I have watched political and social
changes all my life starting with the ‘lone gunman’ assassination
of President Kennedy in 1963.
Informally
for most of it. More attentively over the past twenty years. With
critical interest lately.
The
futile, ‘Yankee Go Home!’ sentiments of post WWII countries
living under the boot of the benevolent hegemon have given way to the
orchestrated reorganization of the Global South into a world entity
based on a new kind of power, new to us at least: Cooperation instead
of Empire. The so-called multi-polar world. But it has not yet
tipped, there has been no fall of Rome event to cast the crumbling
empire into the gutters and make way for the ascendancy of the next.
Whether it lives up to its noble ambitions or not can never be
certain. Not until the new world becomes the current world and the
current world becomes irrelevant to all but thoughtful historians and
late night trivia. As Victor Chernomyrdin said of the tumultuous
times in 1990’s Russia, the crazy nineties, “We wanted the best,
but it turned out as always.” Revolutions, reorganizations, and
rendezvous with destiny turn out like that, as always.
For
the time being the Uni-Polar world stands.
My
fear is that a revolution will change the world once all the
conditions have clicked into place. My terror is what comes next.
Most revolutions are followed by counter revolutions, local
uprisings, secessions and civil wars, war lords and drug lords
morphing into barons and Mafia dons, and eventually into ‘legitimate’
statesmen and patricians-the doge of Venice was once a common
pickpocket, or another age of terror. Even free, City on a Hill,
America had her Shay’s and Whiskey Rebellions, brutally put down by
her Cincinnatus-esque father, Geo. Washington, while bankers bought
up ‘worthless’ Continental dollars from local farmers in
Tennessee and Kentucky that the Federal government, at the
instigation of Alexander Hamilton, had agreed to honor, unbeknownst
to them. And nobody was about the tell them that their money was
actually worth something. Money gathers money. The one percent wear
many cloaks, all with pockets. Examples from other times and terrors
are legion. As Baron Rothschild is alleged to have said, "The best
time to make money is when there is blood in the streets."
There
are exceptions, of course. The constitutional conventions. Bismark
and the Second Reich. Franklin and the Articles of Confederation.
Dekanawida
and The Iroquois Great Law of Peace, which influenced Franklin at the
constitutional convention 200 years later. Plato’s Republic.
Confucius’ Divine Rule. Even Machievelli’s “The Prince” was a
stab at writing a republic into existence. But the
rallying cry for most revolutions is, “Here it comes again, just
like never before!” And then they proceed ‘as usual.’
And
then there was COVID-19.
The
exceptions seem to be revolutions via Le Guillotine de Biologe.
There are War and Famine, but Pestilence is Death’s most faithful
servant. The one percent will always eat and are responsible for most
of the world’s wars and the picking of pockets, but they succumb to
pestilence as readily as the unwashed, charging headlong into Death’s
Petri dish. However, there are a lot more unwashed doing a lot more
essential, yet unrepresented, services. We can do without 10, or 20,
or 50 percent of the useless eaters of champagne and caviar at the
top. Hell, they only ever serve themselves, anyway. Not so the beer,
meat, and potato eaters at the bottom.
What
does this have to do with politics? Revolutions are politics by other
means. These are the consequences to the traumatic act, not the main
event itself. These are the side effects that nobody anticipates. The
things that ‘turned out as always’ though nobody saw them coming.
The sub-plots to the main story. The variations on a theme. Blow back
and repercussions. Whether it is a pandemic or a plague, a war or
drought induced famine, what comes next is all that matters.
In
the military they are called force multipliers. In engineering they
are called mechanical advantages. In society they are called black
swans. They are all basically just levers. Social levers, political
levers, narrative levers, musical levers, theatrical levers, war
levers, biological levers, cultural levers. Things that make other
things happen, only more so. Yet they are always hidden, never
anticipated. It’s not the virus which comes and goes like a dancing
hurricane that leaves devastation in its wake. It’s what comes
waltzing in afterward.
We
cannot suffer the past to come unto us, so we invent new, more
impressive sounding names for things like these so we can pretend
that our ancestors never dealt with anything of this depth. That we
are smarter that those who lived before us and who never had to deal
with such weighty things. “Nobody ever had to deal with a calamity
like this before!” we regale ourselves and then proceed to do
exactly what they did in the same circumstances. As always.
It’s
also how we inoculate ourselves from learning from history. If those
poor, naive, illiterate peasants never had such things in the past,
then they have nothing to teach us about such things in the present.
But thank God we can use our superior wisdom of such things, along
with our brilliant solutions, to instruct the future. We, who cannot
learn from the past, busily recreate it. As always.
That
doesn’t shield anybody from repeating the same mistakes. As always.
We
are in for pain and rebirth. Whether it is at our own hands or at the
hands of the creator tyrant, Mother Nature, time will tell.
The
future is accelerating. As always.
