recalcitrant america

In spite of their efficiency and dedication to order they were unable to keep up with the clean disposal of the bodies. When I was a child I saw in a documentary what remained to be taken care of by the liberating forces. Bulldozers had to be employed to move the haphazard piles of stiffened, shrunken corpses. The horror of those images would henceforth be with me, asking, if this is man? (Primo Levi).  As W. G. Sebald (German author and academic) wrote, 'no serious person ever thinks about anything else.' Sebald was shown images of the Holocaust while at school in Obertsdorf and recalled that no one knew how to explain what they had just seen.

To allow the darkness, that is within each of us, to be off leash. To elect a leader who believes in his own hero fantasy, himself the crusader who liberates those who are willing and able from the restraints put upon them by those who believe that the means matters just as much the ends. This can lead only to utter destruction. 

Those who are like weathervanes and turn with whatever is current are spruiking this sickness as a new world order. But it isn't new. History is full of men becoming carried away with themselves and upsetting the orderly lives of the subjugated. Perhaps they call themselves pragmatists. Like those who are deeply embedded in the capitalism that largely succeeded in infiltrating the tenets of corporatism into everyday life and culture. So that now it seems that everything needs to be handed over to those who already have. Everything must become exclusive. Excluding as many people as possible so that the few can have more.

Hegel (German philosopher and theologian (1770–1831)) had argued that history has a telos or goal – an end point – equivalent to the emergence of a perfectly rational and just state. That state would guarantee the liberty necessary for the full development of all human capacities. At the same time, it would exist in a state of perpetual peace with other – similarly configured – states. 

In February 2022 Russia's invasion of Ukraine plummeted humanity back into a dark age. In November 2024 Americans voted to make Donald Trump president deepening the rift with destiny. 

 

Untouchable

Some say that President Trump does not have an ideology. He does — Might is Right — or Trumpism.

Some men get this thing happening to them; they crave absolute power. Some have to limit their foray to tyranny within the domestic sphere. Others are given licence to enact it in the workplace or they create a business empire. A few get to land a Presidency and with no respect for law or constitution or national borders seek to make the whole world over into their own image. That is Trumpism.

It takes whatever it wants, regardless of others. If there is resistance, it threatens and bullies. It lies about everything. It is constantly engaged in self-promotion. It does not tolerate anything that is not to its own liking.

Some scramble to position themselves to take advantage of this disordered situation; others spruik it as a new world order and try to go with the flow. Others are outraged and keep pointing out every wrongdoing, to no avail. Because 'Might is Right' doesn't listen and doesn't care.

The power was handed over. Can wait for it to self-destruct but there will be a lot of casualties. Can ignore it and try to get on with life. But it will reach out and smother everything that is good. Can divert attention to creating and living within the world that is untouched by venality, in which the quest for truth is honoured and the guiding principle is to revere life in all its forms, living in peace and freedom.            

Mammon America

Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1918, 'Charles Birch started out as an agricultural scientist, switched to biology and ecology and soon confronted questions that were to occupy him for the rest of his life: where humankind was really going, preoccupied as it was with its its eternal conflicts and relentless pursuit of wealth. The world could not sustain this forever and he believed progress could only be made when spiritual values were married to the empirical world he probed as a scientist.' The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 December, 2009.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/a-man-of-science-and-religion-20091222-lbpx.html 

In 1976, Charles Birch said, 'Lip service is given to noble ideals, but in fact what is mainly served is mammon.' So it is in America, where the words 'In God We Trust' inscribed on the coinage struck President Teddy Roosevelt as a vulgar mingling of God and Mammon. (Mammon derives from the Aramaic for riches and is a personification of riches as an evil spirit or deity.) Roosevelt 'ordered the phrase removed from newly designed gold coins in 1907. A public outcry forced Congress to backtrack.'

While there have been numerous concerns that the reference to God should be removed in the interest of preserving the separation between church and state, in 1983 retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, wrote that 'slogans such as "In God We Trust" have "lost any true religious significance." '

And besides, it is very clear that the God that America trusts in is Money.  

TIME, How 'In God We Trust' Got on the Currency in the First Place

https://time.com/4179685/in-god-we-trust-currency-history/

Donald Trump Jr signed on at the investment firm, 1789 Capital in November 2024. The idea for 1789 (named after the year the Bill of Rights was introduced) came from a 2022 Palm Beach gathering of the Rockbridge Network, the secretive group of wealthy technology executives and allies that has become a major force within the Republican Party's donor class. They were discussing government overreach and how to use the financial industry to 'preserve freedom' — certain that they represented the silent majority. 

Trump Jr's role in 1789 has been as a MAGA magnet sourcing deals and investments for the firm from among America First bona fides. 

One recent investment being in the Enhanced Games, a start-up looking to host an Olympic-style competition in which athletes are allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs.

Trump Jr says that the firm 'genuinely believe(s) in the parallel economy.' Omeed Malik, one of the founders, happy to invest in weapons, e.g. GrabAGun, an online firearms dealer, and fossil fuel-related companies,  likens the potential of MAGA-style investing to the boom in environmental, social and governance of the 'woke' liberal agenda, derided as threatening to American capitalism.

There are other firms also engaged in getting into MAGA business, backing companies that 'support the national interest'. 8VC, the firm of Joe Lonsdale, Silicon Valley investor, Trump supporter and friend of Musk, states on its website that American ideals 'are worth striving for'.

 

But do ideals exist anymore in America? 

 

Trump Jr's plan to monetise MAGA, Gillian Tan, Katherine Burton, Bloomberg.

https://edition.theage.com.au/shortcode/THE965/edition/9cb07dad-e5d8-ddfa-4f18-5a7258fec962?page=dd062922-7fcd-e197-b4db-3d0be893c2aa

JD Vance’s cousin who served in Ukraine speaks out

A call for a 'moral imagination'

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000009999341/georgia-factory-trump-doge-usaid.html?smid=url-share

The Speech Everyone’s Talking About – David Brooks at ARC 2025

The evidence is in Trump is an agent of Putin

 https://omny.fm/shows/please-explain-1/the-evidence-is-in-trump-is-an-agent-of-putin

Power is Control of the Story

He is like a mad king buffeted by the winds of chaos breathing bombast and casting blame, believing his own delirious fantasies, railing at the world to relieve itself of its pitiful love of order and decency, goodwill, honour, and adherence to facts. His followers crowd around, applauding and cheering at every stumble and reversal, in this upside down world. The intelligent and the good stand by silenced by the roar of madness that defies reason and rationality. He believes that this is power but real power does not deal with destruction, it creates.

He presents no vision for the future, except empty, simplistic words. It's going to be beautiful he says, such as has never been seen before, we are going to have money pouring in ... And the rest of the world stands by abandoned by a nation that once was great, trying to take seriously, and deal respectfully, where there is only delusion and bullying overbearing ignorance. 

He is wedded to untruth, and deeply anti-social.

Trying to enter this world to appease it, will exhaust you.

Believe his story, and you must abandon your own sanity.

The most powerful story is the truth, based on facts as best we can ascertain them. We live with uncertainty, what we know is so scant compared to what we don't know. We need to live with the humility of this, to be grounded in this.

 

 

Führer

'Trump has long shown an interest in deploying U.S. troops domestically for demonstrations of force, whether to deter migration or to crack down on civil protests.' The Washington Post, 1 March 2025, 'Pentagon orders up to 3,000 troops and Stryker combat vehicles to border'.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/03/01/hegseth-border-troops-mexico-stryker/

'In moods and mentalities, it seems, Volk and Führer partook of the same troubled Danubian brew. On the one hand, the people with their peculiar 'despair of politics' (as Trevor-Roper has put it), their wallowing in petulance and perversity, what Haffner calls their 'resentful dimness' and their 'heated readiness to hate', their refusal of moderation and, in adversity, of all consolation, their ethos of zero-sum (all or nothing, of Sein oder Nichstein), and their embrace of the irrational and hysterical. And on the other hand the leader, who indulged these tendencies on the stage of global politics'. Martin Amis, 2014, The Zone of Interest, Jonathon Cape, London. (Acknowledgments and Afterword: 'That Which Happened')

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003) British historian, author of The Last Days of Hitler.

Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999) German journalist, author of Defying Hitler: A Memoir published posthumously when the manuscript was found by his son Oliver Pretzel. The memoir records the German mentality of victory during his childhood which was followed by defeat, hyperinflation, disenfranchisement of the poor and elderly and the slow rise to power of Hitler in a nation that had no real leadership to oppose him even though most Germans were repulsed by him. In his book The Meaning of Hitler, according to Alan Bullock, in the New York Review of Books, his main argument is that Hitler was one of few people who had a major impact on the world: 'Without him there would have been no partition of Germany and Europe; no Americans or Russians in Berlin; no State of Israel; nothing like so rapid a decolonialization of Asia and Africa, or so quick a reduction of European pre-eminence. But all this was exactly the opposite of what Hitler hoped to achieve.'

And thus the lessons of history forgotten, a loud and unforgiving ugliness appears again.

'Trump seeks to fast-track deportations of hundreds of thousands' The Washington Post, 1 March, 2025. 'The use of expedited removal at the border for recent arrivals has resulted in countless errors, but expanding a system that lacks due process to longtime residents in the interior of the country is problematic at a whole other level,” said American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Lee Gelernt, who in January filed a lawsuit on behalf of immigrant advocates seeking to stop Trump from using expedited removal in the U.S. interior.  Providing due process is built into the fabric of our country but is step by step being eliminated by this administration'.

In a future broken America, children will ask parents and grandparents, 'How was Trumpism possible?' and 'Why didn't you stop them?'"