[Ed. note: My original intention for this post was to share some more pretty pictures with you all, but unfortunately I had to replace my 'phone after inadvertently leaving the old one in a restaurant bathroom this week and being unable to find it upon my return. The circumstances were indeed more than a little suspicious, but given my full plate (as it were) and the relatively low cost of un-smart flip phones, I elected not to put any further effort in locating it and simply purchased another one.
Rest assured, more pics still are on the way, but first, here's a far more serious post about the future of democracy. I hope you enjoy it anyway! - D.B.]
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The formidable challenges facing democratic governments in the 21st century are not limited to questions of survival in the face of authoritarian onslaughts from without and so-called "populist" demagogues from within (as if there could be no legitimate rationale behind any movement challenging the political establishment's priorities).
It also remains to be seen whether democracies like the United States can successfully navigate a path toward reconciliation with their own serious historical shortcomings, grave injustices and outright failures in implementing a series of policies that have fostered inequality to a degree sufficient to destabilize the entire political structure, leading to a crisis of disillusionment among diverse segments of the public. I refer in the most general terms to the relentless commercialization and commodification of life and society, which has surely reached some kind of apotheosis beyond which no further inroads may be envisioned or imposed, and beyond which no sensible human existence can be imagined.
The net effects of this fatuous project of upward redistribution, so much a part of the fabric of civilizations for centuries and now amplified enormously, threatens to undo the tenuous yet very real partial progress that had been made in addressing those historical wrongs and mitigating the worst injustices that were, sadly, all too often carried out under the banner of freedom and prosperity. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrated last month, understood just how far America needed to go to even begin to reflect its stated ideals, given the brutal reality of our nation's history. And for those whose boats were cast adrift to founder under the rising tide of global mega-finance, that vision of freedom and prosperity remains scarcely more than an empty promise and a dream left gallingly unfulfilled more than 50 years later.
Gore Vidal, who ought to have been featured on a postage stamp but probably never will be, was avowedly more skeptical about the country's progress: "We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic." Shortly before his death he quipped, with characteristic nonchalance, that the political system and much else in the United States was "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together."
It could be further noted that there are moments when the former reality and the latter unnerving possibility suddenly become much more apparent. This is clearly one of them, now that both major parties are driving a very hard line indeed on immigration. It wasn't so long ago that even the current administration's rhetoric would have been derided as morally bankrupt, but unfortunately over the intervening years, especially in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, nothing in this country has piled up quite so fast as the empathy deficit.
So as the ultra-rich, the corporate charlatans and their lobbyists, together with the aid of both major parties, continue to siphon off the wealth and vitality of the nation like some kind of vampiric rogue state, leaving behind not so much as an empty husk for future generations, we may well ask ourselves not what we might do for our country, but whether any of it will be left by the time they've finished nailing their selfies to a newly redrafted constitution declaring themselves and their descendants (unelected) planet-devouring overlords in perpetuity.
Can't we do better?
