I believe that the energy and joy that characterized the Harris/Walz campaign reflected a new cosmic energy which supports love, joy, and inclusion and the transformation of the old patriarchal hierarchy of top down control and oppression. I am not "religious" nor do I consider myself "New Age" but I do believe (as a friend of mine said years ago) that "consciousness is the new currency" and that we each have the power to positively transform energies both for ourselves and the culture.
That being said, I don't sense or see any positive energetic support for the forces arrayed against us. I do believe we will endure hardship and ugliness but it will be temporary because those energies in death throes and they're fighting to hang on. Some have said that the reason we've had to go through this is so that those who are open can't ignore or avoid the ugliness and evil of that energy which has characterized our history since inception of our country (slavery, treatment of Native Americans, economic exploitation) can finally reject it and help create the space needed to truly transform our current structure. I have no idea what that structure will look like but my view feeds my hope which will help me survive this.
Thanks for that, Kathleen. I agree about the energy/joy infusion. From the gate, that campaign felt fated to win, and win handily. That's part of what made the loss, and the utter capitulation after the loss, so confusing and emotionally bizarre.
Our enemies have only hate, and hate burns out and turns inward at some point. The American people, even the MAGA, will not enjoy life under this regime. Perhaps this is the death rattle of it.
At noon on Martin Luther King day begins the Age of Actuality. It heralds the dawn of awakening, the truth of who the imbecile and coterie are and how toxic they are not to democracy, that lofty, highly idealistic system of government, rather to living a sensible, call it down to earth way of life with as few complications as possible.
If eggs cost too much before noon, wait until 25% tariffs hit so many staples of daily consumption. Try having berries with morning wheaties when none are available due to no one around to pick them. Wait until we watch the so very few take everything from the masses, leaving us with slim pickings. As we watch Elon the Musk and Jeff the Bozo spend fortunes trying to escape to Mars while the rest of us fight our daily commute. We should think oligarchs and toys, the bigger the yacht the better while tariffs drive us to smaller, affordable cars.
Perhaps the awakening will be the imbecile and coterie are all talk and no action. Or in the same vein, cars full of clowns bumping into each other, accomplishing nothing, more likely making life worse. Is this any better than the alternative above?
For this cynic there is one actuality, time will tell. In the meantime, we should all steel ourselves as we enter a period of the known unknown.
I like that, Old Man: the Age of Actuality. We have gone from the Age of Fuck Around to the Age of Find Out.
They are all fascists, and his lackeys will serve the regime until death, but the confederacy itself is weak and shall be defeated. They will fight each other for sure, it's already happening with the Bannon/Musk rift. I hope the collateral damage is little.
Heaven should help us: we are entering the gates of Hell.
I went to the net, Wiktionary, to check out the precise definition unamorial., to supplement my general understanding. The definition of unamorial was 'not amorial.' When I checked out the definition of 'amorial' there was none. Nada. But it is in my personal dictionary now, however lonely it may be lying in state there. I think the antithesis of the time is Jimmy Carter dying when he did.
Well, shit, that is where we are standing. We're standing in love with a chosen past - probably just a small part - that we can anchor our emotions and outlook; certainly as true for us as anything in this world in these gathering tense moments.
Greg, I agreed with your somewhat drunken bellowing of fear and outrage on the 5 Eight Friday night. At least it was an agreement of uncertainty to me, if only as a lone coyote howling at the moon.
This Sunday you seem to have ignited every contradictory nerve in my cosmos. Humanity's quest for relief from reality, from drawings on cave walls to the ceaseless invention of new gods & their enemies, to the creation of literary fiction to the revelation of conspiracies that explain erectile dysfunction, has never not maintained contests, struggles, war between reality & unreality.
January 6's hundreds hours of Thermopylae video were just the latest of our This Is Not A Movie moments, which is all they've now cracked up to be. It didn't take reality TV to stimulate the worst impulses in all but the best people. "The unscripted-but-very-much-scripted fluff that has replaced actual shows written by actual writers" faithfully plods the trails blazed for decades by many only marginally less untalented professionals of the Dream Factory.
What, for Heaven's sake were the Gospels other than "a heavily-retouched fictional universe presented as the real world?" What was The Star Spangled Banner if not a jingle selling hope for a nation lauding equality in a year when the cotton gin was generating expansion of slavery? Dictatorships are neither permanent and absolute but sixty seconds on a medieval rack unarguably is until the minute hand has moved, not to to mention the torn human tissue.
It's more than hope that survives death. Acceptance of divine injustice and revolt against it do too. They and not only love but hypocrisy and a million other incidents of existence - the whole shebang, in other words - are what make the world go round.
Notwithstanding these really self-evident truths. Matilda Rao's son Mario Cuomo memorably said about politics that we campaign in poetry but we govern in prose. But you, dear fellow, have a prose that surmounts mountain tops and traverses canyons and achieves poetry nine times out of ten. I'm really in awe.
It's interesting, because they are *encouraging* us to think of J6 as a movie, like something we watched that didn't actually happen. You're right about the retouching, history is all about that, but the Gospels offer wisdom, and the anthem offers a stir in the breast. What does reality TV give us? Half an hour of escape, mostly. Valuable, sure, but not THAT valuable.
I've never watched even five minutes of the fake reality that reality tv has to be, not even to see the lesson in fakery it represents. I just can't enjoy popular entertainment or much of anything that doesn't offer an organic stirring in the breast distinguished from electricity from a wall outlet. I also distinguish wisdom from its delivery systems.
Haunted by the dual interpretations of "nothing more terrible, nothing more true."
In 1991 I was the trailing spouse to a Stanford MBA, and worked at the Business Library as a clerk. I saw George Schultz walk over from the Hoover Institute to tell the bright eyed amazing cadre of students that Muslim extremism was the biggest threat to their future. I don't think many questioned the message. And then viola, it was true, by design? And in 1991 I dispensed the homework data pages to hungry finance guys who were salivating over the new options of hedge funds. They never returned the book on time, it was a two-hour limit. The rules didn't apply to them, and hoarding them meant they had a leg up on their colleagues. Also, Bill Browder was a second-year, ready to go off to pirate the fall of the Soviet Union, as he did with precision, until he made too much money and became a target of Putin. Ahhh. 1991.
There seems always to have been these kinds of men -- usually they are men -- who set the world spinning in the wrong direction. In 1991, I graduated from high school and went to college. Big year for me. That year is the setting for my first novel, TOTALLY KILLER, in which I have fun with all of this kind of stuff.
Thanks for the Larkin. Been a long time since I've read him. Same thing for Hobsbawm.
Sigh. In 1991 I was under a purported death sentence from a diagnosis that, after MUCH investigation, turned out to be a rare lung condition, not malignant, and long dormant. It was probably only active in the early sixties, when I had continual diagnoses of bronchitis and pneumonia that in retrospect were also misdiagnoses. The scars show up on CT scans to this day, along with reports that say essentially, "same old same old."
As a result, in 1991 I wasn't paying much attention to world events. Things like being told you have a terminal disease have a way of distracting you; but in the aftermath, you also develop a healthy resistance to unreality. Or maybe just skepticism about whatever you are told.
I'm not clear why you think the Age of Unreality is ending. Yes, we have the reality of trump and MAGA looming, but addiction to unreality -or at least, addiction to acting on the unreal--is the only thing that will KEEP it looming.
Our country may be under a purported death sentence. I hope that there WILL be a rise, as a result, of a resistance to unreality.
Democrats have always been extremely poor at developing narratives into which facts fit memorably. We need to develop a narrative, not just fact checking, but a story of why we NEED continual fact checking. The resistance we peons can develop is to focus on that narrative: with such a narrative, we might be able to turn the country back to the reality of the non-political crises we face--climate change, approval and embracing of hate at all levels above all.
Well, I'm thankful that your death sentence turned out not to be that. I can't even imagine going through that.
Re: narratives, I think the problem in this case is that people have short memories and lack imagination, and anyway the Dems rarely care to review. Trump killed hundreds of thousands of Americans last time with his lies. He tried to overthrow the government -- that one they HAVE made the case for, but that's the hardest case to make IMO -- and he also abused the pardon system egregiously, which none of them EVER discuss. But most of our talk of "democracy v fascism" is just words to a lot of people. Maybe if and when the results of Trump's despotism become apparent, things will change.
Hope so. The thing about narratives is that they are the way we STRUCTURE our retention of facts. I'm also reading Lakoff on framing. It all fits together in a theoretical way as to why so many people are so deluded. The way we should have dealt with the trump lies was not just either simply listing them, or even worse with the MSM ignoring them. The narrative would be--from every media that isn't Fox and similar--"Once again trump is misstating and telling outright lies. We all need to think about the effect of that. For instance, today, he said/repeated X. (use his words). [this is new] [this is something he has said over and over] We will discuss why X is wrong, but before that we have to ask: how to trump supporters interpret this, as opposed to those who do not support him." \
Repeated enough, this might have sunk in at least with those not committed to the cult. It's now too late--it would have worked during the campaign (which was ongoing from 2022) but now the MSM is falling into line.
Handling the "death sentence" was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other during the process, not giving into despair. I've been able to do that with other health problems that have arisen. And so I keep on trucking at 80.
Happened because the intelligence "community" (HA) were not talking to each other nor listening to Osama Bin Ladens Wahbabism warnings. Nor taking serious the related 1993 bombing of the world trade centers.
Osama is dead but his theory is still working well. Fiscal bankruptcy of the enemy
For your intrest try reading "Triple Cross" by Peter Lance.
I know all the above is true as Mohammed come to me in a dream and offered me to be his war general. I told him it was against my Athiestic pacifists religion.
Then I woke up and realized murderous psychopaths have always been with us. Nothing new today. More battles. More killing.
Maybe the Age about to afflict us is the Apotheosis of Friedman, since the first question our business leaders now have about our better angels is “Can they be monetized?”
Fantastic Sunday piece, Greg, as always. “Nazis, mobsters, Opus Dei weirdos, white Christian nationalists, and billionaire dorks.” PERFECT summary and encapsulation of our new overlords. You covered the whole sewage infested, disgusting waterfront of the Trump “coalition.” You are so good at this, and reading you gives me pleasure and you are a real oasis in the desert of these last ten years, and especially now. Thank you for your insights.
I DETEST reality shows. Between the shallowness and nihilism of the Internet, and the banality and moral bankruptcy of reality TV——here we are, ready to embark on Trump 2.0, the new and improved version. And by that I mean total destruction and chaos, and some of the most perverse, stupid and dishonest rationalizations in history by everyone who has and will normalize insanity.
I see no way through, but I pray there is one…… When a person like me’s default attitude is pessimism, it is hard not to feel that we are all about to “abandon all hope, all ye who enter here.”
Thanks so much, Rick. It's interesting -- each of those groups is its own fable in itself, ie, all the money in the world can't make you not a dork, mobsters and Nazis always eat their own, white Christians removing everyone else crushes the economy and they all starve, etc.
No one will remember the reality shows twenty years from now. No one. They are the emptiest of calories. And that's fine, escapism has its place, but not at the expense of culture. Future writers will not write future Sunday Pages about Survivor.
One of your best pieces, in my opinion, and that’s saying a lot. I’m in awe of your ability to glean relevant thoughts from disparate corners of the culture and weave them together into a profound discourse on the current human condition!
Wow Greg. Can’t wait to share. Amazing how 9/11, just ten short years after 1991, redirected not only our focus from domestic criminality, to a couple of foreign wars that would stretch for far too long, claim far too many lives and spend way too much money. Misdirection; much like we’ve witnessed trump hone to a fine art over another ten year span. If reports were correct a couple or three weeks ago about trump hiring a producer for the White House, then yes, we are indeed in the middle of his personal and god-awful version of his own reality show. So who’s going to be the first fired off of it I wonder? Stay tuned.
A higher state of consciousness a vandalistc patriarchy has spent more than 2000 years of self service, ruling ,raping, supressing, to perpetuate the entitlement of control. The futility of it all. The violence of that collective failed our species.
Whilst the silenced, evolved.
Hyperintuivity. Honed further will prevail inspite of them.
We are good.
We're aspire to better.
Hate is taught.
Be fearless, love.
WE are community
BE JOY
The din of their noise is interference. It's static. Said nothing, offed itsef.
Unless you are a white rich dude with a penis.
We're all in the same fkng boat.
Pathocracy : a competitive evil will want only one king. And it's lonely at the pointy end of the pyramid scheme.
Well put, Cathy. Yes to all of this! I hope this is the death rattle of the patriarchy, and of late stage capitalism, and all of it. I hate that these fuckers have so much money. I wish we could seize it all and distribute it to the needy, but that teeters on communism and we can't have that...
Christ Greg, you wrote the shit out of that. I am forever bawling my eyes out whenever I read you. Deeply moving. Thank You for always finding realness, and caring enough to handle delicately, sets the right tone. A lovely ugliness in adversity of collectively fighting their last crusade.
Voices I look to at such times ...Clearing-the-Fog (I recently found him again, after many years, on Bluesky), and you, Greg Olear. I wish I could expand on that, but I'm too emotional. Emotional yet feeling so disassociated, until reading your posts. Every week you do so many of us a great service. You must feel exhausted at times Safe travels, always. Know you've made a difference.
I believe that the energy and joy that characterized the Harris/Walz campaign reflected a new cosmic energy which supports love, joy, and inclusion and the transformation of the old patriarchal hierarchy of top down control and oppression. I am not "religious" nor do I consider myself "New Age" but I do believe (as a friend of mine said years ago) that "consciousness is the new currency" and that we each have the power to positively transform energies both for ourselves and the culture.
That being said, I don't sense or see any positive energetic support for the forces arrayed against us. I do believe we will endure hardship and ugliness but it will be temporary because those energies in death throes and they're fighting to hang on. Some have said that the reason we've had to go through this is so that those who are open can't ignore or avoid the ugliness and evil of that energy which has characterized our history since inception of our country (slavery, treatment of Native Americans, economic exploitation) can finally reject it and help create the space needed to truly transform our current structure. I have no idea what that structure will look like but my view feeds my hope which will help me survive this.
I agree 100% Kathleen!
Thank you!
I like your post, Kathleen. It feels right.
Thank you!
Thanks for that, Kathleen. I agree about the energy/joy infusion. From the gate, that campaign felt fated to win, and win handily. That's part of what made the loss, and the utter capitulation after the loss, so confusing and emotionally bizarre.
Our enemies have only hate, and hate burns out and turns inward at some point. The American people, even the MAGA, will not enjoy life under this regime. Perhaps this is the death rattle of it.
An inspiration! The battle begins
The battles began with the advent of civilization.
AKA
And we invented gods. Pick one of your favorite 4000 myths. More battles.
CAIN
I told you in 1798 to quit fornicating.
Fredrick
You just don't beat biology.
Yep.
Nature bats last.
More Larkin:
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
We must gird the proverbial loins, Richard!
At noon on Martin Luther King day begins the Age of Actuality. It heralds the dawn of awakening, the truth of who the imbecile and coterie are and how toxic they are not to democracy, that lofty, highly idealistic system of government, rather to living a sensible, call it down to earth way of life with as few complications as possible.
If eggs cost too much before noon, wait until 25% tariffs hit so many staples of daily consumption. Try having berries with morning wheaties when none are available due to no one around to pick them. Wait until we watch the so very few take everything from the masses, leaving us with slim pickings. As we watch Elon the Musk and Jeff the Bozo spend fortunes trying to escape to Mars while the rest of us fight our daily commute. We should think oligarchs and toys, the bigger the yacht the better while tariffs drive us to smaller, affordable cars.
Perhaps the awakening will be the imbecile and coterie are all talk and no action. Or in the same vein, cars full of clowns bumping into each other, accomplishing nothing, more likely making life worse. Is this any better than the alternative above?
For this cynic there is one actuality, time will tell. In the meantime, we should all steel ourselves as we enter a period of the known unknown.
I like that, Old Man: the Age of Actuality. We have gone from the Age of Fuck Around to the Age of Find Out.
They are all fascists, and his lackeys will serve the regime until death, but the confederacy itself is weak and shall be defeated. They will fight each other for sure, it's already happening with the Bannon/Musk rift. I hope the collateral damage is little.
Ah yes, collateral damage, always a concern. Fingers crossed we are spared or at least damage is minimal.
Heaven should help us: we are entering the gates of Hell.
I went to the net, Wiktionary, to check out the precise definition unamorial., to supplement my general understanding. The definition of unamorial was 'not amorial.' When I checked out the definition of 'amorial' there was none. Nada. But it is in my personal dictionary now, however lonely it may be lying in state there. I think the antithesis of the time is Jimmy Carter dying when he did.
Well, shit, that is where we are standing. We're standing in love with a chosen past - probably just a small part - that we can anchor our emotions and outlook; certainly as true for us as anything in this world in these gathering tense moments.
Greg, I agreed with your somewhat drunken bellowing of fear and outrage on the 5 Eight Friday night. At least it was an agreement of uncertainty to me, if only as a lone coyote howling at the moon.
Well, damn, it is unarmorial, not unamorial. I am defenseless.
Jimmy Carter, Bob Uecker, David Lynch. An odd combination, but all representing some sort of inherent goodness. "Get out as early as you can..."
Fear, outrage, hope, and ANGER. Righteous, white-hot anger.
The new age will be re-armorial!
This Sunday you seem to have ignited every contradictory nerve in my cosmos. Humanity's quest for relief from reality, from drawings on cave walls to the ceaseless invention of new gods & their enemies, to the creation of literary fiction to the revelation of conspiracies that explain erectile dysfunction, has never not maintained contests, struggles, war between reality & unreality.
January 6's hundreds hours of Thermopylae video were just the latest of our This Is Not A Movie moments, which is all they've now cracked up to be. It didn't take reality TV to stimulate the worst impulses in all but the best people. "The unscripted-but-very-much-scripted fluff that has replaced actual shows written by actual writers" faithfully plods the trails blazed for decades by many only marginally less untalented professionals of the Dream Factory.
What, for Heaven's sake were the Gospels other than "a heavily-retouched fictional universe presented as the real world?" What was The Star Spangled Banner if not a jingle selling hope for a nation lauding equality in a year when the cotton gin was generating expansion of slavery? Dictatorships are neither permanent and absolute but sixty seconds on a medieval rack unarguably is until the minute hand has moved, not to to mention the torn human tissue.
It's more than hope that survives death. Acceptance of divine injustice and revolt against it do too. They and not only love but hypocrisy and a million other incidents of existence - the whole shebang, in other words - are what make the world go round.
Notwithstanding these really self-evident truths. Matilda Rao's son Mario Cuomo memorably said about politics that we campaign in poetry but we govern in prose. But you, dear fellow, have a prose that surmounts mountain tops and traverses canyons and achieves poetry nine times out of ten. I'm really in awe.
Greg always makes me feel much better about my literature and history BA.
Thanks, Joe!
Thanks, Richard. I appreciate that.
It's interesting, because they are *encouraging* us to think of J6 as a movie, like something we watched that didn't actually happen. You're right about the retouching, history is all about that, but the Gospels offer wisdom, and the anthem offers a stir in the breast. What does reality TV give us? Half an hour of escape, mostly. Valuable, sure, but not THAT valuable.
Here's to hope triumphing over hypocrisy.
I've never watched even five minutes of the fake reality that reality tv has to be, not even to see the lesson in fakery it represents. I just can't enjoy popular entertainment or much of anything that doesn't offer an organic stirring in the breast distinguished from electricity from a wall outlet. I also distinguish wisdom from its delivery systems.
Haunted by the dual interpretations of "nothing more terrible, nothing more true."
In 1991 I was the trailing spouse to a Stanford MBA, and worked at the Business Library as a clerk. I saw George Schultz walk over from the Hoover Institute to tell the bright eyed amazing cadre of students that Muslim extremism was the biggest threat to their future. I don't think many questioned the message. And then viola, it was true, by design? And in 1991 I dispensed the homework data pages to hungry finance guys who were salivating over the new options of hedge funds. They never returned the book on time, it was a two-hour limit. The rules didn't apply to them, and hoarding them meant they had a leg up on their colleagues. Also, Bill Browder was a second-year, ready to go off to pirate the fall of the Soviet Union, as he did with precision, until he made too much money and became a target of Putin. Ahhh. 1991.
I'm older than that now.
Ahhh. And the reference librarian who ushered us into his office to see us communicate anew with MIT. How could I forget.
Right, THAT.
There seems always to have been these kinds of men -- usually they are men -- who set the world spinning in the wrong direction. In 1991, I graduated from high school and went to college. Big year for me. That year is the setting for my first novel, TOTALLY KILLER, in which I have fun with all of this kind of stuff.
Thanks for the Larkin. Been a long time since I've read him. Same thing for Hobsbawm.
Sigh. In 1991 I was under a purported death sentence from a diagnosis that, after MUCH investigation, turned out to be a rare lung condition, not malignant, and long dormant. It was probably only active in the early sixties, when I had continual diagnoses of bronchitis and pneumonia that in retrospect were also misdiagnoses. The scars show up on CT scans to this day, along with reports that say essentially, "same old same old."
As a result, in 1991 I wasn't paying much attention to world events. Things like being told you have a terminal disease have a way of distracting you; but in the aftermath, you also develop a healthy resistance to unreality. Or maybe just skepticism about whatever you are told.
I'm not clear why you think the Age of Unreality is ending. Yes, we have the reality of trump and MAGA looming, but addiction to unreality -or at least, addiction to acting on the unreal--is the only thing that will KEEP it looming.
Our country may be under a purported death sentence. I hope that there WILL be a rise, as a result, of a resistance to unreality.
Democrats have always been extremely poor at developing narratives into which facts fit memorably. We need to develop a narrative, not just fact checking, but a story of why we NEED continual fact checking. The resistance we peons can develop is to focus on that narrative: with such a narrative, we might be able to turn the country back to the reality of the non-political crises we face--climate change, approval and embracing of hate at all levels above all.
Well, I'm thankful that your death sentence turned out not to be that. I can't even imagine going through that.
Re: narratives, I think the problem in this case is that people have short memories and lack imagination, and anyway the Dems rarely care to review. Trump killed hundreds of thousands of Americans last time with his lies. He tried to overthrow the government -- that one they HAVE made the case for, but that's the hardest case to make IMO -- and he also abused the pardon system egregiously, which none of them EVER discuss. But most of our talk of "democracy v fascism" is just words to a lot of people. Maybe if and when the results of Trump's despotism become apparent, things will change.
Hope so. The thing about narratives is that they are the way we STRUCTURE our retention of facts. I'm also reading Lakoff on framing. It all fits together in a theoretical way as to why so many people are so deluded. The way we should have dealt with the trump lies was not just either simply listing them, or even worse with the MSM ignoring them. The narrative would be--from every media that isn't Fox and similar--"Once again trump is misstating and telling outright lies. We all need to think about the effect of that. For instance, today, he said/repeated X. (use his words). [this is new] [this is something he has said over and over] We will discuss why X is wrong, but before that we have to ask: how to trump supporters interpret this, as opposed to those who do not support him." \
Repeated enough, this might have sunk in at least with those not committed to the cult. It's now too late--it would have worked during the campaign (which was ongoing from 2022) but now the MSM is falling into line.
Handling the "death sentence" was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other during the process, not giving into despair. I've been able to do that with other health problems that have arisen. And so I keep on trucking at 80.
911.
Happened because the intelligence "community" (HA) were not talking to each other nor listening to Osama Bin Ladens Wahbabism warnings. Nor taking serious the related 1993 bombing of the world trade centers.
Osama is dead but his theory is still working well. Fiscal bankruptcy of the enemy
For your intrest try reading "Triple Cross" by Peter Lance.
I know all the above is true as Mohammed come to me in a dream and offered me to be his war general. I told him it was against my Athiestic pacifists religion.
Then I woke up and realized murderous psychopaths have always been with us. Nothing new today. More battles. More killing.
Always the battles, always the killings, always.
Maybe the Age about to afflict us is the Apotheosis of Friedman, since the first question our business leaders now have about our better angels is “Can they be monetized?”
Well put, Joe. And now if you'll excuse me, these $Melania crypto coins are not going to buy themselves...
Fantastic Sunday piece, Greg, as always. “Nazis, mobsters, Opus Dei weirdos, white Christian nationalists, and billionaire dorks.” PERFECT summary and encapsulation of our new overlords. You covered the whole sewage infested, disgusting waterfront of the Trump “coalition.” You are so good at this, and reading you gives me pleasure and you are a real oasis in the desert of these last ten years, and especially now. Thank you for your insights.
I DETEST reality shows. Between the shallowness and nihilism of the Internet, and the banality and moral bankruptcy of reality TV——here we are, ready to embark on Trump 2.0, the new and improved version. And by that I mean total destruction and chaos, and some of the most perverse, stupid and dishonest rationalizations in history by everyone who has and will normalize insanity.
I see no way through, but I pray there is one…… When a person like me’s default attitude is pessimism, it is hard not to feel that we are all about to “abandon all hope, all ye who enter here.”
Thanks so much, Rick. It's interesting -- each of those groups is its own fable in itself, ie, all the money in the world can't make you not a dork, mobsters and Nazis always eat their own, white Christians removing everyone else crushes the economy and they all starve, etc.
No one will remember the reality shows twenty years from now. No one. They are the emptiest of calories. And that's fine, escapism has its place, but not at the expense of culture. Future writers will not write future Sunday Pages about Survivor.
One of your best pieces, in my opinion, and that’s saying a lot. I’m in awe of your ability to glean relevant thoughts from disparate corners of the culture and weave them together into a profound discourse on the current human condition!
Thanks so much, Earl. I appreciate that. These are fun to do and keep me sane!
Da Snoop ought to donate his ill gotten gain from tRump to victims in the Palisades.
He's got so much money already. I'm so sick of him.
Wow Greg. Can’t wait to share. Amazing how 9/11, just ten short years after 1991, redirected not only our focus from domestic criminality, to a couple of foreign wars that would stretch for far too long, claim far too many lives and spend way too much money. Misdirection; much like we’ve witnessed trump hone to a fine art over another ten year span. If reports were correct a couple or three weeks ago about trump hiring a producer for the White House, then yes, we are indeed in the middle of his personal and god-awful version of his own reality show. So who’s going to be the first fired off of it I wonder? Stay tuned.
Apprentice: White House returns for Season 2. It looks like Vivek is already swirling the toilet bowl on his way to being flushed down.
I noticed that. He’s been offered the candidacy for Gov of oHIo it seems.
Yes 🙌
"Consciousness is the new currency"
A higher state of consciousness a vandalistc patriarchy has spent more than 2000 years of self service, ruling ,raping, supressing, to perpetuate the entitlement of control. The futility of it all. The violence of that collective failed our species.
Whilst the silenced, evolved.
Hyperintuivity. Honed further will prevail inspite of them.
We are good.
We're aspire to better.
Hate is taught.
Be fearless, love.
WE are community
BE JOY
The din of their noise is interference. It's static. Said nothing, offed itsef.
Unless you are a white rich dude with a penis.
We're all in the same fkng boat.
Pathocracy : a competitive evil will want only one king. And it's lonely at the pointy end of the pyramid scheme.
There's more of us.
Well put, Cathy. Yes to all of this! I hope this is the death rattle of the patriarchy, and of late stage capitalism, and all of it. I hate that these fuckers have so much money. I wish we could seize it all and distribute it to the needy, but that teeters on communism and we can't have that...
Christ Greg, you wrote the shit out of that. I am forever bawling my eyes out whenever I read you. Deeply moving. Thank You for always finding realness, and caring enough to handle delicately, sets the right tone. A lovely ugliness in adversity of collectively fighting their last crusade.
Thanks, Cathy. The Lane piece always makes me cry, so I had a lot of help this time...
What will the rest of today bring, I shudder to think...
Voices I look to at such times ...Clearing-the-Fog (I recently found him again, after many years, on Bluesky), and you, Greg Olear. I wish I could expand on that, but I'm too emotional. Emotional yet feeling so disassociated, until reading your posts. Every week you do so many of us a great service. You must feel exhausted at times Safe travels, always. Know you've made a difference.
He is great, perceptive, smart, and compassionate. And thank you for saying so. Thank you.