There are statues now to Trump, celebrating him as a force of nature; one of the gods. He'd dismantled the military industrial complex and destroyed the American empire. No political process was up to the task of instructing the country to cease and desist automobile driving, single-family nuclear homes, multiplying screens. Only nature was up to the task. Natural disaster does the job every time.
And, bonus, our political system was also updated to prevent such a force of nature in the form of a man ever to take hold of it again. Not much different from building a house to keep out the elements. That was shortly after global corporate control was supplanted by local investment. Global collapsed and local took over. An amazement of wealth returned to our cities and towns.
The streets are full of walkers now, the roads, piece by piece, retrofitted for bicycles and mass transit. Beauty is returning, trala trala.
The human mind never had all that much to do with logical problem solving. It - and here I'm including the brain - was a generalization machine. Not so needlessly complex as the computers humans created and made had become, which did the job of problem solving much better than any organic mind could. Still much more complex than anything man-made could ever be. As complex as the cosmos, in fact.
Generalizations are as simple as the apprehension of similarity in the perceptual world beyond the skin. The brain spins those perceptions around, clustering them into nameable and primordial concepts. The mind, in the main, responds emotively to the match between perception and conception which it is the brain's job to orchestrate. Just one unintended consequence is the ability to problem-solve.
Machines, corporations, the economy, have no emotion. Their problem-solving looks like glass and steel skyscrapers in which nobody sane wants to live. It takes an incredible lack of imagination to consider one's mind a CPU. Mind as CPU is phenomenally retrograde.
Those who'd lived through the transformation marveled at how much nicer it was to live in streets full of walkers and bicycles and a very few trolleys on restricted tracks for longer distances. The passage from plush automobiles through autodriving app-hailable cars to not really wanting or needing to go anywhere happened precisely as quickly as the disappearance of want-creation as an industry. Within a couple of generations. Wants of that sort are as mechanical as a windmill, though much more difficult to fix.
Amazingly, whole world generalizing was enhanced and not denigrated by this contraction away from what once was called progress. Universal translation had already reduced the globe to a village, which meant that live performance and art came alive again. Over there became as boring as in here used to be. The problems which had once been humans' main motivation disappeared as problems, once it became obvious that life was not a problem, or a set of problems, to be solved.
* * *
I paid a lot of money to watch the first ever live and global broadcast of a Broadway Production. By 'a lot of money' I mean a tiny fraction of what it would cost to see the play live, bringing along with the subscription over a hundred new channels to my screen. Like watching football (Go Bills!) on my wall-sized projection screen, I can enjoy the game without all the F-bombs, which are now so built in to bro-talk. I can understand the "play" because I can hear the commentary and watch re-runs.
Same deal watching a Broadway production. CNN couldn't help themselves, deploying oodles of electronics, giving me closeups and absolute clarity of sound. The production itself was a mixture of filmed renditions of the actual TV presence of Edward R. Murrow's subjects, if none of the man himself. It was a marvel of perfect execution.
... absent was the magic of live theater, which I imagine was also absent in the theater itself. Really? A film star now takes the Tony? He didn't act any differently than he does in the movies. What I watched was a movie of a play. What I want is local theater that I can afford to be engaged in. I mean kudos for the ability to recreate live over and again, without the outtakes of perfection.
Local stores within walking distance selling locally made wares. Who knew! Local theaters present plays with global resonance. Wealth descends like rain.
These last several hundred years of so-called progress have, in the main, been a concentration of wealth upward with digital technology being no different from an accelerant on a house fire. Our President can now make millions or even billions from his office while he's in it. He no longer has to wait until he makes book in retirement.
The entire CNN spectacle was apologized for as a righteous take-down of a man in office no longer so petty as the Junior Senator from Wisconsin. A man magnificently more dangerous. In just the way a tornado is dangerous. God help you if you're caught up in his whirl. The twister is so powerful that your very soul will be flung away, leaving the dummy core of Botoxed and plumped cartoon realization of your nothingness.
Have you no decency!?
