Don't worry. The image above of deluded maniacs attacking the capitol is horrifying, but chill we're fine. Take the long view for America.. In that reading this thing has just started. We've had several foundation wars in the 18th thru 20th centuries external, and internal.
We're only just coming to terms with our identities crimes virtues, and intentions. Our first empire period is over. Even at that it was accidental. Other opportunities even other manners of empire are ahead. The basic national mythology is generally set.
This usually is done in the first 200/300 years of any nation. We've just finished that. Jamestown 1609 to the Moon landings in 1960's. This a rough gage. An outline a sense of who we are.
China is a good example.
Think like a Chinese scholar. Given their histories of rising, and falling. From that point of view this show the American circus is just getting on the road. Like China the American culture is here to stay. Amazingly the world still wants to be like us. Or like what we were in the mid-20th century. Our brief Imperial era. That mythology is granite solid, and will remain so.
Myths particularly the American myth will live forever. ...like China's.
So don't weep because we're in a bad patch,...history is one long bad patch with a few parties tossed in. The American 20th century was one such party. I was there it was one for the ages!
Images such as that one are carefully selected to support a certain narrative, and others are suppressed to the same purpose. I don't believe the news at all any more these days. Censorship has gotten unbelievably heavy-handed lately, in the legacy media and on social media. Remember when the internet was hailed as a democratizing force, on the principle that "information wants to be free"? Jeff and Zuck and Jack have made a total joke of that one, proving it beyond any doubt to be utterly hollow and false. And if newscasters stopped lying, their paychecks would stop.
ReplyDeleteThose who lived through the world wars or Maoism or Stalinism probably thought the 20th century was a nightmare. But for those of us in the more fortunate parts of the world in the second half of the century - yeah, it was a humdinger. The 21st, by comparison, sucks mummified donkey dicks.
Z
Well I watched the Nazi insurrection live...it was what it was. If it was Black people torching the Capitol Building there would have been piles of Black dead all over D.C.
ReplyDeleteWe both know this.
It's what happens here. I'm old enough to remember tanks being used against us in the mid late 1960's. I saw them with my own eyes. I saw the National Guard guys too.
If they got orders they would have butchered us. ...it was in their faces. This is my truth. This lives with me still.
Yet I know that we are just blips in a much longer story a farther history. 11th century massacres' by assorted Chinese Imperial Sons of Heaven or current ethnic cleansings,...China is still here. We in some form larger or smaller will be here through history as well.
As for truth...this does not enter into history...never has.
The first thing they did to printing presses was to smash them up. That, and disappear the printers. This till they could control who printed what, and for who.
Rather like the heroes you mention using the 'Net for the usual concentrations of power.
Yeah the 20th was wet shit on a stick for 90+ percent of humanity. Basically business as usual for the species. The West in particular us Yanks even Black Yanks had it insanely swell.
I mean they even stopped lunching us after a while.
Though true they switched over to shooting us for having our license tags in the wrong spot or walking sitting sleeping cooking reading swimming shopping going to school etc...while un-white.
Despite that I had the Colored equivalent of a Leave it to Beaver Negro middle class kidhood. Full of building kit models going to the movies with pals getting our first color TV summer camp family shit. All that stuff you can see on YouTube re-issues of the 1960 Donna Reed Show,...Google it.
Sure my old age is impoverished.
That happens to everybody. It's the great leveler. Otherwise 1961 was fucking heaven. Worthy of all the myths that have, and are accreting up around it.
Btw...
This is why I'm glad ya back...loves yakking shit with ya comrade.