Chris Hedges

The Election Circus Begins.

I think it is important to refuse to legitimate the farce that passes for politics in the U.S., and Chris Hedges is among the few journalists with the intellect and moral courage to consistently bear witness to the fact that the Emperor has no clothes.

As Hedges knows, Trump's imbecilic narcissism--as egregious as it is--is not the heart of the problem. Rather, it is emblematic of a far deeper and pervasive moral condition that afflicts many Americans of his generation and my own: a form of arrested emotional development that understands life as a competition to see who dies with the most toys.

Politics is incapable of addressing this condition: it is no accident that Aristotle wrote his Politics only after he had written the Nicomachean Ethics.

So here we are, once again, gearing up for another season of reality-TV-democracy that looks remarkably similar to all of the previous seasons. Most of those among us who still have the capacity to recognize that something has gone terribly awry can (and, all too predictably, will) point their fingers at the Russians or people who support third party candidates or whomever it is they currently wish to blame for what are, in fact, our own self-inflicted injuries. And that will pass as intelligent commentary or even "progressive" politics. And perhaps, in the current political and cultural dispensation, it is. But it is also beside the point.

Sic transit gloria mundi.