Roger Simon asks: “who’s causing America’s breakdown?”
When can you remember two New York corporate lawyers tossing a Molotov cocktail into a cop car?
Or how about the city executives of Santa Monica, California, warning via social media that their many trendy shops and upscale restaurants were about to be looted en masse the day after similar actions had already occurred, then doing nothing as millions, perhaps billions, in damage was done to one of the wealthiest parts of our country?
The amazing thing is that it hasn’t happened sooner. Every few years a new extinction has threatened the earth. The population bomb, nuclear winter, Y2K, the ozone layer, global warming, climate change, racial genocide. How did we stand it for so long?
Maybe the system is having a nervous breakdown to keep from going crazy. The left is now “kiting” their narratives like a bankrupt kites checks. Mueller, impeachment, lockdown, riots have followed each other in such quick succession each drama seems almost designed to replace the last. Yet there’s no resolution to anything. Just a series of faces leering out of the darkness, an endless tunnel with one rung showing dimly after the next, like a scene out of a nightmare.
It’s all to be continued. FISA abuses are still not fixed. Congress has put the process of impeaching the president “forever” on hold. The public has already forgotten the nursing home death debacle, though it killed tens of thousands. Social distancing is history, though politicians shut down the economy to achieve it.
Give it a few days and the narrative will move on from George Floyd because big government can’t solve the problem of police misconduct since the police are part of government itself. Instead, the narrative will focus on another crisis, another fit of frenzy.
After all, it has already forgotten Justine Damond, a 40-year-old Australian-American woman, who “was fatally shot by Mohamed Noor, a Somali-American Minneapolis Police Department officer, after she had called 9-1-1 to report the possible assault of a woman in an alley behind her house.”
Philando Castile, also shot dead in the Twin Cities, well who’s he? And who remembers that perhaps thousands of poor street criminals were ‘disappeared’ into a ‘black site’ in Homan Square, Chicago, for ‘Guantanamo style’ investigation? Nobody. Only a few months ago in the distant years before the virus, one female presidential candidate accused another of framing innocent black men to advance her career. That’s now useful only for Trivial Pursuit.
Floyd will be forgotten because it’s easier to move on than curb the power of police unions and limiting prosecutorial immunity. That requires solutions; it means closure in a world where the biggest government agency is the Department of Unfinished Business. There’s no resolution to anything in public life because it’s easier to focus on a new headline about the same problem in another place. In a sad sort of way, Floyd is of a piece with Flynn. There’s a direct line between framing a three-star and choking a man to death in front of a camera. If only we could draw it … but we can’t. There’s something new on CNN.
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Books:
God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design is it Anyway?, by John C. Lennox. Oxford mathematician and author of God’s Undertaker, Lennox takes a closer look at Stephen Hawking’s logic in his book The Grand Design. In lively layman’s terms, he guides the reader through the key points in Hawking’s arguments – with clear explanations of the latest scientific and philosophical methods and theories – and demonstrates that far from disproving a Creator God, they make his existence seem all the more probable.
The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic, by Robert L. O’Connell. For millennia, Carthage’s triumph over Rome at Cannae in 216 B.C. has inspired reverence and awe. No general since has matched Hannibal’s most unexpected, innovative, and brutal military victory. Piecing together decayed shreds of ancient reportage, O’Connell tells the whole story of this apocalyptic battle for the first time, its causes and consequences, its leading players Hannibal and Scipio Africanus, and reveals the lessons it teaches for our own wars.
The Disappearing People: The Tragic Fate of Christians in the Middle East, by Stephen M. Rasche. Today, Christianity stands on the brink of extinction in much of the Middle East, the land of its birth. How did this happen? What role did Western foreign policy and international aid policy play? What of the role of Islam and the Christians themselves? How should history judge what happened to Christians of the Mideast and what lessons can be learned? This book, published in March this year, examines these questions based on the first-hand accounts of those who are living it.
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Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with your friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.
Open Curtains by George Spix and Richard Fernandez. Technology represents both unlimited promise and menace. Which transpires depends on whether people can claim ownership over their knowledge or whether human informational capital continues to suffer the Tragedy of the Commons.
The War of the Words, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea, how China is restarting history in the Pacific.
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