The title of this blog post should arguably be "Thing I Just Don't Get" because, unlike the original listicle from more than a decade ago, there is only one thing (despite myriad examples) that confounds me utterly. That one thing? The seemingly boundless supply of people willing to carry water for others enacting evil agendas. It would be easy to point solely at criminality but the field of play is much broader that mere law and order. For instance, the news presents an endless stream of malefactors doing obviously evil things -- knowingly one supposes but that presumption is the intentional fallacy -- with little or no apparent hesitation, compunction, or consequence. News presenters themselves are frequently among those malefactors as they promote bogus narratives that often take only a little common sense to undo. Let's take the most heinous example first.
News broke in 2003 shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq that U.S. military personnel had taken over the military prison at Abu Ghraib and had, um, "tortured some folks" as Obama put it rather quaintly later during his administration. It takes no thought whatsoever to understand that torture is evil unless one is deluded enough to believe he or she inhabits a comic-book world of villains and superheroes and is cast as the hero but is actually a villain (plot twist everyone can anticipate). Yet all up and down the military ranks is a supply of "patriots" willing to follow orders unquestioningly, do evil the dirty work, hide it, deny it, and rationalize it somehow. Why hide, deny, and rationalize if torturers don't know torture is evil? Helps to bury decision-making behind the machinations of an inscrutable bureaucracy, but the buck's gotta stop somewhere. Someone has to take the fall ultimate responsibility, right? Another torture program was operated at Guantánamo Bay by CIA goons. How many other sites are as yet unknown to the public? Obama famously vowed to close Guantánamo Bay but failed (or more charitably, was prevented from doing so). To date and to my knowledge, no one (as in not one person!) has been imprisoned for carrying out obviously unlawful orders. Of any of the truly awful things done by the U.S. over the course of my lifetime, torturing prisoners of war, suspected terrorists, whistleblowers, and journalists ranks right at the top. One could argue that preemptive U.S. invasions of foreign countries at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives competes handily.
Centuries of financial crimes demonstrate a permanent corruption in the hearts of men, but the last twenty-five years (the financialization of the U.S. economy) may well be the worst. Repeated shocks to the system (i.e., the dotcom crash of 2000, the housing bubble crash of 2008, and the brief Covid crash of 2020) revealed speculators (individuals and institutions) willing to take risky financial positions only to have their subsequent losses covered so that the entire system didn't seize up -- the notorious phrase "too-big-to-fail" entering the lexicon to describe a rigged market of private profit and socialized loss. One might legitimately ask, who wouldn't take that deal, in effect a guaranteed winning ticket? Meanwhile, many U.S. citizens got pink slips and mom-and-pop establishments went under while the big playahs consolidated and/or enhanced their positions. (Why does Jeff Bezos look so happy in pictures? Because he's fabulously, unreasonably, insanely wealthy but apparently sleeps well despite his wealth having been obtained from an immense army of underpaid, exploited, and heavily surveilled workers who will be dropped entirely as soon as robots and AI become effective replacements.) Destruction of lives and livelihoods each time the pattern repeats is simply breathtaking, yet there are always serious-looking men in expensive suits who enact Federal policies (e.g., bail-outs and stimulus plans) that overwhelmingly benefit deep pockets and have by now become as predictable as the sunrise.
Intractable issues receive ongoing attention and analysis but never truly resolve. For instance, interpretations of the right of free speech (and relatedly, sovereign thought) rarely favor the individual anymore. Instead, because the figurative public square is dominated by private Silicon Valley social media platforms, restrictions on what one is allowed to say/think publicly under the guise/excuse of prohibitive user and terms-of-service agreements (which almost no one reads or understands) are instituted, largely omitting and defining out of existence any right of appeal or recourse. The Twitter Files revealed that a large government bureaucracy of agencies monitored public discussion and recommended demonetizing and disabling user accounts that veered into anything that might be understood from on high as misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Thus, legions of people lacking adherence to free speech ideals actively silenced of the speech of others as though infringing that essential 1st Amendment right was no big deal. The Washington Post's official slogan, "democracy dies in darkness," is of no apparent concern to those only too willing to restrict free speech, thus carrying water for others.
Other hallowed rights from The Bill of Rights include the right to peaceful assembly (often in protest and/or dissent) and the right to petition government for grievance. Yet when U.S. citizens exercise those rights, they typically confront police (who are civil servants, not military personnel) in riot gear bent on thwarting those rights. It's no longer the Civil Rights Era, when police would sic dogs on protesters or harass activists with fire hoses. Now it's sound cannons, pepper spray, tear gas, tasers, rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, the venerable billy club, etc. (the list grows unreasonably long). Police form phalanxes that suggest military-style engagement. Admittedly, maintaining public order demands police response to unrest, but police frequently exceed their mandate and crack heads (or worse) with wanton disregard for health and safety. Indeed, the presence of agents provocateurs within crowd actions reveals authorities often seek to incite violence and mayhem rather than stem them.
Examples could go on and on, yet the sea change needed first to establish punishment for wrongdoing and then incentive individuals to refuse to carry water for others appears nowhere on the horizon. Any progressive notion that quality of life is steadily improving ought to be easily dispelled when so many of our brethren behave so execrably. Small wonder, then, that an increasing segment of U.S. society has lost faith in the American experiment and adopted a hedonistic approach to life to stave of the even worse conclusion that life may not be worth living anymore under postmodern conditions. The race to the bottom is on, baby; too bad the it's to the bottom of the grave.
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