Our Comedic Insignificance

“Never let the weeds get higher
than the garden” Tom Waits, “Get Behind The Mule”

The weeds in our national garden plot have taken over, choking the sunflowers, the sweet corn, peas, strawberries and butter lettuce, malevolent roots penetrating deep and spreading wherever they want. It will take several doses of industrial-strength Roundup or the heavy blade of a CAT D9 to eradicate this invasive crop, and then a long time to remediate the soil. The work will be hard and the rewards will not be immediately visible, and the chances that we lose interest and quit are high. We’re conditioned by our magic devices and Amazon Prime to expect immediate satisfaction, reward with minimal effort.

The wind blows and clouds drift and the ground we stand upon is not as solid as we believe it is. Geology plays on a different time scale, far longer, but its movement and upheavals never cease; by comparison our human life spans barely register as a wink or a nod, a flash of light that quickly fades to black. Our comedic insignificance in an indifferent universe, and yet there’s some part in all of us that believes we will live long lives, and that our time here is significant.

I recently read Basin and Range by the great John McPhee and it got me thinking about deep time and drifting continents, mountain ranges once subsumed by oceans, and how little we know and how much is beyond our control. At the same time I was reading a nonfiction account of a medieval military engineer named Gabriele Tadino, an Italian who mastered the art of building defensive fortifications. Tadino was born a decade or so after the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella united the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. Kings and emperors, popes and sultans, knights in armor, soldiers in garish uniforms; it was a time of constantly shifting allegiances, sieges, plunder and rape, Christendom against the Muslim world, Constantinople and Jerusalem. Territory was power. As I read these books I thought about the many things that have changed, and the fundamental things that have hardly changed at all, like the blinding desire to rule and the use of God to justify inhumane treatment of those considered lesser beings.

These books took me away from the news, the daily outrages of the Trump Regime, the colossal stupidity of the criminal War of Choice against Iran, the no-matter-what-crimes-they-commit American support for Israel, the endless theft of taxpayer money by Trump and his ghoulish son-in-law Jared Kushner, the grotesque destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the blatant racism and misogyny, the North Korea-style press briefings by lyin’ Karoline Leavitt and Clown Car Cabinet members, the perversity of the Epstein Class, the arrogance of the Billionaires and the appalling, treasonous cowardice of the Republicans — all of it — and so much more as Trump continues his effort to remake our country in his venal image.

We haven’t felt the full economic impact of the Iran strategic blunder yet, but those effects are in the pipeline and heading our way. European airlines are reportedly cancelling flights for lack of jet fuel, Asian airlines may soon follow suit, and food shortages are entirely possible; as every day passes the last drops of American prestige ebb away. It was this prestige and trust that enabled America to rule the world for nearly a century, but like Charles V, Frances I, and Suleiman centuries ago, rulers make mistakes, overreach and overextend and become high on their own supply — an example, as if one is needed, of the enormous difficulty of avoiding the corrupting influence of power. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “Power is a poison well known for thousands of years.”

By no means has Trump turned our country into a rogue nation all on his own, he’s had plenty of help from a quarter century of military belligerence, failed foreign wars, horrible Supreme Court decisions, and a merciless class war at home that has seen a staggering transfer of wealth from working people to the rich.

Trump’s approval rating is now in the mid-30s and Republicans in Congress are beginning to acknowledge that the November elections are likely to be a volcanic blowout; the real economy of wages and prices, medical bills, gasoline, food and rent is becoming crueler even as Wall Street pretends confidence; the massive AI data centers the billionaire Tech Bros are trying to ram down the throat of one community after another, promising abundant jobs and local prosperity, are deeply unpopular; DHS and ICE goons are still harassing immigrants and citizens alike, while tens of thousands languish in ICE jails. It’s reasonable to ask if we are nearing a tipping point. Trump’s unfitness for any public office, let alone the presidency, is harder and harder to deny.

But a weakened Trump is a dangerous Trump, and when he goes down I expect him to take as many with him as he possibly can. What else can a life long coward do?