The Bubble That Pops the Bubble

world-world appears behind symbol-world

If you’re an American and you’ve traveled in Europe, you’ve probably taken some advice from the travel writer and PBS host Rick Steves. But in a popular post on I-still-call-it-Twitter, Steves offers this remarkable advice that you should definitely not take: “The world needs not American isolation, but American leadership. Not the chaos of Trump, but the stability of @KamalaHarris.”

The person who sent Mike Pompeo to negotiate the Abraham Accords is American isolation, you see. He embodies the American withdrawal from the world, the stubborn refusal to engage with anything overseas at all.

Fortunately, though, we now have stability, because Trump is out of the White House. The war in Ukraine is very stabilizing, and the war in Gaza, and the rockets fired from Lebanon at Israel, and the ships being attacked in the Red Sea. Trump was chaos, but now we have stability and peace. Strong Kamala Harris is boldly telling weak Donald Trump to his face that Putin would “eat him for lunch,” and doing so as the current vice-president in the administration that watched Russia invade Ukraine. Don’t miss this recent and really quite interesting observation about the ships being attacked by the Houthis, by the way:

The Attacks in the Red Sea Have a Pattern

My goodness, we should sure be grateful that Trump is no longer in the White House. He caused so much chaos, and that’s all over, now.

Mainstream discourse has become psychotic. Here, go read a definition of psychosis. Applicable? We need to stand with brave leaders like Dick Cheney and vote for Kamala Harris, so we can have stability and order!

Look at the world. Look at the actual, the things that exist in physical reality. What is the condition of the country under the Never Trumpian stable influence of mainstream governance?

NASA has had astronauts stuck in space since June, on what was supposed to be a days-long mission, and hopes to bring them home in February, while NASA facilities have a multibillion-dollar maintenance backlog.

The US Forest Service manages 300,000 square miles of public land with a $9 billion budget, less than a third of which is designated for wildland fire management. Result:

Forest Service firefighters have long made about half the pay of other fire agencies, causing considerable turnover, although legislation from the relatively non-insane Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema has begun to address that pay disparity. It’s been a struggle, because Congress has had difficulty finding the money to pay hundreds of millions of extra dollars for wildland firefighting. Meanwhile: “Congressionally Approved Ukraine Aid Totals $175 Billion.”

Without stewardship, some federal lands look like this (click this link to play the video):

Meanwhile, as I’ve said before, the Oakland activist Seneca Scott makes a detailed argument about the condition of his Blue Zone city by just walking around:

We have massive and metastasizing encampments in cities and forests, with giant piles of trash and widely distributed human waste. Obvious conclusion: vote with the mainstream political class to guarantee stability and order.

TDS is an especially unpleasant form of affluenza, and follows easy affluence, while widespread affluence follows a bunch of foundational behaviors and unearned structural supports built by earlier generations. We’re losing those. Systems that mostly run in the background, properly unnoticed in healthy times, are degrading. A form of political expression based in social class — we hate the stupid poors in flyover country, those Trumptards — is grinding down the country with its relentless symbol focus: Haitians DO NOT eat cats, racist, because all immigrants are invariably wonderful. But when the country is worn down, the technocratic managerial class, the laptop class, loses the foundation of its easy comfort. The people who are engaged in this endless symbol-performance are sustaining the forces that are grinding away the foundation of their affluence and ease, which gives them the comfort to sustain the symbol-performance.

The bubble people are building toward the destruction of their bubble world, and they have no idea.

I don’t think that Donald Trump is the savior figure who magically reverses all of this decline, though I do very much think that his political survival serves as a brutal rebuke to the governing class that has caused it — and the rebuke has great significance as a movement toward a cultural inflection point. I’m absolutely certain that the mainstream gibbering about President Kamala Harris producing stability and order is the precise form of madness that’s destroying the country.

It may be time to look around with great care, and see the warning lights that are flashing in the world of the real.