Two weeks. Fourteen days remain and then Trump is inaugurated, his administration installed to pilot the ship-of-state, as per “the will of the people.” Elections and inauguration rituals are considered sacrosanct, a ‘gift of the gods’. The illusion is intentional. The desire of men long since dead was expressed in our Constitution. The institutions were apt. for many generations, serviceable, ‘good enough’ even if by no means perfect.

What about now? None of that ‘fell from heaven’, nothing has been brought down the mountain by our ‘Moses’ (collectively Washington, Madison, Franklin, Jefferson, et. al.). Institutions, myths are eroded by the passage of time, wear out, and must be conceived afresh…

The New York Times declared today in The Morning email bulletin:

Biden will hand Donald Trump a nation that is by many measures in good shape, even if voters remain unconvinced, Peter Baker writes.

There are two, three issues advanced by the Times statement. 1. By what measure(s) is the nation in good shape? 2. Are voters convinced of anything? To the contrary – there is a wide spread nullity, the incapacity of conviction. Perhaps just inchoate anxiety, or for some, banked-rage appearing as a psychological residuum. 3. A nation conceived by expropriating lands lived upon by others, a nation amassing capital by slave trading, a nation maintaining empire by military bases engirdling the globe, — in what universe of discourse could such a society be characterized as “in good shape”?

If our’s is a sane world, we have inverted the meaning of sanity.

I am currently reading The Illusion of the End by Jean Baudrillard. These lines compel thought:

One has the impression
that events form all on their own
and drift unpredictably towards their
vanishing point –
the peripheral void of the media.

Just as physicists now see
their particles only
as a trajectory on a screen,
we no longer have the pulsing of events,
but only the cardiogram,
have neither representation
nor recollection of them…
Neither desire nor enjoyment of them,
but only the psychodrama
and the TV image.

It is a bit like
in vitro procreation:
the embryo of the real event
is transferred into the artificial
womb of the news media,
there to give birth to many orphaned fetuses
which have neither
fathers nor mothers…

The Illusion of the End by Jean Baudrillard, page 20

If you’d like to know more about Baudrillard, here is what The Guardian published upon his death in 2007. CLICK HERE