the internal divisions stressed by the terror attack turned into fractures that have weakened the structure of the United States almost to collapse. All of this is the result of the jelly-kneed fear of people like Stephen Miller.

The bigots posture and talk tough, but it is motivated by the desire to obliterate threats in a way that can never be possible without the complete annihilation of humanity. Fearful people invoke the use of force.

Trump, the man voted back into office by fearful people, stood before the international body formed in the aftermath of World War II to promote peace, diplomacy, and respect for human rights, and mused about obliterating Iran, bragged about kidnapping the president of Venezuela, threatened Cuba, and openly championed the concept that large, powerful, heavily militarized nations have the right to stomp on the smaller nations around them. It was a disgusting repudiation of the high principles that our country has claimed to stand for. We used to at least pretend to be the good guys.

Greed drove the plantation economy of the South. Greed drove the Native American genocide of western expansion. The elites of the South fostered racism to control their labor costs. Years later, Nazi Germany studied the treatment of Black people in the American South to inform their own white supremacy. Next thing you know, we had to go over there and help kill the monster our own policies had helped to create.

Healthy fear is sensible. It makes you alert and cautious. But fear is a continuum. Your healthy caution can mutate into paranoia. The terror and rage that swept over the United States when our bubble of invulnerability was pierced by four hijacked jetliners has led to a man who absolutely personifies greed and fear standing before the UN General Assembly and dragging our country down to the level of loudmouth dictators that everyone hates.

The Republican Party is driven more by greed than fear as they support this man. Maybe they fear him as a political influence, though that influence is waning, but in the meantime the money is good. The party had prepared itself well for his rise. Now they can't seem to pull him down. Or maybe it's just that they won't. They put party over country decades ago. I hope they show proper appreciation to Osama bin Laden for really pushing their cause. Without him, their struggle would have taken decades longer and perhaps failed completely. 

On the other side, the Democrats needed an infection like Trump to demonstrate just how bad a bargain they made when they cozied up to corporate money. I understand that they had to play the game as the game was being played in order to score at all, but instead of biting the hand that fed them in a quick and decisive way, they wavered and let the hand get a firm grip on their leash.

Paint a big target on the USA

 The Trump regime is putting the United States in more danger than it has faced since it was a fledgling nation forged from a set of rebellious colonies. Certainly once we  achieved global power status as the 20th century dawned, an opposing nation might seek our capitulation, but not our obliteration. That held true until the Cold War. At that point, the line between victory and murder-suicide disappeared into mutually assured destruction. But that was unlikely because it was mutual.

The vestiges of mutually assured destruction will probably protect the United States from a direct assault. More likely, the nations we threaten with our psychotic aggression will try to keep a safe distance until the country collapses from within. On the other hand, the current dictatorial regime will strike as brutally as possible against its own dissidents while lashing out at external enemies in ways that might lead to strikes on our soil. The extent and speed of the global destruction depend on the insanity of the dictatorship and the loyalty of the military. In any case, things could start blowing up within our borders within the year.

If Iran faces obliteration, they have nothing to lose. While it is bad public relations to unleash a wave of terrorism through sleeper cells and sympathetic non-state actors, it is also emotionally satisfying. I would guess that a majority of other nations right now believe that the United States should be taken down a peg.

The global aggression displayed by the current US regime makes a better screenplay than a foreign policy enacted by well educated adults. Pop culture and mob psychology got them into power. Unlike previous Republican administrations, that used the rhetoric and imagery to excite their most loyal supporters and then governed with more maturity and cunning, the current crew really believes their bullshit. They're not playing chess. They're not playing checkers. They vary between shit-flinging simians and ten-year-old boys playing army.

The US military has followed the orders of their commander in chief, to put our whole nation at risk of years of retaliation. By turning us into a global menace, the regime has undone all of the good (such as it was) that the nation has done since World War II. Maybe they figure that most countries secretly or overtly hate us anyway, so why not stomp around and seize a bunch of assets? The orders were "lawful." They were also awful. That doesn't matter. Advisers can advise, but orders are orders. When an order is "lawful," refusal to comply is mutiny. The consequences are more severe. 

Following tradition, the law, and regulations, military leadership puts the ponderous might of the most powerful military forces on the globe at the service of  a regime displaying multiple delusions. The most dangerous one is that the United States is so powerful that it can take on the whole rest of the world and whup ass. By attempting to strongarm the rest of the world, we have invited anyone out there to take their best shot at the things we don't excel at, like unconventional warfare, and dispersed resistance techniques. The chaos will not take place in the background or at a distance anymore. It will proliferate to make daily routines unpredictably dangerous. None of this was ever necessary. Or was it?

A persistent myth seems to be that we once existed in some perfect form in this country. If you're a racist piece of shit, that perfect form might be slavery, or post-Reconstruction apartheid. But if you're a fully formed human being with a conscience and a broader imagination, you know that the perfect form, if any, lies in the future. A more perfect union is never perfected. As a fluid form, it must be channeled and maintained. Every generation chooses how it wants to be, based on the information available to it. That process now faces a turbulent future as the regime chosen by a slim majority of voters in 2024 makes the rest of the world seriously question whether they should just preemptively take us out. All that prevents them is the sure knowledge that we would incinerate the planet in our final frenzy. Isn't that a lovely way to be viewed in the world?

Deadly, self-centered attention whores

The shootings in Orlando are just the latest act by deadly, self-centered attention whores who want to end their lives in spectacular murder-suicide. They probably won't be the last. Murderous suicide is an increasingly common emotional disorder with deep roots in the human psyche.

This latest performer has done a great service to the Stanford rapist, Brock Turner, by pushing him out of the internet's spotlight of shame. The sole imperative of the attention whore is to get attention, to the detriment of whatever else might still deserve consideration and detailed, careful discussion.

The attention whore is irrational. The motives of the attention whore are also irrational. This is particularly conspicuous now, when atrocities are committed by home hobbyists claiming cosmic motives of religious devotion. They are condoned by the manipulators of such passions, who themselves see only a new way to operate a global power play. Religious militancy is nothing new at all, but using it through widespread media and communication to launch attacks here, there, and everywhere is up-to-the-minute use of technology. No need to gather troops and transport them to a battlefield. Just broadcast suggestions and let the volunteers create the killing ground at any convenient location.

Attention whores never realize that they are pathetic. They have no shame, because they are the innocent, the aggrieved, the brave martyr. It's a seductive role. Never worry about old age, retirement, sickness, a bad credit rating, a failing marriage, or any other stressor in modern life. You're going to die anyway. Why not go out in a blaze of glory? Strike a blow for something noble, best expressed by slaughtering defenseless people in an undefended environment. If you have properly dehumanized them before you start, the rest is truly easy.

Brussels, the latest insanity

The stated motive behind the current generation of terrorists is to institute their own authoritarian state, an Islamic theocracy. However, if they succeed, they will have to govern a populace that now accepts suicidal terrorism as a proven method of driving social change. Very much like the Republican party now facing the ultimate blowback from its own deal with the devil.

The knowledge of our own inevitable mortality has bred some bizarre coping mechanisms. Explosively rushing off to your "eternal life" is just about the worst.

The uselessness of mockery

What self-dramatizing murderers did to the staff of Charlie Hebdo was completely reprehensible. But it illustrates the limitations of satire as a tool of persuasion.

Terrorist gunmen opened fire on a room full of unarmed people in retaliation for cartoons the killers deemed offensive. People who will do such things are a direct result of the human belief that killing and dying are glorious and admirable ways to express the highest devotion to the best ideals. It's a perversion of the concept of genuine sacrifice. But lots of people are fooled by fakes. The belief is real. The death is real. Does it matter if the logic is flawed? If it FEELS like a blaze of glory to them you'll never convince them that it is really the explosion of a flaming asshole.

People who have no sense of humor cause most of the problems in the world. They are also frequently laughable. The more seriously they take themselves, the more they invite ridicule. They create their own hell by trying to demand respect. But how many people will give up a heartfelt belief because someone made fun of them?

Terrorism takes many forms. Almost none of them are true combat. The targets are undefended, for the most part. Terrorism is part performance art, part temper tantrum.

We used to laugh at the idiot who gets stuck holding the bomb when it goes off. No one wanted to be that idiot. Now it's a career path.

People who like to kill other people will not give it up because someone drew an insulting picture of them or got a roomful of people to laugh at jokes about them. They will seethe and simmer and stir up a bunch of similarly nasty people to inflict pain and damage to show how tough they are. How tough are they if they can't take a joke? It doesn't matter: they're armed and dangerous and totally into it.

Well-expressed ridicule of asinine ideas may help divert uncommitted people from them. And it's addictive. But it has to be a gateway to serious discussion. Continual mockery without mercy ends up feeding the problem more than fighting it, pretty much no matter what the problem is.

That being said, we need intelligent satirists making humorous critical observations. We need to be able to laugh at people in power to remind the people in power to laugh at themselves. We need to be able to laugh at them so we don't do something worse. We're better off with people who beat a joke to death than with people who beat other people to death. But the people who measure worth in terms of killing and dying are a tough audience, a stone cold room where you don't want to bomb, because they'll bomb you back.

You may say it takes courage to stand up to such people, and that it needs to be done. Unfortunately, the kind of people who shot up Charlie Hebdo are psychopaths who are completely unimpressed with philosophical arguments and noble gestures. Homicidally self-righteous people aren't just bullies to face down. And the bigger players who manipulate the actual perpetrators don't care about world opinion either. They're convinced they have a winning strategy. It certainly is a formidable one. They're using psychological handles that go back many thousands of years, to the dawn of consciousness and the first awareness that each and every one of us dies. Rather than find in this knowledge a sense of unity with all life, the manipulators have always seen a way to gain power by exploiting people's fear.

The cartoons and commentaries might give some of us a moment of relief from the craziness. We who are capable of laughing share a few as we shake our heads and go, "that's so true!" For a moment it seems like a universal truth.

The one universal truth is that someone will always disagree. When you discover another one, let me know.