New Year’s Thoughts on 2024
This is where would-be sages offer their predictions for the coming year. I have a few of those. I’ll give you those, then move on to some more general thoughts about where we’re headed.
There will be political assassinations this year. These will be plot mechanics surrounding the upcoming presidential election.
Otherwise, everything will continue to get worse, from January straight through December.
It won’t actually matter who wins the election. If Trump wins, they’ll either kill him if he isn’t already dead or they’ll just keep ramping up the war against him so that there can be no real transition, his cabinet and other appointments can’t be confirmed, there will be litigations and delays in certifying the election itself, no matter how one-sided it is, and there will be no jump start of the fabled “100 Days.”
By then chaos will simply be the order of the day. The only question marks surround the order in which the inevitable and merely possible occur, although all of these will be bad. For example, China will take this year to seize the opportunity for retaking Taiwan, since they know Trump would oppose this if elected. There will be some kind of nuclear event in the Middle East, outcome indeterminate, either before or after the Taiwan catastrophe, which will crash the U.S. economy (no more cheap microprocessor chips for the Tek-Lords), thus providing cover or distraction for the ascendant totalitarians of the far east. As part of this calamity or simply attendant upon it, the dollar will crash, plunging the financial lives of Americans into a very real ‘Great Depression.’ The federal government will run out of money, and the debt/deficit/inflation crisis will hit like a ton of bricks.
The rest of American life will become far more intolerable as well. Crime will continue to rage out of control as millions of undocumentable illegal immigrants draw down resources from various governments, and the non-English-speaking patsies who fell for the American Dream fantasy will take by violence what they cannot obtain by other means. Public health will also descend into profound crisis, as a nation without borders is wracked by once conquered diseases and a tsunami of lethal drugs flowing everywhere throughout the country along with the virus of unassimilatable aliens.
It’s unlikely that any actual Civil War or Right-Wing Revolution will occur before 2025. There will be violent terror events, however, both from the usual lefty suspects and disaffected militia-type insurrectionists on the right. Why the prediction of political assassinations is not singular or absolutely federal in origin.
Thoughts
Can any of this be prevented or halted at some critical event in time? No. The American people are responsible for the travails to come. Who are we, after all? We are fat, ignorant, incurious, seriously ill-educated, foul-mouthed, self-obsessed slobs. Look around. Look in the mirror. You probably won’t be able to find your own grandparents in the mirror…
I can say that because I am sitting in the back seat now, a passenger on the journey to doom. The country I grew up in is gone. Hardly anyone remembers a time longer ago than last week, last election, last death in the family. And despite all the MAGA and Christian evangelical bluster about virtue, virtue itself has mostly vanished from the scene, done in as much by our long incremental series of retreats as by the tireless depredations of the villains. Which makes everyone a villain to one degree or another. National immolation is not achieved by the efforts of one political ideology or another; but by the loss of the glue that holds a culture together.
The video below features two perceived champions of the resistance against the downfall that’s underway. It’s more casual than such presentations by culture warrior generally are. There is one singularly important declaration by one of them, the much admired Tucker Carlson, that he knows how to put his foot down. Citing as an example, “In my house we don’t smoke marijuana at the dinner table.” There’s no sign that he’s making a joke. When I knew Carlson is too young to perceive the totality of what has occurred and is occurring and accelerating in America. He gives his age as 54. He’s too young to know the gravity of his admission. He was not present as a witness to the biggest cultural and historical events that have led us here. The Kennedy assassination. The Vietnam War. The Great Society. The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. When Watergate ‘happened,’ he was still in kindergarten. And he certainly has no experience of an event that has become so ingrained in our culture that it is no even described as an event but a condition of modernity: the torrential invasion of illegal drugs into a generation of spoiled, rebellious young people who became the drivers of everything that’s happened.
I’m not boasting or puffing myself up here. I’m citing stark facts. I have actually seen, often from the inside, the proofs that all our institutions are corrupt. That’s not hyperbole or exaggeration for effect. They are all corrupt, empty shells of what made them great during America’s Golden Age after World War II. All the professions are corrupt. The law, medicine, academia, science, public service, corporate management, all the major religions, the fine arts, and both news and entertainment media. Completely corrupt.
What has been forgotten is that the overwhelming declines in the integrity, honesty, and fundamental human values of these institutions occurred with almost unbelievable speed, after having been maintained for a generation by men who had in huge numbers survived combat and knew that doing right mattered more than winning. They knew why they subscribed to various standards of ethics and behavior and civil communication. They knew how to recognize a moral decision point when it arrived on their desks: right this way, wrong that way.
There is no longer a critical mass of people who understand this difference. If you think you’re an exception, you almost certainly are not. I include myself in that accounting. All I will say to reinforce my credibility here is that I have written more about the factors involved in the death of American civilization in dozens of social and political sectors than anyone I know of. And I have failed ultimately in my responsibility to have any positive impact through my efforts to tell the truth. Why I am now just a passenger.
Even now, it should be possible for people who know the difference between right and wrong to pull together out of their solipsism and save the day. Not going to happen.
The largest underlying theme of everything I have written is connectedness. What I know. Everything is connected. Every aspect of life and existence has holographic properties. That is, the whole is also always embedded even in the smallest parts. As a writer I have explored the realms of linking. This is connected to that other thing over there. That great big thing up there is still visible even in this little bit of flotsam right here. What I do is reflective of what others are doing and vice versa.
We have forgotten this. Why we are doomed.
Which is the solution to mystery of my opening graphic. A pencil. The only article I still remember from the old relatively sane National Review is one that was titled, “Nobody Can Make a Pencil.” The author went on to become someone who came to believe he could make a pencil by himself, a better pencil. We are all hoist by our own petard.
The article explained just how much resource is required to produce that single pencil in the mug on your desk. The wood has to be grown, harvested, and precisely cut by different operations and hands. The same with the eraser, once rubber (now, who knows what concoction of chemistry?), the metal ferrule that holds the eraser, the pencil lead (how do they get that in there anyway), the paint that tells you the name of the manufacturer, or assembler, or seller of the finished product. All told, we are looking at the joint efforts of loggers, miners, planters, chemists and machine operators, forklift operators, warehouse hands, truckers, and retailers, and all the resources that designed and built the necessary precision machinery, the manufacturing plant(s), and the human labor that also contribute to the process, each output of which costs a few cents to the people who will use it.
It’s a miracle of modern civilization. One of countless others we never think about and take for granted. Just as we do the imaginations and beliefs and aspirations of the people who came together for the purpose of propagating the thing called civilization.
Which can be lost. Sadly, civilization is always lost after it has worked however long to sustain those who depend upon it. Civilizations fall when the people needed to sustain it forget the skills and arts and character requirements for survival. When a culture takes basic human survival for granted, they must relearn all the human qualities and duties that have been lost in order to recover. This always involves pain, suffering, poverty, disease, and death in enormous numbers. But what has been lost can’t be relearned on the fly or in sudden extremis. It has to be relearned the same old ways every time.
The Year 2024 can’t and won’t save us. We’ve forgotten too much. All we can do is try to remember enough to pass along to the people who will come after, because there will always be people who come after…
Summary
My view is a bleak view. I am more confident in it than I wish I were. I know all kinds of writers’s games. I’m not indulging in any of them here. I really am telling you the truth as I see it. Nobody I know or have even close contact with understands the reality of what I’ve written. I have always been a Cassandra. Entered the literary world that way and will be leaving it the same way. I’m not complaining though. It’s been a hell of a ride.
Good luck to you and yours.
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