The search for sanity and principle in 2024 post-America
Feeling fissures under my feet on this narrow sliver of terrain I inhabit
Even though the various voices participating in our societal cacophony come up with ever-wackier utterances, a lot of those utterances are pretty predictable.
For instance, was there any doubt that the Biden camp would instantly respond (I would use the word “pounce,” but that seems to be regarded as exclusively an arrow in the left-leaning media’s quiver, to be used when it’s Republicans responding to something) to the Very Stable Genius’s I-hope-the-economy-does-its-crashing-within-the-next-year remark? One couldn’t ask for lower hanging fruit in the quest for fodder for preening and tsk-tsk-ing. Beltway journalists, of course, had to make it a major story, although it’s really a development on the the-temperature-reached-thirty-two-degrees-and-water-froze level.
Something else worth noting is the parallel sabotaging of basic US foreign policy on either side of the spectrum. Republicans in Congress - certainly, the wack-jobs like Matt Gaetz in the House and J.D. Vance in the Senate, but also less fevered types who, in this day and age have to tailor their positions to the prevailing zeitgeist - are holding up the providing of what Ukraine needs to decisively force Russia out of territory that was universally recognized as sovereign Ukrainian land prior to 2014. Across the aisle, the likes of Rashida Tlaib are dead set against the US supporting the only Western nation in the Middle East in the latest and arguably most barbaric in the regularly occurring attacks it’s been dealing with since the 1948 establishment of its modern iteration.
Representative Elise Stefanik comported herself admirably when she confronted Harvard president Claudine Gay (who, as we know, has since resigned) at the House Education and the Workforce Committee in December. That episode led to such positive further developments as Harvard donors pulling their cash from that institution over turning a blind eye toward campus Jew-hatred, and a career-long string of instances of plagiarism on Gay’s part coming to light. Howls from the Left, once again, with utter predicability, tried to make this about the white patriarchy taking out “brilliant” back women. Alas, Stefanik is blowing her own credibility by echoing the Very Stable Genius in his use of the term “hostages” to describe those in legal trouble for their participation in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. And let us remember she got her position as the third most powerful Republican in the House because the voters of Wyoming, who overwhelmingly supported sending Liz Cheney, who had a considerably more conservative record than Stefanik, to the House three times, gave Cheney the heave-ho because she forthrightly characterized January 6 as what it was.
You can tell that it wouldn’t do much good for Precipice to try to attract a readership that was gearing up to support either brand in the hot mess into which post-America is plunging in 2024. On the other hand, I’m not keen on this site assuming an identity as your go-to-source for relentless doom-posting,
But I don’t harbor a particularly sunny view of our civilization’s prospects. As I said in the concluding paragraph of the previous post here, I do know that all is well in an eternal sense, but even there, a steadfast clinging to that truth requires filtering through various institutional sabotages pretty similar to the policy and political ones I’ve enumerated here.
So January 2024 is no time to be mentally muddy. Nothing is more important than distinguishing the true from the false, the right from the wrong, the serious from the trivial, and the sensible from the utterly mad.