Thanks. I had some oven buffalo wings last night and felt a little better (fat has the most energy by mass and I needed something hot: I have a couple of bags of Chester’s Hot Fries lying around but they’re not appetizing when you’re truly hungry. You need something hot from the oven.) I had some Brisk fruit punch this morning for a little hydration and sugar, then just ordered some McDonald’s and I’m comfortable now.

I’ve done some musing over the last two days – nothing at all serious or considered, just what’s drifted through my head while I’ve walked the dog, just in terms of how we got here. After the disastrous speech at Davos this morning cooler heads seem to be prevailing, which isn’t the best thing in the world because the toothpaste is out of the tube and, to mix a metaphor, the major award is pasted haphazardly back together for now, probably with as good results. A dose of poison can be good for the soul, and honestly I was looking forward to the silver lining of perhaps jettisoning everything about modernity that I hate.

tl;dr we should be more like dogs. Immigrants good, a pox om everyone else

The easy answer to how we got here is that too many voters are unserious people. I know in 2015 I tuned into Trump’s first debate to see what he’d do, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You probably did that, too, as did probably everybody here. But some never tuned out. The Trump presidency is a dictatorship in all but name – the early Roman Empire kept republican forms, too – as were the presidencies of Biden, Obama, Dubya, Clinton, and so on. They just had more scruples. But to a good man, dictatorship isn’t necessary a bad thing.

It is a bad thing when it’s not a good man. I’m short, America in 2026, or really America after 1991, has had no point. Life has become a mindless pursuit of money and entertainment. The highest-paid and most famous people are entertainers and athletes who create nothing except for flows of money. Capitalism has turned from an engine of prosperity to money for money’s sake, and celebrities are constantly being suggested for president. Remember when 2016 was going to be Trump versus Oprah? Unserious, unserious, unserious.

I live in a roughly 50/50 community of blacks and Hispanics, generally Central American immigrants, and the neighborhood is instructive. (I only know three white people offline so I can’t really speak to them. I dislike middle-claas people im the abstract but I haven’t lived among them in almost 20 years. In general, I prefer the people where I am now.) I’ve been downwardly mobile in life, and you know what? It’s good for your perspective. If you’ve had it all and lost it all, you know that the experience of life is unchanged – it’s very much a “wherever you go, there you are” thing. Beyond a certain floor, money doesn’t mean much. I’m certainly not any less happy than I was when I was driving a (1990, but still) Cadillac in high school. Losing money isn’t a big deal, but people are more afraid of going poor than they are of death.

But the people who started at the bottom and don’t know anything else don’t know that. Native-born blacks care way, way too much about money and possessions. It’s entrenched in the culture. All most of them are good for are moral exemplars, object lessons in lust, greed, drunkenness, and avarice, like other purely atavistic beings like dogs or children. (Rednecks fill this role in a lot of areas but we don’t have them around here.) This isn’t a black or white thing; this is an American thing.

The immigrants come from less, from violence and even worse privation, but they – whether from El Salvador, Afghanistan, or Ethiopia – are good neighbors, prosocial, and upstanding citizens/residents/illegals. That in itself should be a counter to excusing bad character by blaming root causes. But the insidious thing is that their children, when they’re born here, turn into materialistic, striving, look-at-me, fame-driven true Americans. There’s something in the water, or a disease in the culture. I don’t know what the dating scene is like in Indiana, but there’s a pronounced gulf in quality between foreign-born women and American women.

I saw a statistic that floored me: something like 93% of the population has a Netflix subscription. The bottom ten percent is pretty damned poor, and they not only have broadband internet (not just 5G), but they’re spending $15 on premium television – and that 7% isn’t all the lowest of the low (I don’t have Netflix). We have nothing to live for, so we live for entertainment and money. Entertainment and money.

I’m running long, sorry – real quick, we’ve extended the franchise too far to include too many unserious and frivolous people. A broad lower-middle class with an educated ruling elite would probably be best for a realistic, sober-minded people and maximum spiritual health, with confiscatory top tax rates to encourage investment and philanthropy, with wealth above a billion dollars taxed 100%. Legislation and executive powers in an upper house of the elite, with two chief executives who have to agree, plus a lower house of the people with veto power over upper-house bills. I don’t know the answer; I’m just throwing shit out there. An idea would be to restrict the franchise to college graduates, but there are two objections: one, I’m not a graduate, but I’ll take one for the team; and two, you’d end up with a network of diploma mills selling the right to vote for money, or have the government accredit a small number of institutions, a cure worse than the disease. I think, however, that there should be a clause in the new constitution mandating it be scrapped and drafted anew every 50 years.

Last paragraph, sorry – one cause of the rot in society is the collected detritus of centuries of sins ++ slavery, dispossession, Latin American interventionism, anything that causes inequality and resentment in a government – rolling along in the course of one Constitution, kept out of tradition more than anything – I’m sympathetic to strict constructionism as the most rational legal philosophy, but it’s impossible given the age and archaism of the document so you have to take an ad hoc approach or risk absurdity. A new constitution and a new republic every 50 years, drawing from the lessons of the last and integrating newly enriched, liberated, and arrived peoples would go a long way towards fixing that, a haemodialysis of the body politic. We could honestly talk about better past times without progressives having to ritually flog themselves and the country every time we talk about something like the 1950s, which objectively was a better time for the American people. Further, the self-flagellation today turns into a reductive presentism or, worse, futurism that implies that everything in the past happened on a straight road of progress to the present, from evil to good, rather than on its own terms.

I can’t pretend to put my money where my mouth is – I’ve been known to watch MSNBC all day when there’s something big happening, and I’m most of the way through a video game on a $3500 computer (combination gaming rig, audiophile jukebox, television, movie theater, etc). Cato the Elder I am not; I live a lazy, frivolous life so it may seem hypocritical to write a moralistic screed like this, but then again Seneca didn’t practice what he preached, either.

The solution is to take ourselves down a peg so we’re not so out-of-touch-with-life rich and inculcate virtue among our youth. No more of these progressive educational theories and experiments on our children and society; no more focus on self-esteem breeding self-centered, “I deserve it” materialism. This all comes from the selfish, self-actualization ethos of the baby boomers, the worst generation in American history that gave us Donald Trump, put us in the mindset to elect him, fuelled Wall Street and a decadent society, and destroyed America in their twilight years. America started to go south about the time people stopped wearing suits.

I dunno, just throwing some stuff out there. Dog-walk thoughts. Let me know what you think.