Professor Cobblepot's Marvelous Final Engagement in the Freeverse Theater State
"When you have two competing narratives, each hermetically sealed and intractable, about all you can do is live by your own best lights."
In April 2019, when the Mueller Report dropped and PBS NewsHour/Frontline ran a one-hour special, I began calling Trump “President Cobblepot” because of the uncanny resemblance to Batman’s nemesis, Penguin, who manages to get himself popularly elected Mayor of Gotham and then uses the position to continue building his crime empire and eliminating rivals.
This American drama is a four year series, eight if it gets renewed, and the duel between narratives is what keeps the audience.… Time will tell whether Cobblepot’s short game is as good as Mueller’s long game.
As it turns out, Cobblepot’s short game was every bit as good as Mueller’s long game, and he survived not one but two impeachments and later, the fraud conviction of his real estate company, and now is running again for President. As the January 6 Committee Report alludes, Cobblepot could be POTUS today had he been able to muster just a little more support from other gangs during and immediately after the 2020 election.
In my 2019 post, Professor Cobblepot’s Marvelous Purple Fog News Machine, I closed with the scene of Sunrise Movement youths paying an unwelcome call on Senator Diane Feinstein:
The Senator rebuffed their appeal for the Green New Deal by trying to school them in her reality — political compromise, baby steps, scaffolding, the power of seniority, million-vote pluralities. “It’s not going to get turned around in 10 years,” she pronounced.
They weren’t buying that. Their reality is dying polar bears, sinking coastlines, famine, war, a significant reduction in their own life expectancies. “Senator, if this does not get turned around in 10 years you’re looking at the faces of the people who are going to be living with these consequences.”
When you have two competing narratives, each hermetically sealed and intractable, about all you can do is live by your own best lights, keep educating yourself, and do as best you can to help the children prepare. The light of hard physical reality may eventually be discovered by those of Feinstein’s fogginess, stumbling along, but if you can already see the light, you should be moving to high ground, building a fire perimeter, growing food and storing water. And vote out the fossils.
A year later, after a couple more Frontline specials, my post, Thugs and Circuses: President Cobblepot’s Season Finale dissected the Russiagate hoax, the Hunter Biden counternarrative and the more tedious, soon-to-be-forgotten historic details of Cobblepot’s mental pathology.
Readers who have been with this blog for some years may recall my posts about the stages of empire collapse. One early-stage common to both the Roman and the Mayan Empires has been termed the “Theater State.” In this phase immediately preceding contraction and disintegration, the ruling classes are bored and jaded with their wealth, so much so that they engage in brutal spectacles like throwing Christians to lions, pitting top-ranked gladiators against one another, disemboweling slaves on top of pyramids, or having sporting Super Bowls requiring the losing team be sacrificed. As the world watches, our circus moves to the floor of the Senate next week, pitting a real-estate-grifter-turned-reality-TV-host against the US Constitution. Best of all, even if Cobblepot is removed in this season’s finale, viewers can vote to renew the show for another four years, come November.
Cobblepot was not removed. He was impeached a second time, with the same null result. Then he lost the election. Now he has been investigated and referred to the Justice Department for prosecution, but the man is 76 years old. He will die before he serves a day for any of the crimes of which he stands accused. And honestly, doesn’t it serve the Democrats more to ride in, count coup, and ride off whooping, than to deal a death blow?
The January 6 Committee report Executive Summary listed 17 specific findings “on the full extent of the ongoing planning by President Trump, John Eastman, Rudolph Giuliani and their associates to overturn the certified election results” resulting in six deaths, destruction of portions of the Capitol, and hundreds of later arrests and prosecutions. In painstaking detail, the Committee rehashed Trump’s statements in tweets, phone calls, and discussions with aides and others to provide his mens rea (criminal intent). Knowing his narcissistic personality disorder, we can easily predict his response to the Committee report and any legal action that may flow from it. There is no suspense in this melodrama.
Not to seem too cynical, the US judicial system has been corrupted in much the same way that its public health system has. They are broken. Pay-to-play has replaced rational social goals. Immigration is broken. Gun laws are broken. Education is broken. It is not atypical of the terminal phase of empires. In getting out of political scrapes, the coin of the realm is coins of the realm.
The first bold heading in the Committee Report after “Executive Summary: Overview of the Evidence Developed” is “The Big Lie.” This phrasing is more important than the Committee may suspect. When histories are written by archaeologists from Mars sifting through the carbonized layers of North America, they may well mark the Trump Presidency as the start of the Post Truth Epoch in the lead-up to the Great Human Extinction (also called The Jackpot). As the editorial page of The New York Times asked readers on December 7, 2022:
How, in a matter of less than a decade, could this once-proud country have evolved to the point that there is a serious debate over choosing a presidential candidate who is a lifelong opportunist, a pathological and malignant narcissist, a sociopath, a serial liar, a philanderer, a tax cheat who does not pay his bills and a man who socializes with Holocaust deniers, who has pardoned his criminal allies, who encouraged a violent insurrection, who, behind a wall of bodyguards, is a coward and who, without remorse, continually undermines American democracy?
On March 4, 2020, a Wednesday of no particular significance, the president of the United States told seventy-three lies. The day before that, he lied forty times. By one count he lied 30,573 times over 4 years. A magazine writer noted,
That an elected official plays loose with the truth is hardly shocking — the idea of a lying politician is so commonplace as to be a cliché. What is remarkable, though, is the number of people who, despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, don’t seem to think Trump is lying at all … an NPR/PBS NewsHour poll showed that 37 percent of Americans, more than a third of the country, said they still had a good amount or great deal of trust in Trump as a source of information….
One of the sacrifices we made when we switched to the cyber “freeverse” model of defining truth — everybody has their own, go ahead and freak freely — is that we cast off moorings that turn out to be pretty important for keeping a society organized. Will we ever again agree on what is real and who is qualified to decide? Remember that question a year from now, when the Committee to Investigate the January 6 Committee holds its hearings in prime time.
Truthfully, the post-truth meme is not especially new or original. In ancient cultures, it was personified by the character of the Trickster, El Coyote, Punch. The Trickster portrays himself as a guide, but he is a false guide, there to lead you astray. In our context, The Trickster is the claim that in modernity liminality is a permanent state, that there are no valid moorings, or that modern life is patently absurd. We’ve seen this before — the Dada movement in Switzerland and Paris 1916–24 (“Dada” from what a Swiss child calls a rocking horse); Hegel’s democratic, history-is-over utopia; Camus and Kierkegaard’s absurdism.
The way back from post-truth is straightforward but not simple. We should not trust Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post any more than we trust Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal or Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times. We must train to diversify to better discern. Your poor dental hygienist, forced to an 8-hour daily diet of Fox and Friends, is clearly brainwashed and should not be trusted to even tell you directions to the washroom. The Villages in central Florida should not have their own representative in Congress.
The digital Big Bang that liberated the world from the tyranny of news has imposed its own forms of oppression, including woke pronouns and cancel culture. Recognize the illegitimacy of algorithmic governance, whether in the ideological predilections of Silicon Valley progressives or the availability of Cambridge Analytica to compel a political agenda. Anything that can game the Facebook ad structure can as easily game you, if you let it.
Former CIA Analyst Martin Gurri who predicted Brexit and the rise of Trump via social media manipulation, writes: “The waning of post-truth will not mean that we hold hands in a vast circle of universal agreement about the nature of the world.” Rather, the world is the way that the Peacemaker revealed it to the Haudenoshaunee — that there is no peace without justice, and that justice itself is never complete but rather a never-ending process of making daily judgments and decisions from your highest moral position.
As above so below. For nations as for people there is no peace without justice, and it is a process, not an end. It had seemed for a while that as the US empire overreached its energy foundations and went into decline that China — or Asia more generally — would supplant El Norte as global hegemon. That illusion is crumbling. The world as a whole is deglobalizing into regional fiefdoms as it moves into the Age of Limits. The Trump drama is soup du jour for the Mayan Theater State or the Roman Colosseum, but honestly, the World Cup final was better entertainment.
This is what the young people tried to tell Diane Feinstein. This is what the latest paper from climate scientist emeritus Jim Hansen is all about. I will start a longer series on Hansen’s forecasts next week. We should pay more attention to what is really going on than being distracted by the farcical choreography.
“All of humanity is in peril if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth and all the truth, and to do so promptly — right now.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller
Meanwhile, let’s end this war. Towns, villages and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. There are still 70 sites in Ukraine and 300 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”
The Green Road is helping these places grow their own food, and raising money to acquire farm machinery and seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.
Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.
There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad
The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed climate change, a juggernaut threat to all life, humans included. We had a trial run at emergency problem-solving on a global scale with COVID — and we failed. 6.6 million people, and counting, have died. We ignored well-laid plans to isolate and contact trace early cases; overloaded our ICUs; parked morgue trucks on the streets; incinerated bodies until the smoke obscured our cities as much as the raging wildfires. We set back our children’s education and mental health. We virtualized the work week until few wanted to return to their open-plan cubicle offices. We invented and produced tests and vaccines faster than anyone thought possible but then we hoarded them for the wealthy and denied them to two-thirds of the world, who became the Petri-plates for new variants. SARS jumped from people to dogs and cats to field mice. The modern world took a masterclass in how abysmally, unbelievably, shockingly bad we could fail, despite our amazing science, vast wealth, and singular talent as a species.
As the world emerges into pandemic recovery (maybe), there is growing recognition that we must learn to do better. We must chart a pathway to a new carbon economy that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience. We must lead by good examples; carrots, not sticks; ecovillages, not carbon indulgences. We must attract a broad swath of people to this work by honoring it, rewarding it, and making it fun. That is our challenge now.
Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.
#RestorationGeneration
“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”
— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.
Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.
How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app
The Great Change is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Comments