The best posts of the week of March 23, 2025, a week which featured sad stories of the last day of the Republic of Vietnam, and a lot of vehicles.
The best posts of the week of March 16, 2025.
Last edition:
The best posts of the week of March 9, 2025.
Last edition:
It was a week in which, after Mass on Sunday, I took the dog out with me austensibly to go fishing and we ended up on the Sweetwater. We walked a fair amount and I noticed, on such a nice day that I shed my coat, that I was walking fatigued. "Out of shape?", I wondered, or just rapidly onsetting old age.
I was having a pretty hard time.
Turned out it was Influenza A. The next morning I was in horrific shape. I went to work, but by noon was a wreck.
I knew it already, but one of the negative things about being a lawyer, at least in some cases, your health matters only to you, and you keep on going anyhow. I had to crawl down to work every day, didn't eat at night, and had the fevers of delirium all night long. Nobody really care that much as they have things they want to you to do. "Help me!". So you go and do it, knowing you are killing yourself.
"You don't look good". "You look worn out". Things I was hearing during the week.
Oh well, the weekends here . . and I worked.
The glory of the law.
The law, they say, is a jealous mistress. As one still practicing older lawyer told me, "the law's a bitch". Both are true.
The same week an event in 1925 recalled a proposal in 2025 that didn't go anywhere, thank goodness.
Last edition:
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr.
This last week saw the conclusion of existential shift in the United States. The country went from being a great nation, albeit with greatness foisted upon it due to World War One, World War Two and the Cold War, to becoming a second rate regional power hated by its neighbors and regarded as an also ran by the rest of the world.
Basically, since November, and concluding last week, we went from being what the country was following World War Two, to Brazil.
The concluding act was Donald Trump, whom the nation is pretending to be President, berating a heroic embattled President of a heroic embattled nation. At that point, every head of state around the globe just switched the senile narcissist developer off. He showed himself to be stupid and by extension, showed the US to be worshipping stupidity.
Why would anyone care what we think.
In the next few days the act will play itself out. The US will impose tariffs on our neighbors and sink into a recession that will last a decade or more. We'll be lucky if it isn't a depression. This assumes, of course, that we're nto at war with China within a year and a half. If that occurs, we'll fight it, and lose, on our own. Our former allies have written us off all over the globe, and for good reason. As an importing nation, we're about to find out economically that we just slit our wrists and everyone is going to let us bleed out.
And they should.
The decline of the US was perhaps inevitable. Americans, and its Americans, not their government, have never figured out how to live within their budgets. Government wise, we ran a big government from 1932 on, but always had a hard time balancing it. We went off the charts thsi way in the first Trump administration, with the country lead by a stupid man who never had to live wthin his own budget. The country, which has always had a strong element of anti intellectualism as Richard Hofstadter well explored in his published in 1963 Pulitzer Prize winning book on the topic in which he concluded both anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were in part consequences of the democratization of knowledge but also embedded in America's national fabric as a result of its colonial and evangelical Protestant heritage. He believe,d and we've recently discussed, that Evangelical American Protestantism's anti-intellectual tradition valued the spirit over intellectual rigor. In the turbulent times that have come from 1963, that's festered and become a near worship of ignorance over science, something that the Reagan Administration's abandonment of science fostered.
But its also the case that being ain international power is expensive and nobody has been able to maintain a singular global status forever. The British run of it, for example, was much shorter than generally imagined. So was Spain's. The Japanese effort barely got off the ground bfore it collapsed. So our 1945 to 2025 run probably was a good run.
But it didn't need to end this way, with the nation collapsing as an international joke.
Some nations have come to this point and managed to transition with dignity. The United Kingdom particularly did, realizing after the failed 1958 Suez Canal intervention that it could no longer hold on it its empire. It simply announced the arrival of The Winds of Change and worked with those winds. In the 1960s the United Kingdom was still a major colonial power. By the 1970s it no longer was, and was then a European power. Today, it's one of the leading European nations.
A former British colony, however, provides a contrary example. Unable to accept those winds, Rhodesia chose to stand against them and declared itself independent and unyielding to change. Change was violently foisted upon it, giving us the mess of Zimbabwe today.
France may really provide the example we need to consider.
In the 1930s France was a political mess and appeared to be teetering on the edge of taking the same path that Spain had, a civil war between a strong left and a strong right. World War Two interrupted that, but it also temporarily completed it, throwing the government to the far right autocracy of Marshall Petain.
France from 1940 to 1944 was not the every Frenchman in the Resistance nation that France and Hogan's Heroes pretended existed by any means. A huge percentage of the French were comfortable with a new France that replaced "liberty, equality and fraternity" with "work, family, and country". Petain was, in significant ways, what Franco also was, an earlier version of National Conservative. He was also, and this should not be forgotten, part of an elected government that even the Socialist who remained supported.
Not all Frenchmen supported the rightest government, of course, and as the months rolled by, and it was a mere matter of months, World War Two for France became a French civil war. After June 6, 1944, and then after World War Two itself, Franch struggled with what it was to become and made a desperate effort to hang on to its empire, failing first in Indochina and then in Algeria. France was lucky to have Charles de Gaulle, heroic, haughty, deeply Catholic and committed to democracy. De Gaulle saved France, but huge elements of French society, particularly within the military, were opposed to his agreeing to dismantle the remaining parts of the empire and become, once again, a major European country. De Gaulle and French democracy barely survived.
We're effectively in the same position these countries were after World War Two. And indeed, there were things to address. The United States acclimated itself to running huge deficits and the last two chief executives, Biden and Trump, or rather Trump, Biden, and Trump again, vastly accelerated out of control spending. The US remains a powerful global power, but this would have resulted in some reckoning sooner or later. The American public has become poorly educated in many was post Ronald Reagan, and it no longer grasps why the US should be a world power. Basically, Americans are like the French of the Vichy era, folding in on themselves into work, family, and love of a country that doesn't have to deal, they think, with anyone else.
National Conservatism, which will follow Trump's demise will fail. The US won't convert itself into isolated mythical kingdom, and it won't enjoy being the temporarily biggest bully on the block. The real question is whether or not it will enjoy being Brazil.
Trump's stupidity and lack of releavant experience has caused the United States to be removed to the children's table. The opinions of the country no longer matter on the global stage.
And honestly, some of this will be a good thing, while much will be bad. While the US has been a major force for democracy and good in the world since the Second World War, starting with the Trumpist decline in the Republican Party, suppressed elements of real ignorance have been harming the world, chief among them being a stubborn refusal to recognize that the fossil fuel era needs to change, and quickly. We've been, essentially, like China in that regard.
Now with the Western World's axis shifted back to Europe, with Canada and the other English speaking nations with it, the US will have to change, and quickly. A blistering sense of arrogance and ignorance that has come to define Americans in recent years will have no currency and will not be tolerated. We'll be told what to do, and like it.
All empires fall. Some fall into stupidity.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
The best entries of this sad week:
We started to look into the elements that have caused Americans in this era to worship the rich and reject knowledge, and started with this one.
Last edition:
