Reading notes

Tom Engelhardt writes well what I sense, too. His melancholy piece struck me powerfully. Some highlights:

[On the morning of the London bombing Bush] presented for the umpteenth time his Manichaean vision of a world of good and evil in which he and his administration are unhesitatingly the representatives of all goodness. …

There’s something so confoundingly dream-like about all this, so fantastic, even absurd … As reality grows ever darker, our President never ventures far from his scripted version of a fictional world that is nowhere to be seen. …

Whatever he may be — and it’s worth saying this exactly at such a moment — George Bush is simply not the representative of good. While holding up the banner of democracy, he and his men, experts in vote suppression and gerrymandering on their home turf, have created an ever less democratic, more intolerant, more police-ridden, more liberties-impaired America. That’s simply their record on the ground. …

What does it profiteth a man to deny this?

There’s something so painfully childlike in the spectacle of him. Here, after all, is a 59 year-old who loves to appear in front of massed troops, saying gloriously encouraging and pugnacious things while being hoo-ah-ed — and almost invariably he makes such appearances dressed in some custom-made military jacket with “commander in chief” specially stitched across his heart …

There’s something unbelievably stunted about all this. He and his top officials seem almost completely divorced from any sense of the actual consequences of their various acts and decisions. They live in some kind of dream world offshore of reality, which would perhaps not be so disturbing if they didn’t also control the levers of power in what, not so long ago, was regularly referred to as the “lone” or “last superpower” or the globe’s only “hyperpower.” …

What chills me is this near-complete disconnect from observable reality, the adamant unwillingness to face it, and the over-the-top forcible attempts to silence or discredit any who seek to point out facts and consequences.

I keep flashing back to the bits of control systems theory I remember from engineering school: when a control system’s incoming feedback data are scrambled or deleted on arrival, or the means of sensing them are rendered inoperable, then the necessary feedback loop is broken: there is no control, no guidance, no destination. Instead, the system spins further and further out of control until it fails.

The lights are on in the cockpit … but the crew is stoned.

I think we can do better than hurtling through space until we crash. Our brains neither evolved nor were designed to just sit idle. Let’s use ‘em.