Photo credit: Caricature of a Fat Cat, Wikipedia
It’s All Greek to Me
The cemetery on the island of Mykonos in the Mediterranean Sea is a kind of oasis amidst the largely barren landscape of the island’s hills and white homes. The sea is everywhere, as is the warmth. It was 37 years ago. The cemetery seemed to have lots of some kind of coniferous trees that lent uncommon green to the otherwise bleached, but stark and beautiful landscape.
As my family and I exited the place, a man was entering. I don’t know a single word in Greek, so communication was limited to hand motions and little else. One word, however, was shared between us, and it was “kaput.” I think, looking back to the interchange that the man may have been the caretaker, and we came to a mutual understanding about a possible outcome of the place and its position in the universe of ideas and human experience. The cemetery marked the end of something, life, and that seemed to be it.
When I look at the contemporary scenario in the US, the caretaker’s single word comes to mind. As a society, we are kaput. There are millionaires and billionaires, and lots of militarism and economic inequality, but we are essentially kaput. If inequality and militarism don’t do us in, then the environment will, as the greed and meanness, no cruelty, of the ruling class, the elite, is so thoroughgoing that nothing will escape it. The meeting of these variables, once held back by things like checks and balances and guilt and shame, aren’t operating anymore, and a way out of this debacle is like the closing door in the song “The Days of Wine and Roses.”
The ruling class appoints and anoints a dope, or near dope at best, and allows a laser beam of hate directed at the other, in this case the other being immigrants in a nation of immigrants. Immigrants are only a diversion for the ruling elite who have their long arms and hands in the pockets of ordinary people. Long gone is the economy that supported a working class and a middle class.
The debauchery of a Jeffrey Epstein, and his camaraderie with the fearless leader, is not that unusual. It’s all bread and circuses for the ruling class now.
The ruling class gofers hate science because that anti-intellectualism is part of their mantra, too. They’ve got Robert Kennedy, Jr. at their beck and call, and he’s more than ready to put a measles-infested blanket into your living room, car, train, or plane and forget about vaccinations! Housing, nutrition, healthcare, education that doesn’t break the bank, and a secure future, they’re all pipe dreams now.
There once was a sense of hope in this, the most powerful nation on Earth, that there was a path to something better, but that sense has been absent for half a century. What’s happening right here and now just may well close the door to human history. The chance to salvage anything from this shipwreck may be lost.
Opposition is not impossible, but this disaster in motion will not wait for a mobilized reaction that is slow to respond.