Dummocracy
Thursday night was the first debate between Biden and Trump in the 2024 race. I lasted about twenty minutes before tapping out.
Decades ago, I worked for almost a year in nursing home as a certified nursing assistant. The world was different then and I was young, directionless and looking for a life that was economically viable and engaging. Professional nursing seemed like a good path and the best place to start was at the very bottom as a nursing assistant, caring for people who were poor, dying and in the worst conditions, socially and economically.
One of the best perks of the job was working at nights. The world is less disturbing from midnight to 5 AM even if you wear yourself out changing diapers, watering patients, cleaning up spills, turning decrepit bodies over, helping nurses, etc. One nurse I worked with used to tell stories. One of her more memorable ones involved a patient whose leg had basically rotted off. When a CNA had gone to turn her, the leg below the knee just went, "Plunk!"
Other stories involved flies laying eggs in open scabs, noxious smells from patients with wounds on their skin and other horrors of samsaric existence. Really good stuff to draw on when pondering dukkha, the cycle of birth and death and the like. As the human body approaches final break up into the four elements, it can become so frail, so disgusting. It was probably here that I began pondering the illusion of the steel marble, the solid, impregnable identity that we supposedly have from moment to moment, decade to decade.
The Buddha would ask anyone experiencing extreme old age, "Is this you?" Is this worthy of Self? Is the Self these compounded things which give way to indignity, abandonment, decay and finally death?
One of the spiritual traits you have to hone is the ability to feel compassion for someone who is literally falling to pieces. The job could be extremely draining emotionally. In the early 90s, before the Internet, folks were different in terms of their ability to show empathy and relate to others. Some of the people I worked with came from very modest economic backgrounds, were not well educated at all, but showed some of the best grace to people who had been abandoned by their families to the ravages of penurious old age. The last people that the elderly see in nursing homes are underpaid, overworked people. I was fortunate that the ones I worked with were pretty compassionate.
The liberal democratic form of government much slobbered over in the West has gone big into military conscription and forced servitude in the cause of killing recently, with all the Western nations discussing the need to revive drafts or, in the case of America, to expand selective service registration to women. Because healthy societies send women, the bearers of future generations, to be blown up by drones in muddy trenches. I was appalled to watch a video of Russians recovering a pregnant Ukrainian woman on the battle field. Maybe it was fake, but what isn't fake is the use of women on the frontlines in Ukraine. That's happening now.
If the country really wanted a national service core that benefited society as a whole, it would mandate two years of service of working in a nursing home. If you feel called to blow up children on a beach with a cluster bomb in Crimea, you are more than capable of cleaning up your fellow citizens who have reached the end of life. Sure, if you are an American hero, you are only relaying the coordinates to the rascally Russky children playing in the sand, not actually mashing the button that sends the missile flying to them.
Working in a nursing home will sober you up about life while the former, blowing up people with hi-tech missiles and drones, will just make you another one of the dead-on-the-inside, sociopathic side effects of modern technology.
There would be a vigorous fight against such an elder care conscription program of course. Men (and now, women) are easily trained to kill other people, including women, children, the indigent and the elderly as part of the duties surrounding forced military service. The hindrances found in the human heart and spoken of in Buddhism make this easy; fear convinces us that it is essential to national survival. Forced conscription to tend the elderly as they are dying is of course off the table since the care of other citizens is not essential to national survival. See how that works? Ill will towards other comes easily and it's not a problem to train people to act on this. Training people to feel empathy is much harder.
I realized the backbreaking work in understaffed nursing homes making 50 cents above minimum wage was not for me. Any plans I had for nursing school faded quickly as I had no car, no savings, no inside track towards the goal. We did a lot of dangerous stuff with patients because we were always shorthanded and safety guidelines went out the window.
If you were the kind of person who showed up at a job and did it halfway well, you could expect to be called non-stop on your days off to pick up additional twelve hour shifts to cover for no-shows and drop outs. Gary, one of the hard workers on my team, was putting in 70+ hour weeks regularly for the overtime pay. I was way lazier. Still am. Moving other humans into and out of showers, feeding and cleaning up after them is physically demanding, but Gary was around 35-40 and on his own. No wife, no kids, just work to survive.
For me, it was a recipe for burnout. One day a sibling called me and said, "We're starting a business and need you to join us." That was the end of my foray into "health care."
A few years ago, I met a woman doing the CNA thing. Nothing had really changed at all but the pay had increased during COVID. It was still back breaking labor doing dangerous stuff in one of the lowest possible roles you could have in society: caring for the elderly as their bodies are undergoing the final march to death.
Then and now, people talked about the collapse of the work ethic and the laziness of the youth. As a CNA in the very early 90s, I could not afford to get a very modest apartment unless I was willing to match Gary's work week and forfeit a social life. I lived with my parents. All of the things we see now among Millennials and Zoomers as far as living situations were present then among GenXers like myself: youth living at home because the economy was soft, the end of real jobs for high school only graduates. The one saving grace that GenX had was the advent of HTTP and the web browser. Another topic for another day. Suffice to say, GenX was heading towards Zoomerville before the explosion of the Internet-based digital information age and the loosening of all sane financial regulations under the Clinton government.
The tech boom forced global capitalism to take a step back and find a solution to the outbreak of a recovering healthy middle class. Fortunately, they found India and created the H1-B program. Every right thinking, college-educated person understands that a thriving middle America causes inflation and the best way to handle increasing pay raises and standard of living increases is to move the work overseas or bring in indentured servants under "legal" programs. We must protect C-level compensation packages at all costs. But I digress.
Biden reminds me of the patients I used to care for. The stiff gait, the shambling walk, the glazed eyes filled with bewilderment and trepidation to the goings on in his vicinity, the voice that bursts forth in anger and irrational babbling before fading off into ghostlike whispering.
My mother in her last year or two life was very much like Biden now in his decrepitude and was only older than him by two years. This month is the first anniversary of her passing. Her dementia was brought on by a brain tumor produced from a metastasizing cancer in the lungs which had spread through out her arthritis-wracked body. Mom was a life long smoker, switching to really awful, heavy cigarillos the last couple of decades to hasten her own death. The problem with a long life is that it leaves you with a lot of free time towards the end. Well, it used to.
Biden reminds me of her and of all the elderly who've lost their minds to the causes and conditions which accompany aging, sickness and death. My mom's dementia was accompanied by a lot of negative verbal abuse and viciousness that made caring for her extra challenging for some members of the family. I could tell myself and my siblings that her poison was caused by failing health, but it could still mess with you.
I was not disturbed by her decline, having already witnessed all sorts of things in the nursing home. One 90 year old lady I cared for would lay stiff in her bed all day, blind, demented and sobbing while rubbing her clitoris constantly. Efforts were made to keep her from overdoing it since elderly skin is fragile. Demented people say the darndest things and sometimes they just make weird noises.
All of Biden's signs of decline were present in 2020 and earlier.
Understandably, much was made of Trump's lying during last night's debate. No matter how you look at it, he made so many false statements that, were it not for the savior complex baked into the Western (and to a lesser extent, Eastern) psyche, he would be dismissed as unworthy of any office. In the West, the "O Savior Save Us!" outlook is hardened and reinforced by two thousand years of Christianity, whose followers have been taught that they are saved by Jesus, "without whom they can do nothing." While the faith is dead in the West, its psychological influences are still very apparent, especially when things are falling apart. The Good Shepherd is the one who seeks out the lost sheep and lovingly restores them to safety with the flock. We Westerners are always waiting for this benevolent being to save us. It's not Aryan and it ain't Buddhism.
Christ the King is a political figure and people look for traces of a savior in their own time among the throngs of ordinary fallible men like Trump and Biden. They aren't looking for salvation from the world however, but rather salvation from a decline in the standard of living. This is not to say that in the East saviors don't exist like Amitabha Buddha, who is very much a Christ figure revered in the Northern School. While called a "buddha," he is nothing Buddhist. He is, as they would say in Christianity, a pastoral care device meant to console people who will never have the time to practice and can only see a bleak, never ending cycle of endless toil and suffering ahead of them.
Trump was a strong savior figure in 2016 and into the first few years of Biden's administration. In 2024, I've seen a drastic drop in Trump signage and emblems in my mostly Red Team environs. A Trump supporter sets up a stand on the weekends in a nearby town to sell MAGA swag and each time I go by, it's void of foot traffic. The man and his wife just sit in their lawn seats and watch the world go by. MAGA in 2024 really consists of a remnant of true believers; COVID and its vaccines, which have been taken at least once by 81% of the American population, has severely impacted the cognitive ability of millions of adults. To the unvaxxed, the drop in intelligence and liveliness is very noticeable. A recent Pew Poll reveals most Americans believe they know at least one person who has died from the COVID vaccines.
In the Empire of Lies, the dishonesty more concerning is the one which has surrounded Biden for years. This goes along the lines of: He's keen, of agile mind and more than capable of executing his duties as Commander-in-Chief of the Greatest Nation to Ever Exist (After Israel). Kamala Harris, Joe Scarborough and various other talking heads said this only weeks ago in response to his increasingly demented behavior in public. Likely none of these multi-millionaire fibbers has ever cared for a loved one experiencing the ravages of senility and the dissolution of the self. There's a kind of meanness towards others that goes with dishonesty. Dishonest people tend to be mean people although not all mean people are dishonest. Lying to others foretells worse abuses in the future. Hardened liars carry a contempt for others, for their ability to see through their distortions.
The charge of elder abuse on the part of the Biden handlers holds merit. A liberal Catholic who has waged war on the unborn for decades and still holds good standing in the Roman Church, Biden allegedly issued a proclamation declaring the Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday of this year. Not the Saturday before or the Monday following. When asked about his proclamation which every Player Character understood was a jab at Christians on their holiest day of the year, he showed no awareness of it. NPCs of course did not register it at all. That is a mockery of his Catholic faith, one I doubt he would've tolerated were he of sound mind. Under what circumstances did he sign the document?
So why is the lie of Biden's competency the bigger concern? Trump lies easily, effortlessly and always with a view towards his own aggrandizement or the enrichment of his family. He's venal in a common way and therefore, understandable. He's an easy-to-grasp parody of the shallow American businessman, something worthy of a novel from the 1920s. His narcissism is even relatable because deep down, we all have the same love of self and the desire for others to recognize the greatness we ourselves think we possess.
I've written here before that the Trump family has by some accounts racked up an astounding amount of money in contracts, consulting fees, emoluments, patents and trademarks as the result of his stint as president. And all this before Donald J. Trump Media ($DJT) showed up this year.
DJT is a company with a market capitalization of $6.4 billion dollars, yet its revenues this year amount to a few million and has the been the object of short interest for obvious reasons. To protect Don's net worth, one GOP politician has launched an investigation into eight firms thought to be naked short selling the stock; having seen it drop from a high of $78 to $23 per share in a short period of time, political allies of Trump have grown concerned that his net worth may be under attack. This is not to say naked short selling, forbidden by the SEC, doesn't take place, but it's a little crazy to suggest that DJT is not a worthy short selling target if there ever was one. Tesla is a distant second. The problem with legal short selling is that stocks can be hard to locate and expensive to borrow, hence the lure of the naked variant.
If I had the resources, I would be shorting the shit out of the stock as well when it made sense. The ridiculous valuation has inflated Trump's net worth into the billions when he possesses modest talents in business and his Truth Social is of zero consequence in the social media sector. DJT's stock if it were fairly valued would stand at around $4 per share and his company would have something like a $50 million valuation. Trump's financial and political fortunes have been buoyed greatly by liberal media like NBC and CNN over the decades. CNN gave him millions and millions in free ad time in 2016 and would, if presented the same setup, do it again if there was a chance to boost its flagging viewership.
Good fortune favored Trump with a wealthy dad who was able to give him benefits very few ever get. His DJT enterprise is like his others, based on the bluster of image and ego. No tangible value is produced for its investors much like nothing good was given to the American people as the result of his presidency. Trump was the first to betray the promises to his base and the first to push a vaccine that has killed and maimed in the millions. When warned by people close to him of the harms, he's blown them off.
But with Biden, the entire inner party has to pretend that he's able to do the job when those of us out in redneck flyover territory see the signs of advanced old age, sickness and imminent death as plain as day. We've seen the decline in people in our immediate family and understand its inescapable course.
The phrase "elder abuse" has been bandied about a lot in the last year or so because it aptly fits the shambling, pale, corpse-like figure who is passed off as POTUS by a group of jackals who remain faceless while causing great destruction and suffering.
It takes a significant degree of contempt for the electorate to have supported Biden for so long and to lie to the people with such recklessness. Talking heads today and last night acted as though this was the first time for any cause of concern over the president's cognitive decline. Everything else prior to the debate was just conspiracy theory advanced by white trash. For all their stupidity, venality and corruption, this is simply not true and they know it. Biden has been incapable of carrying out his duties as president since day one.
As wars have spread and the U.S. has pushed confrontation with a peer nation capable of unleashing great devastation, the inner party has acted as though Biden is in control and running things with the steady hand of an experienced statesman. But most of us with life experience knew he could not be running anything and wondered about our rules-based order which was supposed to be managed by a lawfully elected leader with basic working mental faculties.
But the lies and the lying and the contempt have gone on for years... And still no one knows who is running the show. And to be sure, it is a shit show complete with poopy diapers and cringe, gallows humor entertainment.
The Aryan traditions never speak of a golden age where we have a republic or a democracy as the ideal arrangement for mankind. There is the wheel turning monarch of the East; in the West, a few Christians hold out for the equivalent in the form of a saintly French king who emerges from obscurity during the West's darkest hour to restore order, law, prosperity, fraternity and true charity.
King Arthur is another manifestation of the same Aryan political aspiration. We want Arthur or Aragorn and the age of greatness they bring. The movie version of Tolkien's The Return of the King was for many millions of Westerners, a powerful vision for a society shaped by dhamma and basic goodness. Who doesn't daydream about living in Gondor after the eradication of the orcs and the restoration of the monarchy? Little girls want to be princesses who grow up and marry princes who will one day become kings. They don't fantasize about marrying the labor secretary or the vice president. These are do-nothing jobs and inspire nothing in us.
There is no savior here in these stories of great monarchs although one could argue this based on Aragorn. The King is not so much a savior but the manifestation of reality; he is reality and the good life flows from him. He is what was supposed to always be as a golden light and therefore, is no savior.
Cynically, one can say that these monarchs are the objects of fairy tales and that the real world requires men of the caliber of Sunak, Macron, Biden and Trump. List any political figure you want from the last fifty years, you will find at best something less than mediocrity in his character and leadership. From history, we know that there were monarchs who were good, who served as the father of their people and precipitated golden ages. In democracy, the servitude and eventual enslavement of the entire population is considered fine so long as every commoner is under the same yoke. The inner party remains exempt as always of course.
In Buddhism, it is related that Siddhartha had two paths available to him in his last life: that of the wheel turning monarch who would usher in a great golden age or that of a buddha who, through superhuman efforts, would teach sentient creatures how to end their suffering permanently. He chose the latter out of compassion, foreseeing that his dhamma would be more salubrious in the long run than even the greatest golden age of kingship.
Democracy is like the ads we are confronted with on a daily basis: filled with falsehoods, distortions, forward lies and exaggerations. Biden's cognitive acuity and Trump's business acumen are just more of the lies we think nothing of anymore. We no longer even care about the fraud in advertising and think it normal for political leaders to behave dishonestly. We are men living in ruins.
In my lifetime, nothing has been made better by democracy and those who practice become, like Biden's handlers, power-hungry boogies completely blind to truth. Or they become like Trump and his family – vain and inconstant, always looking for the next buck to be made.
Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband were, like vultures, scouting real estate for lucrative future development projects in the blasted, corpse-infested rubble of Gaza not more than a few months after October 7th. You need to hustle to make it in America and the Trumps, Bidens and Kushners are masters of the art of the hustle.
