Requiem for America
T. Rump is not an aberration but rather the ultimate consequence of democracy. If you try to select a leader by popularity contests, in a theatre of the absurd in which politics is a spectator sport—where the populace can do no more than cheer from the sidelines—how can you expect a rational outcome?
This post is inspired by music from “Zorba the Greek,” especially “Life goes on”
which I’m humming all day every day while writing this. I can have great fun with this, vocally being able to cover about 3-1/2 octaves. Listen to the full soundtrack here, track by track. Composition by the great Mikis Theodorakis.
What does the Zorba music have to do with this topic? Mr. Theodorakis’ music embodies the grief and glory of a people who have suffered true oppression. Not the supposed suffering of fat Americans feeling inadequately provided with entitlements. True suffering and oppression such as the Greeks endured under Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. Thousands of Greek Jews were deported to extermination camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz. The occupation led to a severe famine, with an estimated 100,000 people dying from starvation. The word “occupation” became synonymous with hunger for many Greeks. Which got me thinking—some nations face oppression imposed upon them, yet others bring it upon themselves? What is going on here?
History to me is not an abstract, it has deep and real connections. In 1952 and 1953, I had the opportunity to meet one of my great-grandfathers, Frank Murry DeLarm when he was 99 and 100 years of age. He was born April 18, 1853, so was a young lad when the “Civil War” (at the time called “The Rebellion”) broke out April 12, 1861. His grandfather (Henri DeLorme) was born in France in the 1780s and from there emigrated to Canada. So there you see myself and one family member I met and one family member he knew—just these three people cover almost the entire lifetime of the United States. Perhaps this is the only benefit of getting old!
In another line, my 5th-generation-back great grandmother, Sarah Anthus Romans, was born in 1836. Sarah Anthus was a 12th generation direct descendent of King James IV of Scotland. And she looks very much like a portrait of the King’s daughter, Janet Fleming. Yes, those Flemings, ancestors of Sir Ian Fleming, of James Bond fame. Her fingers in that photo—that’s my fingers exactly. Sarah Anthus married Daniel Rater and they raised ten children born from 1853 through 1877 in Iowa. These are the people who built the nation. Here is Sarah and Daniel:
So what went wrong? How do we go from these nation-building pioneers to walking scum?
Bear in mind that all through this article I’m talking about “Western” civilization and philosophy which is a ragged hodge-podge compared to thousands of years of Eastern civilization, principally that of China. For a rough overview, we had centuries of feudal governance which had a correction in 1215 with the Magna Carta limiting the powers of a king and requiring him to abide by the law (which apparently lasted until 2025) and conceding some power to a growing nobility. Another major change was in The Enlightenment from 1685 to 1815 promoting the ideals of reason, skepticism and especially, individualism. Thus began the notion of exceptionalism, which has been an unmitigated catastrophe. The notions of “liberty” have enhanced gun ownership and “individual rights” and morphed into property rights which extended into rights to own other humans, States rights and diminishment of sense of community. It was during those Enlightenment years that the notions of a populist government, a “democracy,” a rule directly by “the people,” came into vogue. But along the way, in the 1820s industrialization, “democracy” became inseparably conflated with Capitalism while the working classes, being conned into urbanization by the capitalists, began to form a larger and better-organized portion of the electorate. In most industrialized countries, the 1848 revolts represented major shifts in political thought, even though historians try to bury their significance. Public education became an important means of bringing up the educational level of the previously less-educated parts of the population. But the effectiveness of all types of education diminished in parallel with the rise of neoliberal think tanks since the 1940s. Thus the evolution of “We don’t need no education” (Pink Floyd) and the glorification of ignorance coinciding with the rise in populism. And then the working classes were crushed by the Capitalists after the U.S. went off the gold standard (1971) and investment and intellectual property (patents) moved offshore to low-wage countries, leaving the Rust Belt in the wake. What is there to resent?
And during those same years, the beacon of Freedom represented by the Statue of Liberty morphed into delineation of the globe into military control zones under various military Commands, military representatives of which made regular visits to the nominally independent nations within their Command area. Compare this world view of military control along with about 67 “regime changes” initiated by The Hegemon since WW-II, to the vastly different cooperative approach of China with their BRI, Belt and Road Initiative bringing funding and developmental expertise to developing countries. And since after George H.W. Bush, all Presidents have been funded by the Zionist Entity. They were very upset with H.W., so supported and funded Bill Clinton for President. And all the bad military inventions have followed that, including by “W”, Obama, T. Rump and Biden. “W’s” admin had attacking Iraq planned months before 9/11 and Obama’s regime change in Ukraine is still a massive geopolitical catastrophe.
As I have written before, the “progress” of western thought is fully delineated in Pankaj Mishra’s book Age of Anger, which is the most brilliant and concise chronology of it, revealing how the spread of the “Crystal Palace” concept has covered the globe, the increasing burden of “modernity” with the final stages of western thought creeping as far as India via Italy’s Mazzini through Gandhi and his Hind Swaraj manifesto (see Chapter 15) and on to the demagogue of Modi. And in all nations in between, a fuller development into populist, nationalist, far-right and “social conservative” governments is increasing. The operative tool of populism is the popularity contest in choosing a leader. The television “debates” play right into this popularity contest, they allow viewers to confirm the appeal of their favorite candidate—policy and rationality don’t even register—“They’re eating the dogs, They’re eating the cats…” Thus you have the ultimate popularity election result - T. Rump, the final nail in the coffin for democracy. All you have to do is win that popularity contest then go about deconstructing the nation. Such is the final outcome of all nations that have moved toward a CEO-style government with the final concentrations of power into the executive. In Canada, another country which has moved away from a parliamentary system, waiting in the wings is another right-wing demagogue working on increasing his popularity until he can grasp the levers of power and bring in his form of “social conservatism” and austerity. Can we end this experiment with Enlightenment and individualism yet, and work toward a common good? My previous post “Imagine an Economy Devoid of Debt” which had a low-level of readers, outlined the problems with democracy and elections and the better approach of the meritocracy governance in China, which replicates the form of rule under their former Dynasties. Something has to change, this degraded system of democracy has seen better days. The above-mentioned military-focused control of the entire globe has now focused inward on the American people themselves in a shift, from the beacon of Freedom to military oppression, from brilliance to ignorance, from democracy to a new king. Checkmate anyone? Life Goes On? Not after nuclear war, try to understand that. What better method is there to over-stress the population than ever-present risk of nuclear war, as the war mongers generate ever more geopolitical “threats”? “Sorry leadership in a democracy means you are going down” - Col. Larry Wilkerson on Glenn Diesen’s program.
“As the respected former United States Ambassador to Moscow, George F. Kennan wrote in 1987… ”Were the Soviet Union, to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military industrial complex would have to remain substantially unchanged until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.” Until his death Kennan continued to deplore NATO’s hostile encirclement of Russia.” (Source: Ottawa Citizen, also for next quote)
“During the bombing on NATO’s 50th birthday, US President Bill Clinton announced a new role for NATO – from now he declared, in effect, that NATO could intervene wherever and whenever it decided to do so. Article I of the treaty presumably had been nullified by Presidential decree. The NATO treaty had been turned upside down. In the same month NATO admitted Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO thus breaking the promise made to Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev that if Russia allowed a united Germany into NATO the organization would never expand eastward.”
The U.S. economy and entire socio-economic-political structure has been hollowed out.
“The U.S. has some rare earth deposits but lacks refining and metallurgical expertise; ironically, these were offshored to China decades ago. The self-declared arsenal of democracy is now dependent on the industrial capacity of the very nation it sought to cripple. The United States is discovering that it cannot “sanction” the world while remaining sanction-proof itself. Its industrial capacity, the envy of the globe in days gone by, has been hollowed out by decades of financialisation, offshoring and short-termism.” From: China’s Material Squeeze Exposes U.S. Industrial Fragility. Export controls over rare earths and other materials shows that reality has the final say. - Dr. Warwick Powell, Oct 10, 2025.
It didn’t have to turn out this way. America went from the world’s creditor following WW-I to owing the world debt beyond imagination. The U.S. can’t even make its own weapons now, hasn’t made TNT in 40 years. An F-35 has 900 lb of critical minerals. If it’s too expensive to lose, it’s too expensive to use. The entire country is facing decades of deep poverty and the unrest that goes along with that. And because of totally stupid geopolitical posturing, all-out nuclear war is ever nearer. Resistance is the only remaining option.
Today’s rabbit recipe: Dijon Roast Rabbit
References:
Rater Family Cookbook and family tree
Photo: Daniel and Sarah Rater, provided by family archives of David Marshall, Walla Walla, WA
Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 delineated the chain of command from Pres to SecDef to unified commanders. Need for specialized commands became apparent with the failed 1980 Operation Eagle Claw, (Airborne & Special Operations) leading to creation of the RDJTF Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force which eventually became USCENTCOM (Central Command) which covers the Middle East, everything east of Africa, west of India and south of Russia. USSOCOM Special Operations Command, USSTRATCOM Strategic Command 2002, USCYBERCOM 2010, USAFRICOM 2007, USPACCOM became USINDOPACCOM, USTRANSCOM (transport), USEUCOM (Europe). https://www.war.gov/About/Combatant-Commands/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_combatant_command
Addendum
I should add this important bit, transcribed for your reading pleasure from The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920, an article titled “Bayard vs. Lionheart” by H. L. Mencken, section IV.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-evening-sun-hl-mencken-article-26/21831908/
“Such tests arise inevitably out of democracy—the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob emotions. In private life no man of sense would think of applying them. We do not eliminate the integrity and ability of an acquaintance by his flabby willingness to accept our ideas; we estimate him by the honesty and effectiveness with which he maintains his own. All of us, if we are of reflective habit, like and admire men whose fundamental beliefs differ radically from our own. But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental—men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, of self-respect, it is cruelly hard. But if he, like Harding, a numbskull like the idiot he faces, or, like Cox, a pliant intellectual Jenkins, it is easy.
The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Outstanding article, Kathleen. Thank you.