The Great Unraveling/Rev III

BRT has waxed "poetic" about why America is in such dire trouble. From gross and inept malfeasance performed by W and Weapons of Mass Destruction to The Donald mishandling COVID-19 to the nth degree, this once great nation has been ravaged by the so-called owners of the country in ways boggling the mind and ... we haven't even discussed the bankrupting kleptocracy of the MIC or the acceleration of climate change, the existential gorilla threatening to end our sorry ass existence on planet earth. 

To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival.

Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

Read the rest of Wade Davis' excellent and detailed article as to why America is unraveling, a notion yours truly has been writing about for quite a long time.

Adding insult to injury comes from an insightful blurb from Australia titled We are witnessing the fall of a great power describing the rottenness of the US political system with passion and accuracy, a take yours truly concurs with without question. In reading both pieces, a connect to the French Revolution comes to mind due to the fact America cannot handle the truth of a flawed political system needing a complete reset if the nation is to survive as a viable entity as it moves further into the 21st century. 

Just how rotten is the United States' political system? The answer is rotten, as in it will only take a small kick for the whole edifice to fall in, let alone a big kick like COVID-19.

The idea is about as fanciful as the collapse of the Soviet empire seemed in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan famously demanded: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Yet, a short time later, a little chink in the Iron Curtain at the Hungary-Austria border saw the whole rotten regime collapse.

"Viewed from 2020, exactly 50 years since it was published, Amalrik's work has an eerie timeliness. He was concerned with how a great power handles multiple internal crises - the faltering of the institutions of domestic order, the craftiness of unmoored and venal politicians, the first tremors of systemic illegitimacy. He wanted to understand the dark logic of social dissolution and how discrete political choices sum up to apocalyptic outcomes."

Tragically, American exceptionalism - 'we are the first and best democracy on Earth' - contributes to the self-delusion of indestructibility. There is nothing automatically self-correcting in US democracy.

Just look at US foreign policy for the past 60+ years to see why this take rings true.