It began with post-mortems for the Biden-produced debacle in
Afghanistan. The ongoing critique of American policy has now, almost magically,
morphed into a deep analysis of what is wrong with America. The only real
problem with these studies is that we will not soon run out of material.
Much is wrong with America. A country led by a Scarecrow,
backed up by a band of fools, is not about to reassert world leadership. As
Miss Giggles herself, Vice President Kamala Harris, hops around Southeast Asia
claiming that America is a reliable ally, the prime minister of Singapore
managed to challenge her assertion-- to her face.
When Asian leaders fail to respect your face, it means that
they no longer respect you. They are treating you like a clown because you have
been acting like a clown. It was a strange moment indeed.
So, among the analyses of America’s current failed state, we
have this from one Peter
Savodnik. Normally, he writes for Vanity Fair. This time, his essay has
appeared on the Bari Weiss Substack. Again, hats off to Weiss for landing on
her feet after unceremoniously ditching the New York Times.
Many people are talking about the Savodnik essay, so here
are a few excerpts, with comments. After sharing some domestic scenes-- why do
writers feel they have to share such personal details?-- he opens with his
theme-- failure.
It is tonic:
Then, we failed. We failed over and over and over. In
Iraq. In Afghanistan. But also — and this was harder at first to see — at home.
We kept electing commanders-in-chief who had never
served, who had credentials but had never built anything, whose success resided
atop the more substantive success of more serious people. The post-Cold-War
president could make you feel all kinds of things, but he was always a little
out of his depth because he had very little to begin with. He made promises he
did not really understand. We won’t just pummel Afghanistan into glass. We’ll
turn it into a Jeffersonian republic. We’ll make these people into a people
they have never been, even though no one — the Brits, the Soviets, the Persians
— has ever attempted as much, let alone achieved it. We will do it because
we’re Americans.
It wasn’t just our presidents. It was that the whole
machinery of American government seemed less capable of doing big things:
mopping up New Orleans; quashing the subprime meltdown; making sure Big Pharma
didn’t kill us with painkillers.
One might rejoin that Donald Trump did actually build
things, but he had a devilishly difficult time getting the government to do
much of anything. When he did, the results were often positive, but Savodnik’s
larger point resonates.
Like most of our recent presidents, the people who have been
running the country did not rise up through the ranks. They did not earn their
way by ascending the ladder of political service. They were most often
amateurs, propelled to the top by a combination of good looks and charisma.
Evidently, Savodnik is referring to one George W. Bush, a
man who was largely in over his head-- as was his predecessor and as was his
successor-- but who managed to glom on to the notion that we would build a
democracy in Afghanistan. It was, dare we say, a fool’s errand, and certainly
was a major contributing factor in our two decades long Afghanistan adventure.
We might also ask who was advising Bush, but no one seems much to care.
People got seriously torqued when Tom Friedman suggested
that as long as America could not complete a high-speed rail line it was not a
serious country. And yet, from Tim Cook to Elon Musk to Marc Andreeson, people
in the tech world have bemoaned the fact that American workers lack initiative
and skills. A few days ago I reported an essay by a trio of serious
mathematicians, to the effect that we were falling seriously behind the nations
of the Far East because we had chosen to teach critical race theory, but not
advanced math.
At this point, Savodnik makes a telling point. Our great tech
companies do not create as much as they connect people. If you ask who is
building the networks of 5G infrastructure throughout the world, the answer
will not be America.
Worse yet, high tech companies have mostly served to produce
spurious connections between people. One might say that the connections
established over social media are more virtual than real. After all, Facebook
serves no useful function in society. Its efforts to render itself useful by
joining with Twitter in censoring voices it does not like has exposed it for
the waste that it is.
The fastest-growing technology companies didn’t create so
much as connect. They connected us with friends and drivers and places to eat
and to stay. Uber was great, but no one was pitching apps to tackle
joblessness, cancer, alienation.
The more we communicate online the less we communicate in
person. We do not converse with other people any more. And thus, the social
fabric is fraying, if not being shredded:
We talked with more people than ever. The number of
acronyms and emojis we vomited out — voicelessly, by way of thumb — exploded.
But the things we said were more trite, thinner. Which made everything faster,
smoother, “smarter,” and exponentially lonelier.
We were stuck in the middle of this strange contradiction
— the more and the less blended together. Which left everything
feeling flat. Even those interactions that still took place IRL,
which were always being interrupted by a ping or a vibration or someone glancing
at a screen, wondering whether more interesting things were happening in this
other invisible, parallel universe.
Social media seemed to make relationships with human beings
obsolescent. They are, as a movie whose name I forgot showed clearly, addictive
substances. Heck, even the president of China pronounced them to be like opium.
Those who know Chinese history understand that that nation has very little
tolerance for opiates sent into the country from the Anglosphere. Remember the
Opium Wars?
Of course, once Xi Jinping started denouncing social media
companies for their negative impact on children and even adults, good Americans
rose up to defend social media and to denounce the authoritarian
Chinese. It wasn't a sign of competent thinking.
Many Americans know that children are being serious damaged
by their addictions to social media, but when the president of China decides
that he is going to try to do something about it, we defend social media. Or
better, we complain. It beats doing something to rein in the totalitarians who
run Facebook and Twitter.
Savodnik seems to think that we should all be having
difficult conversations. I would be happier to see people exchanging greetings
politely. Difficult conversations tend to be divisive:
But we forgot that it was also impossible to get by
without other human beings. We were relieved we no longer had to have difficult
conversations — one could simply ghost or delete or block — but we started to
think this might not be healthy. Difficult conversations, after all, were
important and good, and they instilled character. They made us more real. We
yearned for the days before high-speed and we talked endlessly about the
importance of authenticity. The truth is, we just missed it.
Serious adults decided that they needed to learn how to use
Tik-Tok-- whatever that is?-- but that they need not provide moral guidance to
the young. It has been a major moral failing:
The people in charge stopped being adults, which meant
they stopped upholding the values and standards of those who came before and
they rationalized this abandonment by telling themselves that the
Tik-Tokification of American discourse was harmless or forward-looking or a
good way to “engage” Gen Z. They forgot that it was their job not to engage
with the young but to teach them.
So, we have gotten confused. We are not concerned about
getting things done, about building things, about leading adult lives. We think
that it’s all about therapy and that if we rejigger our mindset then naturally
all will be will.
They were confused, and, in their confusion, they failed
to distinguish between influencers — otherwise known as popular people with
short shelf lives — and leaders, who were willing to harness and even sacrifice
their popularity in the service of something bigger than themselves. Everyone
in the land of this new, horizontal, non-elite elite, was a brand now, and they
spoke the same stupid, happy lingo of the H.R. Department — relentlessly
upbeat, irony-averse, disingenuous, parochial. They thought the worst thing in
the world was to offend. They said amazing a lot.
Savodnik identifies someone called Benny Drama, an idiot
influencer who appeared at the White House in order to encourage people to get
vaccinated. So, the Biden administration was wallowing in stupidity while
Afghanistan was burning:
They were disconnected from the gravity of the moment,
because, like all adolescents, they hadn’t yet come into possession of
themselves. They were silly and trite and self-important. They were conduits
for social-media personalities. They thought bubble-gum phenoms like Benny
Drama were clever.
It’s worth noting that the White House released that
Benny Drama video — which was meant to encourage all of us to get our
vaccinations — weeks after the
State Department warned that Kabul was on the brink of falling to
the Taliban and exactly one week before all those Afghans crammed themselves
into the wheel well and climbed onto the wing of that C-17, hoping that,
somehow, when they opened their eyes, they would be in America.
We are drowning in an ocean of inanity. A nice phrase.... We
have failed to educate children and we want to cover up our failures by telling
them that their mental drool makes them surpassingly intelligent. Just ask
Benny Drama.
Our elites’ dereliction of duty, their forgetting — about
who they were supposed to be and, just as important, what America was supposed
to be — is mostly to blame for the ocean of inanity that has engulfed us. The
multiplying stupidities. The mythologies we promulgate online unironically or
strategically. The preeners. The pronoun displayers. The opportunists. Michael
Moore with his mindless Instagram post about everyone having their own Taliban.
A genuine elite would know enough, be strong enough, to
say: enough. To say: no. To say: that is nonsense.
A genuine elite would care little about how many
followers it had. It would be steeped in its many responsibilities — to those
who had come before and those who were yet to be born — and that sense of
responsibility would be reflected in its nourishing and cultivation of the
institutions of American life. It would ensure that those institutions remained
tethered to their heritage while open to new voices. An ever-expanding, renewing
worldview. Like America itself.
Savodnik explains that we are governed by weaklings. Take
the blithering fool running the State Department, coupled with the woke crowd
at the Pentagon-- we do not have to go very far to find evidence for his view:
Instead, we are governed by weaklings whose weakness has
enabled all species of moral relativism. The identitarian left can no longer
distinguish between its political foes and those who are truly evil. It cannot
see that the “toxic masculinity” it decries extended
the lifespans of Afghan women and shielded them from their would-be
rapists and enabled their daughters to go to school. The identitarian right
wonders aloud why America should absorb the Afghan interpreters who helped us
prosecute a 20-year-war in their country. It cannot see that admitting these
refugees is a matter not of immigration policy, but of honor and integrity and
preserving these values that, it claims, are central to the American character.
Both camps have been permanently alienated from their home. Both are incapable
of charting a way forward, because they have forgotten, among all the many
other things, where we are going. Our ignominious departure from Hamid Karzai
International was presaged years ago by their ignorance and cravenness.
What now?
We have arrived at the second bookend: the Afghans
falling from the sky.
Of course, it wasn’t really a bookend. “Bookend” implies
symmetry. This wasn’t symmetrical. The first fall was horrifying, but it was
the first. It signaled the start of something, and it signaled the hope that,
soon, everything would be different.
Now we know that nothing will be different. That we have
been returned to September 11, 2001, but that it is worse this time, because no
one fears us and everyone knows we’re never going back. That nothing can be
done. About Afghanistan and, really, America. There is a sense of inevitable
decline.
He is not very optimistic about America. Then again, neither
am I.
2 comments:
That Joe Biden, a man with obvious dementia, was elected President says we are not a serious country. That the democrat party would choose such a man says they have lost all sense of responsibility to the country and become pure evil.
I'm 77. Worked as a RN since age 20. Married twice, buried both husbands to major illnesses. Raised 1 daughter who, thankfully today, is strong, courteous and has a functional realistic brain. Through all these many years, I'm sad to say I saw all of this current mess coming and wondered, over and over, why none of my friends, cohorts, saw it???? When Trump ran in 2016, I felt rejuvenated and a new energy because thru all my life, our country has been run by and governed by life-long politicians ...they strive for power. He was not of them! New blood...new inspiration...and a willingness to fight for our Constitution and freedom I had never seen before. A man who already had billions so couldn't be bought. A man who so loved America that he worked 24/7 to accomplish goals. Then..........I saw him taken down by a Leftist Communist Socialist Media, made up of a generation of indoctrinated college students, a bunch of people (many elite women who couldn't stand to be insulted by his Tweets using the same words they spoke daily) It was the highest form of hypocrisy I've ever seen (and I've seen quite a lot).........They and other Leftists had such hatred for this one man that THEY voted and have brought our country low now. Much because of pure hatred and FEAR of change. But, just wait! Their will be huge backlash to them all....it may take time...but it's coming. People are waking now, for many, many reasons. America has been and always will be a strong, free, lawful country. We may be down right now, but by God, we are not out!!!
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