The only thing we can say with certainty, fourteen months into what ought to be called the Dunning-Kruger administration,* is that nobody knows what the hell is going on.
We, its subjects, formerly known as “we the people,” certainly do not. Granted, there do seem to be two broad schools of thought about what’s going on, but their positions are diametrically opposed. If one school is right, then the other must be wrong.
According to the conventional view of our tripartite form of self-government, an undefined “fourth estate” ought to be acting like a beacon, cutting through the fog, helping us to understand current events. However, thanks to our capitalistic economy—the pinnacle of mankind’s achievements, according to many, so essential and so universally accepted that merely calling attention to its presence is, in most situations, considered gauche, déclassé, and a vulgar faux pas—each of these schools may now call upon its own array of “news” sources to buttress their positions.
For some run-of-the-mill Americans, this is not much of a problem. They know where they stand. They are right, the others are wrong. Mere facts—if such quaint things could still be had—would not weaken their passionate intensity. Some others, of course, may lack this level of conviction.
Fortunately, neither side in this stalemate needs to be embarassed by uncertainty, or even error. In our democratic republic, making decisions about war, peace, and the economy is not their responsibility. Their lot is simply to provide the raw material for the nation’s most important industry, the manufacture of consent.
So the people at large have every right—perhaps even a duty—to be confused and ignorant. They even, as Senator Warren Rudman [R-N.H.] so memorably said while dressing down Ollie North [LtCol., U.S.M.C., Ret.], “have a right to be wrong.” What should alarm the average American, though, is the growing body of evidence which suggests that no one in a position of real power has any idea what the hell is going on—and that is the optimistic assessment.
Our news desk, such as it is, is confronted dozens of times a day with a veritable tornado of calamitous events we would never have guessed were possible. No newspaper large enough to catalog them all has been published for more than 38 years.†
Setting aside lesser issues such as putting a brain worm sufferer in charge of our health care, terrorizing a huge swath of workers without whom our economy cannot function, and the obvious, ongoing campaign to rig future elections so that these suicidal policies may not be reversed, let us focus on the single project most likely to resolve all our worries through the admittedly less-than-optimal route of nuclear annihilation: the war against Iran.
Much as we might like to, we cannot lay the inception of this problem on the person whose junk mail is addressed to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was only seven at the time. His hero Winston Churchill, along with some British spies, anti-democratic Iranians, oil company executives, and the CIA, are to blame for that.
More than 70 years later the game is much the same: a top priority is to maintain access to enough oil to keep your war machine running in the defense of capitalism.
Since a full-blown SKYNET system is still a gleam in the eye of our billionaire tech-bro overlords, there remains a need for meat-based cannon fodder. For that reason, these elemental facts have to be dressed up in palatable, abstract verbiage: defense of freedom and democracy, yada, yada, yada. Armed forces recruitment was hard enough in the old days, even with the draft. Maintaining this “all volunteer” Department of War requires some real effort on the propaganda front.
This was the status quo when the person in the gilded office decided he was going to kick the hornet’s nest. As is his wont, he has given the public a handful of reasons for why he did it. Being the anti-Washington, though, he cannot tell the truth. All we can do is guess.
According to news reports, he is surprised that he has shut off one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. He also claims to be surprised that, after insulting foreign leaders and denigrating our alliances with them, they are declining to follow him—that is, us—down the primrose path to ruin.
Is he intentionally trying to destroy us? That seems unlikely. It seems prudent to wonder, though, who’s whispering in his ear.
* Wikipedia: “The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability.” David Dunning: “Not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition. The problem with it is we see it in other people, and we don’t see it in ourselves. The first rule of the Dunning–Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning–Kruger club.”
† “The most massive single issue of a newspaper was the 13 September 1987 edition of the Sunday New York Times, which weighed more than 5.4 kg (12 lb) and contained 1,612 pages.” – Guiness Book of World Records.