Essays in Idleness

“Imagine you woke up after the 2024 U.S. presidential election and found that Donald Trump had been re-elected and chose Rudy Giuliani for attorney general, Michael Flynn for defence secretary, Steve Bannon for commerce secretary, evangelical leader James Dobson for education secretary, Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio for homeland security head, and Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman,” … &c.

Yes, this would cheer me up.

It was how the (risibly sub-literate) Thomas Friedman greeted the victory of Bibi Netanyahu in the New York Times. Israel supplied Friedman’s latest threat to democracy; because the more conservative (and possibly saner) faction had won an election there. I had not been exposed to “Mr Flatworld” for some time. Alas, my earnest attempts to censor my own Internet feed have proven unsuccessful. An exuberant mess of garbage continues to seethe through.

While I do not “support” any politician, my dislike of the species (and their servants, in journalism) is neither equal, nor constant. The more a politician is despised by the Left, and the pompous thespians of smugness, the more easily I can endure him. My suspicious nature does not cease to be watchful, however. For what is this gentleman (or God help us, lady) doing in politics? Mr Trump and Mr Netanyahu can blame only themselves, for descending into such a trade.

Nothing good is likely to come of their best efforts. They only inspire their enemies, to opposite policies, unambiguously destructive of public order and security. The odd “great man” is invariably succeeded by a Biden.

On the eve of yet another cataclysmic election, in which the inhabitants of the United States will admit the disastrous mistakes they made in the last one, the media are distended with vacuous rhetoric. This is the compressor technology of our (false, imaginary) collective soul; and like every other form of technology, it exists for a purpose, and that purpose is bad.

Thomas Aquinas was right. Evil is rooted in nothingness.