Squirming with power
In its April 1981 issue, Harper's Magazine published an essay called "Failure", written by a William Gaddis, later to be titled "The Rush for Second Prize". I will quote the first two paragraphs:
Ronald Reagan recalled it with the word "noble", McGeorge Bundy felt that "somewhere, somehow, the United States could have done better", and Alexander Solzhenitsyn saw the whole thing as a pacifist betrayal and a failure of nerve on the part of the American intelligentsia. Gerald Ford, speaking as our unelected president at the moment of that final humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam, chose the metaphor of the game. It seems a shame, he said, "that at the last minute of the last quarter we don't make that special effort.... It just makes me sick...."
Ford was, after all, a veteran of the playing fields of Michigan where he had been voted Most Valuable Player on a college football team that lost every conference game; but these were not the fields where winning mattered less than "how you played the game". They were closer to those of his predecessor, lately mired in Watergate while busy on the phone with strategies for the next day's victory by the Washington Redskins. These were not the fields of Eton, where Waterloo was won, but nearer those of the legendary Vince Lombardi, where "winning is not a sometime thing. It is an all-time thing. You don't win once in a while, you do them right all the time. There's no room for second place. There's only one place, and that's first place."
I don't know Mr. Lombardi well, and I ask for forgiveness if I mischaracterize him, but I ask - and perhaps it's my Taoist bent that causes me to ask this - "Is the thing aware it is in first place?" In the same sense of, am I aware I am on planet Earth, am I aware I am one among a billion, am I aware I am a mammal or so many gene expressions different from a chimpanzee?
What is the simplest definition of winning? The one that strikes me is: not losing. That these two definitions are equivalent is, strictly, correct, and this fact reveals that winning is both an active and a passive thing. Winning is conquering an environment by its defined rules, and winning is not succumbing to that environment outside of the rules, outside of human control. If your best pitcher needs Tommy John surgery, you're not making the playoffs that season; if it rains in every city you play, you can only cast blame on the clouds.
But I largely agree with Lombardi's statement: winning is a state. It is a set of conditions you enter into or exit out of. The philosophy behind that entering into or exiting out of is one of the great human obsessions. Zeno's arrow is always instructive: at what point do we know we are in the state of leaving, or coming into being? Human beings, alas, have not mastered this recognition of change. We only know when we are in or out.
I return to Gaddis:
The real marvel in our complex technological world, given the frustration implicit in Murphy's law, is not that if anything can go wrong it will go wrong but that anything goes right at all. In communication and control "we are always," wrote cybernetics' pathfinder Norbert Wiener, "fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful." The more complex the message, the greater the chance for error. Entropy rears as a central preoccupation of our time. As computer technology's appetite for precision is enhanced by its own enlarged complexity, the archenemy, disorganization, must look increasingly to human error for an ally; and failing error, where foul is useful and fair is not, to sheer deceit. If Robert McNamara's [, Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense's,] computers wanted "body counts," they should have them; if the squad leader whose job was billed as fighting for freedom knew his real job was simply to make the man above him look good to the man above him, the body count escalated accordingly; and whose bodies were they anyway? V.C.s'? Children's? Old ladies'? Clear fictions?
McNamara would come to have a fallacy named after him; the folly is, to put faith only in what can be quantified. I will try a formal definition. 1. Everything can be quantified. 2. Everything that cannot be quantified does not exist i.e. is below intellectual thought. 3. Therefore, if something cannot be quantified, then creativity is insufficient, because it can, in fact, be quantified. The end result is, then, to quantify victory or defeat, in terms of goals made, or sacks achieved, or wins in a season, or passes succeeded; in terms of killed enemy soldiers, killed allied soldiers, in terms of ammunition spent and capital lost, in terms of headlines, ceasefires, peace agreements, nevermind how material these actually are.
In short, it is easy to view life as a game, with clear rules, with clear conditions of winning and losing. In trying to grasp the concept of winning and losing, one must define rules, one must define goals, one must define progress and one must define the arena; after this flurry of defining commences the scorekeeping, the actual getting of points. But even children, very early in their intellectual development, know how to condemn this with the pithy, "But you made up the rules."
I can't help but think all of this when I examine the war in Iran.
The United States' war with Iran began on February 28, 2026, with US and Israeli strikes against the latter country; the strikes took advantage of a rare convening of Iranian officials into one location. Beyond this conference, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei's government was materially unpopular; since December 28, 2025, the Iranian people had been protesting volubly against the government. This, then, seemed like a clear victory: eliminate the current heads of government, whom the United States was unable to see eye-to-eye on many matters with, and replace them with leaders among the people, who would, either from their own hearts or, likelier, from their weakened hand, be more amenable to US goals.
This is one way to look at the game.
The other way to look at the game is, Most or all people cannot think straight when they are being bombed.
Which is what came to pass: if there was a chance for a genuine uprising in Iran, it was stifled the moment bombs fell upon the country. As it turns out, people are disinclined to pour into the streets when there are fire and shrapnel about. Secondly, the only thing defending the Iranian people from bombs is ... the Iranian government.
As we established earlier in this essay, to be winning is a state. To be in a state is to be blind to other states; our sensory organs and our predictive powers can only go so far. The United States, very simply, was so entrenched in their own game they did not recognize the game the Iranians were playing, which is the game of living.
And so the Iranians defended themselves, as is logical in the game of living. One of the means by which they defended themselves was to take over a body of water no American could possibly have cared for until the events of the war: the Strait of Hormuz. The United States, ever the conductor of international trade and an eager waver of the baton of commerce, did not realize that a fraction of the world's output in oil and fertilizer is significant, because fractions, we recall from math class, add up to a whole.
As much as I can make fun of my country, I will defend it here by saying that I see all of its actions as logical. The airstrikes were not costly; they were costly in terms of material and therefore wealth, but they were not costly in terms of personnel, which is the greater resource. We are not indifferent to the Iranian government; we are downright antipathic with them (though, I feel I should not be politically correct and equate, correctly, that Iran is, in fact, the Iranian government, in the same way the United States is the United States government). It was an exceptional opportunity, and the projected outcomes were plausible.
And yet, logical is not equivalent to factual. Logic is but a method, through which, proposition leading to conclusion, we can analyze how a chain of causes can lead to a specific end. Logic deals rather poorly with probability, particularly with probabilities that themselves were poorly calculated.
Rather, the logic - of these specific beliefs, that the Iranian government was weak and the Iranian people will be happy to topple it, leading consequently to the attack - allows me to be sympathetic. It does not prevent me from scolding.
The US-Iran War, which is currently going on as of the time of writing, is now in this state: the Iranians are now aware of external belligerence and have taken a defensive posture. We know this is the case because they perceive themselves in a position to retaliate, and are actively doing so. The United States' airstrikes are fearsome, and yet they are a method, which can be counteracted with the right means. The United States has deployed its navy to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, intended to increase economic pressure on Iran. This is a rational move, though I am unsure what its outcome will be. For all the glamor of stocks, futures, and currency valuations, markets in reality move quite slowly; Adam Smith, after all, reasoned that economies are ultimately about real, moveable, edible and useable things, not speculations. It will take some time to see if Iran can or cannot tolerate austerity. The last move for the US, which would expand its range of moves dramatically, is to put boots on the ground. By having real, mobile, dynamic human beings in the country, they will have actual eyes and hands to perceive and control the state of the country.
There is the option of the United States, simply, pulling out, but this seems unwise at the moment to do. The United States is the sole hegemon in the world. There are other countries who want to undercut this status, but the facts are rather clear: the world spends in dollars, the world speaks in English, and the American market and American education are still widely sought after. This greatly powerful country needs to exert power when it needs to, because its presence in the international world is predicated by its exertion of power. Its access to international markets and its ability to negotiate come from that power. Of course, a loss is not cataclysmic, but it's certainly chilling.
I can't speak for Gaddis's Vietnam War, but that war was ultimately not fruitless: it showed the United States' ability and willingness to pressure Asia, particularly China and the Soviet Union. If we are speaking of Vince Lombardi's game, the real battle was not measured in goals but in inches. I can't quite say what the outcome of this war will be, but I currently don't see a demonstration of American power, largely because Iran was not poised to do anything (the threat of nuclear capabilities strikes me simply as a big lie). In fact, Iran's government seems to be strengthened by the crisis of war.
I look to two examples when I think of this moment.
In the Second Punic War, Hannibal had cornered the Romans. He had sowed division among Rome's international allies and even within the Italian peninsula. He had killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the Battles of the Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae. He had been told by the commander of his Numidian cavalry that he could dine in the capital that very night. And yet Hannibal refused. He instead spent his time sowing discord among the Italians, holing in the south and petitioning for reinforcements from the Carthaginians; his overabundance of caution and therefore dithering would lead him to lose the war.
In the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians had many reasons to be satisfied with themselves. They had come off from a peace with the Peloponnesians, really the Spartans, which allowed them to rebuild material, and they held a colony called Pylos on the Peloponnesus that allowed them to harass the Spartans whenever they wanted. Furthermore, the decade of war had confirmed Pericles' arguments: the Spartans were far too conservative to contest them in what had evolved into a war of proxies, the Long Walls protected Athens, and money was the true fuel of war, and they had a lot of money. This is the time when they had hatched the Sicilian Expedition: they would send their armies to rich Sicily, subdue its militarily-inferior people, raid it for its wealth and use this same wealth to conclude the Peloponnesian War. This war, adjacent to the war they were currently fighting, they lost, and the loss from this war was so devastating that they lost the entire Peloponnesian conflict in the following decades.
This is the taint of power. The phrase of Lord Acton's, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely", is shallow, and yet there's a ring of truth in it. Power is a state, power is a posture, and yet power is ultimately a reputation, of power exerted in the past. True power is something continually tested; but the common understanding of power is precedented power. Put in another way: you may have the reputation for being the greatest runner ... until the next time you run.
If you want to maintain a reputation as a great military power, you must consistently accomplish great martial feats. If you are capable of creating the best hardware in the world, and yet you lack the strategic ability to execute on them, you are but a factory. If you possess great strategic insight and yet lack material, you are but a chess player. And if at any time you lack the right personnel, you are but a vault for a thief to sneak in.
No one truly has power; power is only demonstrated in doing. The posture of power - the need, the fear, the anxiety to appear powerful - is what corrupts and deludes.
A Postscript to the Iran War
I began writing this essay some time in April, and now it is June 18th, when the United States and Iran have entered a kinda-sorta truce - the president has signed some piece of paper saying something, which makes the truce somewhat official, even though the United States is able to resume its bombings again, as suits the temperament of the - our - my president who believes in using every card on the table.
Let's examine that statement I wrote earlier: that the United States is the sole hegemon in the world. That's not strictly true, but the statement itself is nevertheless illuminating. Our military speaks on the behalf of other countries, while the same certainly cannot be said for China nor Russia. At the end of the Second World War, there was always a chance for the economically-restored Europe to challenge the United States' reach; they didn't, tacitly allowing the US to exercise its powers over the world at the expense of Europe's own relationships, because Europe believed the relationship with the US was much more valuable. You can extend this logic to China, to India, to any other growing or grown nation.
Relationships, as it turns out, are flexible; both sides may voice displeasure in the relationship, and often, yet both sides are also leery of breaking the relationship off entirely, for that is a Pillar of Hercules no one knows what lies beyond. So long as the countries of the world believe the United States is listening to them, even if we don't always act on what they say, they're likely to remain content in the relationship. Disgruntled, sure, but content that at the very least they have some lever of control in whatever ordeal will be placed upon them.
Beyond starting a war that didn't really make much sense to begin with and revealing weaknesses in the global economy, the 2025-2029 executive has consistently and persistently withdrawn military aid from other countries, particularly during this moment in the war with Ukraine. If we are so bold to adapt the language of football into war, the annexation of Ukraine would be so many inches closer to the Czech Republic and Germany and the rest of NATO. No team is comfortable with ceding inches to their opponent, at any point in the game. To us, the US, it's a war, we may even think of it as a domestic quarrel between once-father Russia and once-son Ukraine; to them, it's an existential crisis with aromas of the Second World War.
We then berate, repeatedly, our allies' actions in terms of their economies and their cultures and even their political systems. Whether we have taken any concrete actions is a different matter, although how is one supposed to interpret the vice president stumping for Hungary's Orbán? If we are still using the analogy of a private relationship - which analogy falls apart when one realizes a private relationship is between two people while these global relationships involve millions of people - the US is daily hounding and yelling at our partner, watching their finances and reading every one of their texts, not, to be fair, throwing vases at the partner's head, then storming off to our secret girlfriend's apartment. As we have possibly observed in our personal lives, this still isn't enough to end the relationships of some people. But this is enough to end the relationships of many people i.e. people with a floor of pride in themselves.
In any case, I didn't want to spend the entire essay writing about the war in Iran, though it is endlessly interesting. I digress.
Postscript to the Postscript
It is June 20th. The truce did not last.
Groups and their thirst for power
I see this theme of power recurring in public and private arenas of life. I see this theme constantly with groups, but rarely with individuals. Regardless of mission and ideals, groups are motivated to maximize their power as much as possible - for that is the only reason behind the existence of the group.
This is something Adam Smith knew and warned about, in his "Wealth of Nations", which shares America's date of birth:
But a company of merchants are, it seems, incapable of considering themselves as sovereigns, even after they have become such. Trade, or buying in order to sell again, they still consider as their principal business, and by a strange absurdity, regard the character of the sovereign as but an appendix to that of the merchant, as something which ought to be made subservient to it, or by means of which they will be enabled to buy cheaper in India, and thereby to sell with a better profit in Europe. They endeavour for this purpose to keep out as much as possible all competitors from the market of the countries which are subject to their government, and consequently to reduce, at least, some part of the surplus produce of those countries to what is barely sufficient for supplying their own demand, or to what they can expect to sell in Europe with such a profit as they may think reasonable. Their mercantile habits draw them in this manner, almost necessarily, though perhaps insensibly, to prefer upon all ordinary occasions the little and transitory profit of the monopolist to the great and permanent revenue of the sovereign, and would gradually lead them to treat the countries subject to their government nearly as the Dutch treat the Moluccas. ... As sovereigns, their interest is exactly the same with that of the country which they govern. As merchants, their interest is directly opposite to that interest.
If a group is formed to change the state of the world, then underpinning the group's formation is a need for power. This is the same for every political entity, firm, or non-profit organization. Human beings do not coalesce unless they need to leverage the other's utility. (Groups created for artistic and cultural reasons are excluded.) By wanting power, they contrast themselves with groups that also have powers. Groups are, by nature, adversarial, and they desire the power to reduce, invalidate or defeat other groups.
Extending and probably mutating Adam Smith's thought beyond recognition, all groups want to overcome or invalidate their government. It is natural for those with power to be uneasy among others with power; this is not a trait that allows for friendship. The difference is, the government was created to protect people; every other group is a reaction or a distortion of the government. This does not deny them their existence, but it means their existences are less necessary.
And yet, as we discussed, as ancillary as these groups are, they are motivated to maximize themselves and minimize all others at every cost, as otherwise they would not exist. The tension, in a sense, is Darwinian: every species currently living in some way has adapted to their environment; every species not living has not; and "success" is primarily measured by being in the former camp, and "failure" in the latter. In short, human groups have every incentive to not fail.
Thomas Hobbes saw these tensions in the English Civil War, inspiring him to develop his theory of mutual advantage. Hobbes famously described life without society as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"; to make life less brutal and less poor, human beings had to empower one - and only one - group to ensure the protection they need to live their lives at least nonviolently. Hobbes could not be compelled to rely on empathy and reason to save human lives; power and power alone sufficed. Hence, government.
One particular train of thought highlights the aesthetic of Hobbes' government:
And as the Power, so also the Honour of the Soveraign, ought to be greater, than that of any, or all the Subjects. For the Soveraignty is the fountain of Honour. The dignities of Lord, Earle, Duke, and Prince are his Creatures. As in the presence of the Master, the Servants are equall, and without any honour at all; So are the Subjects, in the presence of the Soveraign. And though they shine some more, some lesse, when they are out of his sight; yet in his presence, they shine no more than the Starres in presence of the Sun.
A common argument against Hobbes' sovereign is that it contains total power, as in, the power to prescribe religion, justice, and speech. I would gently argue what characterizes total power is that it may do; it does not define what it should do. In the cases of extreme religious and political violence, and the extreme distortion of truth, the sovereign is provisioned with enough power to defeat these threats. It may act, or it may not; it is more important that it can.
One can easily see how current American culture defies Hobbes's prescriptions. In today's fraught political environment, Americans want less of the government, they desire to strip it bare of its powers. Speech should be "free", trade should be "free", expression, violent or not, should be "free", thereby, through Hobbes' argument, not being free, for they have no protectors. Americans want to make bets on the country's welfare, Americans want to sell speculations for things that do not exist, Americans want to speak ignorantly without correction, and Americans want to express themselves in the flags of brutality. These "freedoms" are ostensibly provided by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, that of "freedom of speech"; and yet Americans do not understand this freedom is not provided, as it were, by God, who did not care to weave it into the fabric of the universe, but by a government willing to protect citizens and punish transgressors.
By allowing so many freedoms, the government, as Hobbes predicted, empowers so many groups; as we have discussed, every group is motivated to promote itself, for the sake of its own existence. They are motivated to lie, so as to bring followers into the fold; they are motivated to bribe, so as to purchase compliance; they are motivated to subvert, so as to undermine their enemies; and, most crucial of all to their existences, they are motivated to destroy, as conflicting goals cannot coexist.
I myself am averse to government's power, and yet never have I thought that any other entity is adequate for power. Power is a reality. You must exert power to control one's destiny. (Spinoza goes further and adds that power is necessary to accept one's destiny, though his definition encompasses a more personal dimension.) If one does not consciously exert or grant power, then one unconsciously passes power onto someone else. And by no means do I trust any group of individuals with power who have not been officially sanctioned with that power.
We have arrived at the twisted inversion of the American Dream, which promises unlimited success and abundant rewards. By letting loose groups that cannot fail, we have encouraged the failure of American society.
An extreme digression; then, on gold rushes and pretending as productivity
As an extreme aside, I am obsessed with Folding Ideas' essay "Why was I invited to Beast Studios?" The essay describes a YouTube production studio called MrBeast (at this point, "studio" is the right word for it). MrBeast partnered with the aforementioned Amazon to produce a TV series called "Beast Games"; they were given a hundreds of millions of dollars to have players stack large foam colored blocks.
I find this relentlessly fascinating. If you go to a grocery store, you have an idea of what a hundred thousand or maybe even what a million dollars looks like, but you would still be far from comprehending what a hundred million dollars could translate to. And yet, a hundred million dollars were disposed of to make a series of sets where contestants underwent playground exercises.
This is not my critiquing the dollar amount. This is not my critiquing their use of that money. This is not my critiquing the concept of competition games or entertainment in general. This is not my critiquing MrBeast's ambitions. In fact, I am critiquing their lack of ambition. James Cameron's "Titanic" (1997) had a production budget of approximately 200 million dollars; it was in theaters for more than a year. Michel de Montaigne wrote philosophical essays, possibly for a deceased friend, possibly for himself; they lasted unto posterity, and they cost him nothing to write. In the middle is "Beast Games", which accomplished nothing except to ensure so-and-so were paid, with alibis. As Dan Olson pithily puts it at essay end, "There is no why; it's just what they do."
Money, and not wealth, which is a quite distinct concept, justifies itself. The makers of money defend themselves, saying many virtues go behind the money-making. I rejoinder, many virtues go behind the making of anything; only, the anything is the end, whereas the money is their end, that also happens to be a means to make more money. And, to be clear, this is a distinct concept from wealth, which, as Adam Smith puts it, is food and shelter and clothing.
The 2010s saw the birth of a peculiar cultural figure: that of the startup firm leader, ostensibly molded after Steve Jobs of Apple fame. The concept behind this figure is that they have an idea that hitherto was unrealized and, if realized, would yield great profit to the consumer, to their firm and to their investors; they are then given great investment to develop their product, for this product will reward the investment on orders of magnitude unimaginable; they then develop the product and ... nothing. Because the firm, a decade or so later, dies. No one hears about it, as no one hears death; see: Darwin.
And yet the cycle continues onward and onward, glorifying the firms that had not died, and whispering of the tales of the market Messiah that shall come to be.
Firms are necessary for a country's health, and I don't deny that developing a business is difficult and requires skill to fruit. What strikes me as odd is the surety of success. Men have ambitions and are deluded by them, sure, but generally men are realistic enough to set as a minimum goal that their profits meet their costs, give or take a margin of difference. The desire for an order of magnitude of success, disproportionate to cost, is strange and, as I implied, near-religious in its fervor and separation from reality. And orders of magnitude of success require orders of magnitude of cost.
Let's discuss what "order of magnitude" means; I've been thinking on this concept and how to demonstrate it. Let's count to one. 1. Let's count to ten. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Ten is an order of magnitude greater than one. One hundred is two orders of magnitude greater than one, and one order greater than ten. Let's count to one hundred - no, we're not going to do that.
In moving up an order of magnitude, much more happens than appending a zero. It's trivial to count to one. It's not hard to count to ten, but it's an annoying waste of time. You would have to pay most people for them to count to one hundred. Now consider the effort to count to one thousand - ten thousand - one hundred thousand - one million - et cetera.
And let's be clear: if you were tasked with counting to even one thousand, you are likely to get a number wrong or forget where you are in the count. The vastness of these numbers cannot be underestimated.
So when I mention the order of magnitude of anything, I am also bringing up the amount of irrationality and fault that goes behind that number. If you have a dollar, you can justify how you found that dollar; it was in your closet, it fell in your couch cushions, it was on the sidewalk. Ten dollars is your lunch, and a hundred dollars may be approximate to your daily pay. But as orders of magnitude accumulate, you begin to lose the tangible, direct justification for how that money was achieved and where it came from. It devolves into madness. It devolves into, as I have said, religion, and the god is called Mammon, and the Tower is Babel.
An interesting characteristic of belief is that having a belief automatically reinforces the belief; that is, one of the reasons you believe something is that you believe in it. If the belief were untrue, why would you believe in it? so the logic goes. Belief, as a result, is fairly useless; only consequences are useful. Firms believe their application and their acquisition of money are morally justified, and yet we can analyze the consequences of their use of money: nothing, and a bunch of colored blocks.
The obsession with power
I don't have anything against power; to have anything against power is to have something against human beings, for which power is accumulated. You can question how power is used and who wields it, but the very nature of power is to protect humanity and to punish inhumanity. Power enforces borders, power builds trust, power distributes food, and power can understand.
However, there are different attitudes of power. I have always seen Abraham Lincoln as understanding the purpose and mechanism of power. People, very unfairly, blame Lincoln for not punishing the South, but Lincoln was a fundamentally principled man who understood: The worst thing that can happen to the Union is to eternally stare down an enemy composed of deserters of the Union. When the South was resistant, he permitted the Union Army to cause the South to suffer; when the South was submissive, he relinquished the suffering and offered generous peace terms. The worst thing he could have done was to give them even more reason to rebel, and I think it took quite a lot of discipline on his part to pursue peace at all cost.
Not that Lincoln was particularly pleased with his entire situation. Visitors of the president knew he suffered immensely while in office, in large part because of the death of his son. He became somehow thinner, his face became somehow longer, and he feared constantly that the worst would come to pass, or he would, for some reason or other, be prevented from stopping the passage of the worst. Lincoln, at his election, was joyous because he understood the meaning of having the weight of power put upon him; he was approved by his fellow man and providence to administer unto them. The weight of this power also burdened him and sought to destroy him, but he handled it magnanimously because Fate saw it fit that he had to bear it, for reasons he could not understand.
This, to me, is responsibility. It is being entrusted with great power, knowing the origin of that power and what it can do, and being faithful to that origin and purpose. This responsibility was treated with solemnity by Washington and Roosevelt (both) and other great leaders in the past. With such a great weight, it is easy to be scared that one is not using it correctly; or that one is not answering to it well; or that the weight is misplaced; or that the circumstances are not fortuitous; or that all the work is for naught. It takes knowledge to direct power; it takes courage to act with a steady hand; it takes wisdom to learn from one's mistakes; it takes principle to move onward. These virtues, collectively, are responsibility.
The other attitude with power is obsession. Instead of accepting the burden of power and come what may from it, one despairs of not having enough power, and using whatever power one has to acquire more, thus losing sight of what the purpose of power is. I thought there would be more to write on this, but no, there really isn't; this mechanism is very simple and easy to observe, the only reason it's not sidestepped is that human beings are robed in fear.
This is where America is, embroiled in the obsession with power, which is secretly the fear of power. We are in a culture where no one wants to be responsible and admit fear or failure; if one is at the risk of failing, then one needs to rapidly acquire more power. Harry Truman once said: "The buck stops here", meaning, whatever failure has come from the government, the failure is upon me, because I am directing the government, and I have been imbued with great amounts of power to absorb that blame. The current president has said: "The buck stops with everybody", meaning, it's not my fault a perfect world wasn't given to me, so why don't you make the world perfect for my sake? Repeat, for every American firm and politician.
We can be so deceived by the emblems of power we become blind to how that power is used; our current executive isn't majestic with power, aweing the world with our command of men and resources; neither is it villainous with power, compelling other countries to give up their own means; it squirms with power. It uses it badly and blames anyone else for the outcome, it suctions as much money as possible into itself, because it despairs of not having any after, it tells lies because it cannot learn, and it kills innocent people because it doesn't know how to negotiate. Some mornings I wonder how anyone can fear this executive: it's a toddler with a gun, and it wants my complicity and a cookie.
There really isn't an end to this essay, as power is one of the eternal human concepts. I simply needed to exorcise some thoughts on the page that I have been screaming to myself every morning. I don't have any hope, so there's no happy ending. I think the only hope is a powerful and active executive, not this anal-retentive and flabby one, that is willing to bring all the various groups in America to kneel, and to elevate some over others, for the sake of the people.
