Diatribes of Jay: The <i>Real</i> Game of Thrones

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

As our species moves into its Third Millennium after Christ, two things about us stand out. First, we are driving our Planet Earth into a different climate regime from the one under which we evolved.

We have no idea now how far the runaway cart of climate change will careen down the hill before it comes to rest. All we know is that, when the Earth’s oil and gas at last run out, sometime in the lifetimes of children born this year, those of us who survive will be living in a hotter, wetter climate. Our species will have far less land area and far more deserts, will suffer far more violent and dangerous weather, and will have a much tougher time raising children, livestock and crops than we do now.

The second salient thing about us is how fast our current hegemonic empire, the United States of America, is declining. Its current rate of decay makes the decline and fall of ancient Rome seem slow-motion by comparison.

Right now, at present, the US is an empire, not a democracy. More precisely, it’s an oligarchy. A thorough 2014 study of 1,779 public-policy issues—things like health care, college financing, Social Security, background checks for gun purchases, and progressive taxation—showed the vast majority coming out the way the business and political elite wanted, not the people.

The 1% do indeed rule us Americans. Elections and democratic forms have become a charade. The oligarchs tolerate Trump, despite all his meanness, incompetence and craziness, because he gave them and their corporations a huge tax-relief windfall and he tends not to get in their way. Ever direct and irreverent, the BBC declared in its headline, “Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy.” That about sums it up.

Our own American slide into oligarchy is part of a worldwide trend toward corporate and away from government rule. Perhaps the greatest avatar of this trend is Facebook. A single man, Mark Zuckerberg, with absolute control over a single corporation he created, has brought down the world’s once-strongest democracy, exploited but nearly unaided. Not only that: he has hastened, if not precipitated, a worldwide trend away from democracy and back toward empire. From Russia to Turkey, Egypt, Brazil and beyond, strong men owe their regimes and their extraordinary power in part to the dominant social medium that Zuckerberg created.

It doesn’t matter that Zuckerberg never intended to do all this. He did it nevertheless. He did it by negligence and inadvertence, by being heedless of unintended consequences, on his way to acquiring great wealth and power for their own sake. His early motto was “move fast and break things.” Centuries hence, those words will ring like Marie Antoinette’s advice to let starving French peasants “eat cake.”

So a single man has changed the face of global politics and the most powerful nation on Earth, almost beyond recognition. He did so before his 35th birthday, while still too young to be elected president.That’s an oligarch!

Zuckerberg’s late fellow oligarch Steve Jobs, followed by Tim Cook, gave Zuckerberg the physical means for his extraordinary power: easy-to-use computers and little mobile devices to distract attention from society and real life with shiny irrelevancies and seductive lies. And if that weren’t enough, another oligarch, Jeff Bezos, added to the destruction of rural and small-town America by crushing the futures of the innumerable retail outlets that once let unskilled and uneducated people earn a pleasant, decent and respectable middle-class living.

Don’t get me wrong. I respect and admire Bezos as much as always. He’s my favorite benevolent oligarch. Without his purchase of the Washington Post—and his fierce protection of its independence—we Americans might have to depend on the New York Times’ inconsistency for real news.

I do more than half my shopping on Amazon, and I love its speed, efficiency and fair dealing. But that’s precisely the point. If everybody shops like me, what will happen to all those huge shopping malls and every main-street store in America?

Are they all going the way of the last century’s American manufacturing and family farms? Analysts now predict a retail apocalypse, in which as many as 75,000 stores could die by 2026. Will we have the same country when all the folk who now own their own little stores work inside Amazon warehouses?

The problem is not so much that this is happening. Maybe, in the end, it’s all for the best. The problem is that one man and his company are making it happen, with the enthusiastic acquiescence of millions and the utter ignorance of those who are supposed to be governing us. No one else, whether in government or the oligarchy, has any control over the consequences. We the people are but helpless bystanders, watching the train wreck and not even sure whether we stand at a safe distance. That’s what oligarchy means in practice.

Donald Trump is more a symptom than a cause. He’s our own empire’s Nero and Caligula, rolled into one man. But he follows a succession of colorful, disastrous men who led us downhill. They included: (1) an aging, grade-B actor with enormous charm and limited intellect, who taught us to be selfish and brought Alzheimer’s right into the White House, (2) an unknown from Arkansas of abysmal character, who won elections by being the first Democrat to accommodate the oligarchy and so helped cause the Crash of 2008, and (3) perhaps the stupidest man ever to occupy the White House, who brought us two unnecessary wars and let the oligarchy further entrench itself.

So it’s no coincidence that today’s most popular American TV show depicts a ceaseless, pointless, nihilistic struggle for power among families. For that’s precisely what our politics has become: a ceaseless struggle for power among lackeys of the oligarchs and those few pols who can dimly perceive, through the fog of their own ambition, what our Founders called “a more perfect union” and the “general welfare.”

Precious few pols today understand that we are all collectively wealthier and more powerful when the least of us is as wealthy and powerful as he or she can be. Christ knew that truth two millennia ago. But our oligarchs and their lackeys have forgotten it in their headlong rush to fame, fortune and power.

It was not ever thus. Three-quarters of a century ago, our myth-makers were mostly Jewish refugees from dismal empires in Europe, including the Nazis’. They painted American life and society in optimistic terms. There were hardships and evil, yes, but there was always hope. A fair deal, substantial justice, and a path to a better life were always just around the corner.

Now that optimistic art has given way to the bloody Game of Thrones, in which dominance of one clan by another is the only point. The show well reflects the power game that American society and politics have become. Art mimics life.

Fortunately, the real means of dominance are not (yet) so bloody as in the “Red Wedding.” They include: our grossly skewed Senate and Electoral College, our bought and sold Congress, which has abdicated its warmaking and much of its budgetary authority, and our stacked Supreme Court, rigged to support the oligarchy’s ideology.

These rigged institutions preside over a game of gerrymandering, vote suppression, and disguised political manipulation every bit as consequential as the TV series’ blood and gore. Its consequences include: bloody foreign wars that produce no benefit and seem never to end, thousands suffering and dying from illness and injury that medical science could cure, immigrants living in semi-slavery in deportation limbo, doing horrible jobs that citizens won’t, innumerable cases of racial and environmental injustice, and epidemics of suicides and opioid overdoses. For the first time in American history, our oligarchical empire has given us a declining average longevity.

So as the bloody fiction about personal power winds down its final season, it raises questions far beyond the realm of entertainment. Will our real game of thrones end, too? Will we Americans ever convert our empire back to democracy and/or to greatness, or will we continue to slide down the same chute as ancient Rome, beginning with Caesar and Pompey?

From the distance of two millennia, it’s hard to tell what kind of men those two really were. Maybe two millennia ahead, the fog of political war and Fox’ carefully preserved drivel will lead future historians think that Trump, like Caesar, was a talented but misguided ruler. Yet few will likely believe he was any more democratic or benevolent.

Of the two great challenges of our age—global warming and America’s decline—America’s agony is the more immediate. Global warming will take most of a lifetime to decimate our species. The decline of American democracy could reach a decisive phase in only six years.

In that little time, Trump could systematically drive all the good from government and replace them with lackeys or worse. Children could forget, or never learn, what America was like as a real democracy. And a citizenship question on our census form could further skew the distribution of political power from our cities and universities into the outback, setting the stage for a possible second civil war that the outback, again, could only lose.

That would be a spectacular game of thrones, wouldn’t it?

Things needn’t go so far. The real game of thrones could end next year, just after the show. But ending it will require extraordinary public attention to the election coming up.

The task is not merely retiring Trump. That’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition for jump starting the restoration of American democracy. We also need a president with a plan. That will be the subject of my next essay.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

For a discussion of the waste of energy and fossil fuels caused by unneeded long-range batteries in electric cars, click here.
For a discussion why Democrats should embrace the long campaign season and make no premature moves, click here.
For a discussion how Trump and Brexit have put the tree world into free fall, click here.
For a review of how our own American acts help create our president’s claimed “invasion” of Central American migrants, click here.
For a review of basic facts that must inform any type of universal health insurance, click here.
For a discussion of how the West’s fall and China’s rise affect the chances of our species’ survival, click here.
For a discussion of what the Mueller Report is and how its release could affect American politics, click here.
For a note on the Mueller Report as the beginning of a process, click here.
For comment on the special candidacies of Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, click here.
For reasons why the twin 737 Max 8 disasters should inspire skepticism and caution with regard to potentially lethal uses of software and AI, click here.
For my message to Southwest Airlines on grounding the 737 Maxes, click here.
For an example of even the New York Times spewing propaganda, click here.
For means by which high-school teachers could help save American democracy, click here.
For a modern team of rivals that might comprise a dream Cabinet in 2021, click here.
For an analysis of the global decline of rules-based civilization, click here. For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.
For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here. For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here. For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here.
For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here.
For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here.
For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights?
For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here.
For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here.
For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Diatribes of Jay

26 April 2019

The Real Game of Thrones

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