Anti-Pundit Mulling on the Election

Two parties are two identical guns. One has one more bullet for Russian Roulette--you get a choice by deciding which gun to your temple. Pull the trigger to win

Chat GPT and I rarely converse. Last night I was deeply depressed. So I looked up the darkness of the bot to chat about politics from a high vantage point ignoring personalities. I was thoughtless by not saving the chat. It was interesting. The Bot pressed me in my ranting a few times and praised me a few times which shocked me because I never expect a machine to compliment. My main thrust was Total War. The bot as I pushed on engaged my thought and asked - well what solution do you think would work? I simply said Die Wende. The turning. Fleeing Mammon and returning to a spiritual center of every person is meaning is the only exit. Curiously the bot followed up asking me how this could be done. I responded-nuclear war. I shocked the bot! After a short discussion I did say that another option would require more time that we do not have and this would be to replace shrinks with Shamans and Psych drugs with Psilocybin.

As I said I was extremely depressed. I am still quite depressed. As I seriously think it doubtlessly depressed for many years but rarely as much as 2019-2024 with the 2023 death of my wife being the peak and today being quite close to the peak and not improving much.

Insofar as I am able to discern the center fall apart in 1967. A fast downhill motor race to oblivion followed. Neither faction of the War Party represents anything rational. Voting is the least rational thing a citizen can do. Imagine with me two guns representing two parties. Voters get passionate over which gun has one bullet less than the other. They only have rhetoric to guide them and emotions. Russian roulette at the polls. Justified each election as CHOICE. Now considering how many chose vaccination I am not astonished. A very close friend is voting Democrat because Trump is a clown. Kamala has word salad but she is —NOT TRUMP. Another friend votes Trump and as a legal immigrant from some 3d world hellhole working 3 jobs (I can’t get just one) is angry at the Left and can only see Trump Hero. Clearly choice is in the eyes of the beholder. One friend voting word salad feels that this choice protects his interest. The other voting Trump does as well.

At the time of the Liberation, the commissioner of the Republic, Gaston Cusin, requested that Ellul join the municipal delegation of Bordeaux under the leadership of the socialist Fernand Audeguil. This political experiment was short lived (October 31, 1944 to April 28, 1945). Ellul formed the conviction that political action (obtaining positions of responsibility via elections and participating in a party) could not produce profound change in social life. Politicians are elected on a platform, but practically speaking they have little ability to implement it because of their negligible power over the civil service, which acts according to its own technical logic.

This for me begs a few questions about the present. FEMA is bureaucracy. Is the commander of Ft. Bragg told not to fly Apache helicopters to help Trump voters by the Governor or JCS or the President or FEMA? I do not know. In a way I care only that he chose obedience to the do nothing line. I understand the chain of command. Of course so did Nelson who won at Trafalgar by ignoring it.

So here we are today as the voting public faced with two pistols waiting for a miracle. Rather reminiscent of this song by Stephanie Beatriz.

I can't move the mountains
I can't make the flowers bloom
I can't take another night up in my room
Waiting on a miracle
I can't heal what's broken
Can't control the morning rain or a hurricane
Can't keep down the unspoken invisible pain
Always waiting on a miracle, a miracle

[Verse 2]
Always walking alone
Always wanting for more
Like I'm still at that door
Longing to shine like all of you shine
All I need is a change
All I need is a chance
All I know is I can't stay on the side
Open your eyеs, open your eyes, opеn your eyes

Changing thought here I consider the French thinker Gabriel Marcel. Rather than representing a facile panacea for nihilism, Marcel's appeal to the power of relationships draws together and rests upon many of the richest veins in his thought, e.g., his ideas of exigence, being, mystery, availability, entrustment, commitment, creative fidelity, and hope. Further, his efforts to show that it is in and through committed relationships that the self is created and that meaning and value are constituted are among the greatest sources of his philosophical relevance, both undergirding powerful challenges to the likes of Sartre and Heidegger and illuminating his affinities with Levinas and, among contemporary analytic philosophers, Frankfurt.

Now with voting eyes tightly shut and unable to open due to incessant propaganda I marvel in wonder about this narrow materialist world of much and quick. Another spiritual thinker from the United States in the year of 1964 (interestingly Erich Fromm proposed unilateral one weapon at a time disarmament in 1964) was Thomas Merton.

In the 1960s Thomas Merton expressed concern for many social issues, including the need for criteria by which to evaluate and control technology. Merton read books by thoughtful writers anxious about social changes engendered by new technological developments. Merton's growing unease intensified after 1964 when he read a pamphlet entitled The Triple Revolution in which thirty two prominent thinkers drew attention to three revolutions. The first had to do with cybernetics. The second with new forms of weaponry that cannot win wars but can obliterate civilization. The third concerned the universal demand for full human rights. For Merton, The Triple Revolution offered an excellent starting point from which to diagnose and ameliorate a pattern of illness in the United States and elsewhere, namely, distortion of our true humanity. Failure to develop a spirituality by which people might resist negative consequences of technology has since given rise to diverse symptoms of human distress.

It is 2024. Do we have profound political thinkers without partisan thought? Or are waiting for that miracle as well. After all as Pink Floyd recognized

Us and them
And after all
We're only ordinary men

Be the miracle and be the meaning. In the end voter it’s up to you since FEMA and Big Government can’t do it. Or won’t.

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