{"id":6673,"date":"2016-05-09T10:42:42","date_gmt":"2016-05-09T18:42:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=6673"},"modified":"2016-05-09T10:58:56","modified_gmt":"2016-05-09T18:58:56","slug":"the-smoke-of-that-great-burning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=6673","title":{"rendered":"The Smoke of That Great Burning."},"content":{"rendered":"

There was a time, a few weeks ago, when I reconsidered my decision to stay out of the US.<\/p>\n

Most of you know that I’m banned from entering that country anyway. What you may not know is that, as of last summer, I don’t have to be. There’s a kind of expiration date on my conviction; after five years I can apply to have my record “expunged”. I’ve never bothered, never even explored the possibility. Why would I? Exile doesn’t seem to have harmed my career (such as it is), has actually helped it in a few ways I could name. And the overall quality of my border-crossing experiences has vastly improved ever since that particular boundary got scratched off the list. Why waste effort gaining re-entry into a country which qualifies as third-world along every metric from religiosity to life expectancy?<\/p>\n

\"USA<\/a>

USA highlighted in yellow. In comparison with 16 “other” first-world nations around the globe.<\/p><\/div>\n

I suppose it might be nice to be able to prove that my aversion to the US isn’t just sour grapes, that I choose<\/em> to keep my distance even though I don’t have<\/em> to; but anyone who’d seriously raise such an argument in the first place would be a card-carrying member of the Dunning-Kruger<\/a> Club, and not worth the effort. Besides, I got hassled enough crossing that border even before<\/em> I was on the radar; does anyone really think I’d ever get across the US border again without falling victim to a “random” cavity search, no matter what my legal standing might be?<\/p>\n

And yet, just a few weeks ago I was seriously thinking about it. It was during that brief bright window when it looked like Bernie Sanders might have a shot. Think of it: a presidential candidate who didn’t arrive pre-pocketed by the multinationals. A candidate who consistently maintained the same forthright positions for decades, even when they were politically unpopular. A candidate who, instead of\u00a0 sheepishly apologizing for jumping on the Iraq bandwagon, could say: hey, I voted against that fucking war from the outset.<\/em><\/p>\n

Talk about making America great again.<\/p>\n

I would gladly return to a country that voted for such a candidate. It might even be worth enduring the velvet touch of Andrew Beaudry’s latex-covered hand up my ass. But you all know what’s happened since. The Democrat machine put its foot down<\/a>, told its bitches how to vote, and\u2014 barring some late-breaking statistical miracle\u2014 relegated Sanders to footnote status. Further to the right, Trump’s ascension has pretty much sealed the deal. Suddenly the court jester is within a stone’s throw of the crown. Pundits on both ends of the spectrum have stopped laughing. Conventional wisdom is that no sane person has a choice any longer: unite behind Clinton, lest the country burn.<\/p>\n

\"Hey.<\/a>

I make the best conflagrations.\u00a0 Nobody makes better conflagrations than me.<\/p><\/div>\n

I agree with that math. Which is exactly why I so fervently hope that Trump becomes the next US president.<\/p>\n

A child-rearing analogy might come in handy here. Some believe that the way to teach a toddler to avoid hot stove-tops is to scoop them up whenever they get too close to the burner, followed perhaps with firm warnings of potential consequence. Personally, I think the take-home message in that scenario might not be Stove-tops are dangerous<\/em> so much as If I want to find out what’s the deal up on that cool stove-top thing, I should wait until there aren’t any grown-ups around to stop me<\/em>. If you really want to teach the little darlings to avoid stove-tops\u2014 if you want the lesson to stick<\/em>\u2014 step back and let ’em discover that red-hot element for themselves. Once should be enough (or if it isn’t, at least you now know to cut your losses on this one and invest your efforts in any other <\/em>offspring that might be crawling around.[1]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>)<\/p>\n

A Clinton presidency would be tantamount to the interventionist approach. Business would continue pretty much as usual; we’d continue toward the iceberg (or at least, we would if there were any icebergs left), albeit with a stern finger-wagging and whatever teensy course corrections might be permitted by Clinton’s corporate owners. The USA might experience a few more years of what currently passes for “stability”, but the only ones who got burned would be those who always have been. Little would change\u2014 except that at the end of it, we’d be that much closer to the precipice.<\/p>\n

It’s admittedly a better fate than what might have awaited the world if Cruz had made it to the finals: even ongoing environmental catastrophe doesn’t stack up decisively against the immediate threat posed by a batshit religious fanatic with his hands on half the world’s nuclear arsenal. But Trump doesn’t have Cruz’s focus, or his agenda. Or any<\/em> agenda, maybe. Trump just seems to make shit up as he goes along\u2014 and while both his strategic foresight and his impulse control might evoke images of The Joker, as far as I can tell he doesn’t want to watch the world burn.<\/p>\n

The world will<\/em> burn, though. Or enough of it, at least. If Trump gets in, there are gonna be a lot<\/em> of screaming toddlers with scorched hands. Shouldn’t take him more than one term to bring that whole damn country down around his ears.<\/p>\n

And once the pot has well and truly boiled over\u2014 when even the Guccis of the one-percenters are slick with the blood in the streets; when Flint-level infrastructure has spread to every corner of the fifty states; when those damned Mexicans finally build Trump’s wall for him, but along the original<\/em> Mexican\/US boundary\u2014 why, the Land of the Free will be just begging<\/em> for someone like Elizabeth Warren to take the helm.<\/p>\n

It might be the only way to return sanity to the US political process, in a world where the Overton Window has moved so far to the right that yesterday’s centrism is today’s radical loony tune. In order to reset the scale to the point where workable solutions are even visible<\/em>, you might have to shatter that window entirely and start over. Or\u2014 if you prefer pendulum metaphors\u2014 pushing the bob all the way over to Trump might be the only way to build enough energy to reach Warren\/Sanders territory on the return swing.<\/p>\n

It sounds grim, but at heart this is a hopeful message. True democracy might yet play a constructive role, even if its voice is dominated by toddlers who thus far have refused to accept the danger posed by stove-tops. So let them prevail, I say. Let them burn. Let them learn the hard way, and the sooner the better.<\/p>\n

There’s a nice fringe benefit for the rest of us, too. Once those burns have been sustained, perhaps the toddlers will be so busy trying to stamp out the fires within their own borders that they’ll be less inclined to keep starting them elsewhere in the world. Wouldn’t that be nice.<\/p>\n

Maybe I’ll head down south after all, in a few more years. Hang out with some old friends I haven’t been able to visit in a while.<\/p>\n

In the meantime I’ll keep playing Fallout 4. Just to get ready.<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> It’s such an obvious\u2014 and yet, such a rarely-mentioned\u2014 approach that I’m thinking of writing a book on child-rearing, right after the BUG and I complete Nellie the Nephron<\/a><\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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