Fin de siècle

Literally "end of century" in French, applied especially to the turn of the century from the 19th to the 20th, but in English and more broadly, the passing of an age. In this present age the globalist leftist establishment conjure a Great Reset, between flutes of champagne at Davos. And one does wonder whether we are on the point of a terrific turning-over, only not of the sort glimpsed at in the sparkles and bubbles of Davos.

 

If it's official, it's a lie. At the risk of overgeneralization, in 2021, if it's official, it's a lie. If the FBI say so, it's a lie. If "Dr." Fauci at his National Institutes for Health says so, it's a lie. We all are coming around to the truth that we are daily and nightly lied to, by the powerful and the influential, that the powerful and influential don't know what they're talking about or what they're doing or what's going on, and that the powerful and influential hate the ever-living guts of the masses of nobodies who are We the People.  

 

And at the same time that the institutions are bankrupted on the debased currency of their credibility, the upstarts demonstrate that anybody can do it. So for instance Fox News today is halfway to becoming CNN-3, but as Fox betrays us, no fewer than three alternative conservative TV news channels ride over the ridge to sustain us. As it turns out, it's not so unattainably tricky or costly to build a TV-news set, run a camera or two, and find a host and some guests who talk sense, then throw it all up onto the air. Anymore, anyone can do it, if only they work at it and they're good people with sound ideas.

 

One could go on with cases-in-point of the corrupt establishment overtaken by the dedicated amateur or the rough-and-ready upstart, but let this further exhibit suffice. Marx famously observed that "religion is the opiate of the masses," and as ever Marx was wrong, but his formulation was useful: as of some time in the later 20th Century the opiate of the masses has been televised sports. I don't say that the established leagues of the woke billionaires are finished, but to take but one example, the Superbowl which has been for the longest time the biggest thing in TV sports, rated worse in 2021 than since the 1960s when football was America's second game. And that was before the NFL declared itself homosexual and its national anthem the black national anthem. At the same time it does seem to me that the energy and growth anymore are with the amateur and outsider, the rough-and-ready, the upstart and unwoke in sports, like UFC or NASCAR or college ball. Fin de siècle, maybe. 

 

It may be that I'm thinking wishfully, but I find the signs and the proofs of it daily, that the rot of the last half-century has gotten to be unsupportable, that the godless elite and lawless establishment who lord over us are exposed for the forces of evil they are, and that the elite and establishment stand today about where the Roman Church stood, about the time Martin Luther nailed those Ninety-five Theses to that door.

The late, last godly power

Six little months; half a year of war and rumors of war.

 

Three acts of war on the United States, crippling cyberattacks on the economic infrastructure, without consequence to the attackers. Something like 50 attacks on Americans in Iraq, one by drone. War anew in Iraq and Syria. War also in Israel and Gaza, after the Abraham Accords and the greatest peace in the Mideast since the founding of Israel in '48. A third of Afghanistan is reclaimed by the Taliban. In Haiti the president is assassinated. And South Africa descends into low-grade civil war with corpses "lining the roads".

Offensive mobilization of China against Taiwan, and Russia against Ukraine; diplomatic coordination between China and Russia, against the United States; and a warning from Japan that China and Russia are coordinating also militarily, and that it would behoove the United States to be watchful for a second Pearl Harbor.

What it all comes to, this half-year of war and rumors of war, in my reckoning, is that the world America has borne on its shoulders, is crashing down around us: America is not America, not in 2021, and in 2021 America is collapsed, past-tense; America was the last godly power on earth, but as of 2021 America is not godly and neither is it a power.