Great Expectations
Normally, grandiose, ambitious endeavors are launched on the quiet, with little fanfare, because when they implode in process, or wither away, big hype just reveals them as utterly ridiculous.
Two such big deals have lately dominated the media: COP30 in Brazil, and Trump’s 28 point peace plan to end the Ukraine farce.
They were both hyped to the moon, and were both DOA, very obviously going nowhere, total non-starters out of the gate.
After 29 years of cosplay, showboating Lollapaloozas in which absolutely nothing of worth was ever done to actually address flagrant, inarguable, man-caused global warming, it can’t be said this latest monumental pratfall was any surprise.
It proved to be another dumpster fire of idiot contention and meaningless yammering, adorned by some brilliant, theatrical color from tribal people who are the saddest, most impotent of billions worldwide whose health and well-being is sacrificed routinely to the diabolical enrichment of the most vicious, murderous, and indifferent corporate entities on earth.
The founding purpose of this massive convocation of elements of world nations that were alive to the life-threatening menace of unlimited consumption of fossil fuels a half century ago, was determination to show, on a vast scale, how much that deadly advancing certainty appalled them, and to stop it dead.
It was thought—by many, naively; by the cynical, tactically—that the best way to emphatically convey the passionate concern they felt was to convoke a gigantic sort of public square, outside and unbeholden to governments. The idea had merit. It was to be People Power in action, a forum where the root problem could be articulated and exposed in all its fatal implications.
That noble conception was not lost on the giant fossil fuel cabal.
They saw it at once for what it was, potentially: a direct and, if continued, a mortal threat to their anti-human, anti-life dominion.
They did at once, with total commitment, what governments always do to strangle any movement or proposed law that will benefit the people: they moved in with money to take it over. From its beginnings these sorry exercises in futility have been owned and dominated by massive, fossil fuel Capitalism.
Ignoring the existential reality of irreversible disruption of human society and its imminent extinction due to ecological breakdown and failure, is an obscenity on so cosmic a scale that excoriation can never be adequate. It is the proof of Man’s Death Wish, the shoddy tribute our species pays to its own desired extinction.
While this latest macabre jest was in progress, Trump announced his 28 point plan and its many sub-heads as his grand effort to end the Ukraine meatgrinder. Reactions from Western media have been ecstatic, Russia has been decorously restrained, and tiny Zelensky and the EU mannequins are humiliated and bitter.
They needn’t bother. Although Trump’s plan addresses a glut of unrelated and irrelevant ideas, and goes into great detail on how this multitude of fanciful notions should be carried to fruition, it addresses none of the few essential points that provoked Russia’s SMO and initiated the conflict in the first place.
Putin was absolutely clear, both before the American financed and instigated uprising in Kiev, and well before actual combat began, as to the essential terms required to avoid it. The points he made were few, and neither obscure nor abstruse.
The Empire forbid its pathetic marionette to make the necessary concessions, which would have undercut its whole concealed but obvious purpose—to attack Russia to break it down—and so were by definition inadmissible, and the result came as promised.
In the long, gory, ruinous decade since, The Empire has done everything it dares to do to fuel the Ukrainian blood sausage maker until there is little left to save in that battered, sacrificed nation, while vainly trying, with absurd futility, to convince Russia to accede to an outcome it swore not to accept at the outset.
One of the great fascinations of our era is the observation and explication, as far as possible, of the stunning irrationality of American geopolitical behavior. There is no diplomacy; that is a thing of the past. In his ignorant, jejeune egotism, Trump proceeds by demanding what he thinks he wants and erupts in infantile vituperation when he predictably fails to get it.
Under Biden, one got used to devious criminality, clumsy and crude deception, and simple-minded reaction. The new wrinkles are the bald-faced owning of malicious intentions, commission of criminal acts openly admitted, and declarations of harmful intent and ugly purpose celebrated and rumpeted with vulgar pride.
A device always employed by dying empires is magical thinking. When its power to inflict itself on the world is gone, it substitutes
inflated, baldly inaccurate assertions that it yet remains. Hollow claims and baseless boasting gradually lose potency and, before the catastrophic end, they are seen as pure fantasy by the world.
The American Empire is fast descending in power and status and so a fatuous, brainless, self-aggrandizing buffoon has assumed authority over the functionally empty, destructive government, and substitutes his vacuous pronunciamentos for state policies.
There is an inevitability in the fall to disaster of empires that is iron and ineluctable. Kipling put it best, of the English empire: “Our far called navies melt away; on dune and headland sinks the fire. Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre”.