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Every day I log on and I see so many people acknowledging there is pernicious machinery of awfulness just grinding unnecessary human misery at the benefit / entertainment / indifference of the powerful people and interests that grind along with that machinery.
And though we have an ostensibly democratic structure that should by mere chance alone allow uncompromised bomb-throwers to sneak their way into institutional authority, why has nobody in significant power thrown their body onto the gears of that machinery in a meaningful way?
Achebe said things fall apart, the center cannot hold, but I ask myself what intuitional forces have cemented that center, because we live in a culture of such random notability that it would seem destabilizing elements built on personality would be a near constant.
The only one in my lifetime is Trump, and it’s only unintentionally destabilizing in our collective inability to process so something so stupid. But it is in no way violently oppositional to established structures.
What would happen if a true political arsonist got near important mechanisms of control? I feel like we’re creeping closer to seeing that happen in my lifetime, and that Trump, while grotesque and phony and cartoonish, is a harbinger for what may be possible.
The next major institutional change to civic life will be ushered in by whatever cunning cultural malcontent manages to dazzle their way into public fascination with a modicum of more skill than a huckster reality TV rapist. Sleep tight everybody.
