October has finally arrived, creeping past the tank traps of our dysfunctional political thought, the barbed-wire entanglements of our disordered social behavior and the head-up-asininities that daily surround us in our Disunited States of America, in the past year-and-a-half of pandemic adjustment.

Sanctions on our lifestyle have witnessed tremendous change in just about every aspect of daily life. This month, the latest pandemic-related bad news concerns the massive economic constipation that has adversely affected our national addictive habit of consuming mass quantities of superfluous goods at holiday time. Whoopee! No toys for kids at Christmas? Perhaps it’ll do the little buggers some good to go without for a refreshing change! A critical shortage of snow tires in snow country? Maybe that’ll discourage some of the 3-brain-cell-morons who show up every year at Donner Summit (remember? That’s where the Donner Party you didn’t learn about in history class perished as the Donner Pass (7000 some-odd-feet elevation) became inaccessible due to snowfall, back in December of 1846) in bassaball shorts and tank-tops, encapsulated in their massive SUVs, to get snow-bound in front of national media anchors for our entertainment on the evening news! [A verbatim statement from one such ‘victim’: “We never seen snow before and we wanted to bring our kids up to see some”. Yeah. Each such interviewee seems to be reading from exactly the same script.] But that’s all coming up, a month or so from now. Check your local station for listings and time!

It has been, needless to say, a long, hot and thoroughly unsatisfying Calipornica (sic) summer as the nation has undergone a myriad of insults and assaults from both without and within…capped by the incredible ignominy that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan has heaped upon America. And yet, despite the tremendous social shear-forces that presently afflict us, we still haven’t collapsed into overt civil war or come apart totally at the seams…yet. In the best of preventive mental health traditions, most of us continue to either switch our brains off entirely…one common response to the extreme trauma besetting our contemporary society…or verge on the brink of lapsing into overt semi-sanity…the other predictable response, limited largely to a small percentage (probably less than 5% and that’s likely optimistic) of the population who either don’t have the ability to think logically and rationally about our irresolvable problems, or just plain flip-out, grab a gun from their personal home armory, and start killing people arbitrarily. Ho-hum…just more of the lunacy that presently passes for ‘normalcy’ in America.

Sadly, but hewing true to predictable patterns prevalent over the past 20 years, we are now governed by a President who gives every indication of prematurely lapsing into advanced senescence and has few if any signs of possessing the leadership abilities we so desperately need, as the nation continues to be torn apart by the incredibly puerile and sophomoric neo-socialist forces that presently hold the nation in thrall. Our ‘common wisdom’ has now become so polluted by populist, individualistic emotionalism that puerile social media largely governs the thoughts and attitudes of a majority of the citizens that comprise our population (certainly the younger ones, at least). And as if that weren’t enough, the forces of leftist liberal progressivism that have infiltrated and taken over both popular public opinion and corporate commercialism, now force-feed us on a diet of the most unbelievably utopian nonsense imaginable that serves to enforce a mindset wherein the entire white population is regarded, if not purely evil, then at least guilty for all the many sins of 'non-people-of-color' over the past 300 years or so of our nation’s history.

This is most notably reflected daily in the programming of televised mass media broadcasting (i.e. the major networks), packaged and served to the public in commercial marketing ‘morality plays’ (see: ads), in which a notable majority of paid advertisement actors now seem to be black and whites comprise a distinct minority, if one judges things purely by the respective percentages of appearances by both black and white actors in commercial advertisements).

That ‘happy’, feckless consumer couple stereotypically depicted in these ads is also, more often than not, a racially mixed pair…the popular new stereotype replacing the formerly homogenously white and heterosexual couple who glibly bought Charmin Toilet Tissue because (an unspoken assumption) it was so soft on their tender little, lily-white butts! This sea change occurred almost overnight it would seem, as if the new advertising stereotype had been orchestrated in advance by an unseen but overwhelmingly forceful master producer/director who lurks in the shadows, behind advertising corporation power-circles’ Big Green Consumer Curtain (think The Great and All-Powerful Wizard of Oz, here).

As an American of Northern European ancestry (Irish, French and German) who still dares to think analytically and daily exercise my mental powers of intellect and analysis, this is all so painfully apparent to me that one wonders how such blatant distortions of whatever prior realities may have been to suddenly sweep through the halls of ordered society as they have, almost overnight, to institute ‘new consumer normal’! And yet, few individuals, if any, stand up to address these tissues of flimsiest fabrication and protest their patent hokum. Few seem to either care about it or perhaps feel it better to simply turn a blind eye to the obvious and pretend as if nothing has changed, so that the hounds of ‘denial culture’ won’t suddenly go on attack mode against them for pointing out the Emperor’s stark nakedness.

By happy coincidence, I am just finishing up an excellent 2017 book by author Kurt Andersen titled ‘FANTASYLAND’, in which he dissects and documents the processes by which America (since its founding, several hundred years ago) has rejected traditional processes of post-Enlightenment rationalism and reasoned logic to embrace some of the most pure-fantasy substitutions for empirical reality imaginable. Andersen’s fascinating premise in a nutshell is that America has now become simply an immense, colossally subsuming and all-enveloping Disneyland, wherein the principal ethic is “If you strongly believe something, that alone is sufficient to make it real.” In other words, what matters most is not the reality your proprioceptic senses seem to confirm (such as they are) but whatever fantasies you wish to substitute for them in their stead!

Andersen is not a declared atheist but it is pretty damn obvious that he has no personal belief in a Supreme Deity of any sort, as made clear right from the start of his book, wherein he states that it all started…more or less…with the English Protestant Puritans who came from England to escape persecution (i.e., for their religious beliefs) nearly 500 years ago, thereby archetypically establishing ‘escapism’ as a primary identifying American social dynamic. However, rather than being merely a lengthy citation of unsupported assertions (such as I am famous for), Andersen rather brilliantly develops his thesis over the course of the book’s 425+ pages in such a convincing manner, with so much superb skill and such on-target observations of America’s history of social, religious, economic and political change, and backed up by such compelling documentation, that you’d have to be a total ‘La-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you’ snowflake to even dare refute ANY of it.

Andersen’s book has been for me a VERY slow read but not due to any heavy-handed academic constructs that require painstaking analysis; rather the book has been such an epiphany that I am only able to make slow progress through its pages due to my habit of penning copious numbers of marginal notations as I read it. This is probably a very bad habit of mine but whenever I run into such a profound book as this one is, I try to leave plenty of little bread crumbs along the forest trail so that, should I ever care to back up any of my frequent and freely disbursed opinions and arguments with a touch of substantial authority, I can quickly return to a particular segment in reference. Of course, whomever gets the book in future shall probably, instead of marveling at the prescience of my brilliant wayside insights, curse me soundly for mucking up their own reading experience (by littering along the trail?).

Right now, though, I won’t worry about that since this is all too important part of my daily reading routine, but let me explain a bit here.

My early morning, post-somnolence ritual is as important to me as it is unvarying. I typically get up at between 5 and 6 AM, which is amazing, since wifie rousts herself out of the rack at a blurry-eyed 5AM each day! The fact I am able to sleep at all after 5AM is therefore a miracle of Roman Catholic Church proportions, but I do at least manage to get up more or less promptly, no later than 6AM. Hallelujah.

First thing, after my eyes manage to stay open by themselves (no toothpicks needed) is to reach over and scratch the pup behind her ears for a few moments, accompanied by a few remarks delivered in a special dialect of doggie nonsense talk that she well knows is for her beautifully fuzzy Siberian Husky ears, only.

Next, I get up out of bed and we head for the kitchen to get her a special doggie biscuit (she loves Milk Bones, surprisingly, just like the pre-starved dogs that wolf down these things by the bucketload in the TV ads), followed by a three-inch-long green bean section (she also loves veggies, amazingly). Then, still clad in whatever I spent the night in (which is often very little), I check the coffee pot for contents.

You see, I make up a pot of coffee in advance each Monday AM that typically last me about 5-6 days, doled out a cup at a time to be reheated in the Microwave. Once the coffee availability status is determined, I get dressed in casual household duds and head for the reading room. [I should explain that as a former Berzerkeley student and SFO North Beach pseudo-Bohemian of the 70s era, although I was formerly an absolute OCD fanatic about my coffee, the type, the grind of the beans, and the process (preferably French Press or Melita Drip), etc., in my old age I have finally gotten to the point where the gourmet coffee experience is no longer as important as the basic, essential soul-warming thermodynamics of the brew and that all-important infusion of C8H10N4O2 in the cup (that’s ‘caffeine’ to you). All else is of secondary and tertiary importance.

Once dressed, doggie biscuit and green bean rations dispensed, I shamble into our ‘reading room’, formerly the dining room (until I filled it up with stack upon stack of books I want to read), settle into my Eames Chair clone and adjust my reading cheaters, prior to opening the book I’m about to plunge into.

My fur-kid, Nala (properly known in our household as ‘Her Serene Highness the Grand Duchess Nala’, since she derives from East Siberian canine nobility), has already pre-arrived and is curled up on her comfy pad next to my chair. The ritual that has been established is that at this point I am required to give her a good 10 minutes or so of undivided attention, rubbing her luxuriously thick wolf-like coat in what must seem to her (I hope) like a professional massage job!

Her ears are particularly sensitive, a discovery that used to puzzle me until I examined the skull of a Siberian dog (“Alas, poor Yorkie!...”?) on my shelf to find (to my great bemusement) that the ocular orifices of the dog skull are not solid behind the ears and two great nerves feeding them lie right up on the surface, under all that fur, and are therefore quite susceptible to the soothing effects of massage. You’ve undoubtedly heard that dogs all love being scratched behind their ears, yes? Well, that’s because of the proximity of these two nerve branches that rise up to ‘feed’ the ears via their direct connection to the canine brain. Amazing, really, but there it is! This is a very basic but fascinating explanation for the apparatus responsible for the exponential acuteness of canine hearing (which you must remember exceeds our human aural ability by an order of magnitude!).

At any rate, after the prescribed ritual of 10 minutes of furry shiatsu, she promptly turns over onto her back and sprawls most unladylike in a manner that plainly says “It’s not over until I get a belly-rub, too!” The resulting belly-rub nearly always puts her on the brink of blissful sleep, but the minute I cease with these final ministrations, she flashes a look of sheer tragedy at me, those big blue eyes plaintively saying “Wooooo! Over so SOON?!”

And yet over it must be, since I need to start my reading. This particular morning, however, as I was absently scratching behind her ears, admiring all that wonderful Lupine fur, I had pause for thought (doggie massage induces a very thoughtful state in most humans, I think…one of their many blessings, aside from lowering human blood pressure measurably). At such moments, stroking that incredibly cold-resistant, double-layered husky fur, many insights, both great and small occur to me; in fact, for me stroking my fur-kid's luxurious coat acts as a sort of philosopher's stone.

Such was particularly the case yesterday but unfortunately, in the midst of my 7th decade of life as I am, a palpable awareness also makes itself felt of the fact that I am starting to slip into vague senescence myself (just like our much-ridiculed Chief Executive buddy, “Uncle Joe” Biden) and if I don’t write these flashes of insight down, they quickly dissipate into the more obscure, opaque recesses of what used to be a fairly sharp mind (not quite up to lawyer standards…reckoned to be in the IQ range of 130+ or so…but still fairly up there for a person of modest intellectual antecedents like moi), where they tend to get lost forever. This is why, of course, many older people keep a notebook and pen handy, so I surmise.

But I digress (Ah! You noticed that, did you, you clever person!). Kurt Andersen’s book is not just intrinsically brilliant in terms of its well-ordered, cutting insights into America’s fantasy-themed cultural excesses but also a reassuring evidential testimonial (so I would like to think) to my own long-held opinions about the perversely Disneyfied sense of altered reality that so remarkably characterises modern America (and marks it out as dangerously subversive to any and all applications of deeper reflection and insightful thought in our society).

Whereas I am possessed only of a mediocre ability to articulate concepts, ideas, and analyse the nature of pits of cultural quicksand, Mr. Andersen’s astute intelligence successfully lays all my scattered and discombobulated suspicions and half-baked theories out on an intellectual dissection board and performs a wizard post-mortem on them with the skill of a gifted pathologist! In short, his book is a stunning affirmation of a great number of my pet theories about the shortcomings and specious failings of our greatly ballyhooed American democracy (which none other than the great H.L. Mencken described as “…running the circus from the monkey house”). In this context, Andersen falls, in my humble (not so, actually) opinion, in that category of social critics with great thinkers like Mencken, Neil Postman and other illustrious articulators of our American exceptualistic cultural excesses.

Futhermore, my own insights as expressed here (and elsewhere) are merely the disjointed ramblings and musings of an admittedly second-rate intellect; it takes someone with Andersen’s superior intellectual caliber to claim the spotlight on the larger stage of American understanding to bring about awareness that is increasingly absent in the lives of emotionally reactive and vapidly volatile ‘average Americans’. And damned if it isn’t enervatingly cathartic to figuratively stand there (on his stage), occupying a much smaller part of it, to echo bits and pieces of Andersen’s thesis, so compelling is the content of his book to an amateur philosopher like me. Think of it as the epiphany a community-college-grade archeologist must experience when he stumbles on a new and unknown Rosetta Stone in the local city park; that’s not far off the mark!

But you may be asking yourself at this point, “Why does it matter that America has become just one vast Disneyland of the mind and senses?”

I’m glad you called the question! The answer to that, in the briefest possible terms, is that this grievously deluded misconception of who and what we Americans exist as on the greater venue of the entire world makes us totally and completely unable to deal with the far starker (actual) realities that characterise the harsh ‘real life’ circumstances that exist less than a foot away from the territorial geophysical limits of the United States. In other words, we now tend to base our entire understanding and interaction with everyone else out there on Planet Earth on theories, understandings, sentiments and beliefs that may just as well have been taken directly out of a Grimm Brothers or Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale (or Tolkien’s fabulous mythology, for that matter). Joseph Campbell, the mythologist bard, would be quick to agree with this surmise, were he still amongst us, I am sure!

This massive shift from the former hard-based factual reality of 20s and 30s America to the utterly whacked-out, post-Romantic substitute (that is most perfectly characterised by our post-Disney age’s ‘imagined reality’ norm) helps explain why the United States has been so utterly inept and so maladroitly unable to deal successfully with the rest of the world (not to mention its dealings with its own citizens that inhabit North America!)...most of which (those ‘ferriners’ that haven’t yet adopted the culturally horrific ‘American model’ of democratic capitalism, anyway) still must cope with a reality that is regularly characterised by death, starvation, epidemic disease and savage brutalities beyond our wildest imaginings! ‘Poor’ by our standards is wealthy beyond their wildest comprehension!

[E.g. Outside the US a great many people are worried about some very real and basic fears, such as "Will my children be killed by some crazed religious fanatic?". In America, one of the biggest fears right now is "Will the COVID-19 immunisation hurt?" No contest, your honor!]

Speaking of the substitution of utter fantasy for the merest former vestige of hard, cold reality, I made the mistake of watching the news on TV yesterday evening. Since table conversation is now almost totally extinct in the domestic American refectory (and certainly in our home, tragically), I usually eat sitting in an upholstered chair in the family room (my typical evening meal is a single-dish, Chinese-style meal served in a Japanese-style bowl). Since eating doesn’t provide much thoughtful rumination, I sometimes yield to the urge to avail some sort of stimulation, and given the hour (5PM or so), I switch on The Big Eye. If BBC America isn’t available (or Deutsche Welle or France’s International Canal 24), I may occasionally watch one of the US broadcasting media network news programs (such as that of CBS, etc.), but fortunately (I thought), BBC America was available, so I absently grazed on my Dong-Gu-over-rice while watching BBC America’s whats’ername anchor (Katty Kay?).

BBC America was talking about the latest American media circus act revolving around a young black man named Ahmaud Aubery in Georgia; the individual in question was attacked by a small group of white men and killed with firearms.

In a manner similar to the George Floyd incident and so many other events ostensibly involving unwarranted violence against black men, we are told by the media that Aubery was brutally and victimised while ‘jogging’. Maliciously killed while innocently ‘jogging’ down a road, merely because he is black! At least that’s what his parents tell the media (this is merely what the legal beagles would call ‘hearsay evidence’...). And the fact that his three attackers were all-white is heavily underscored!

While there’s little argument, based on existing evidence, that Aubery WAS murdered by these all-white attackers, the popular myth that has grown up around him is suspiciously a typical leftist liberal exaggeration of some of the important peripheral circumstances surrounding the event. Meanwhile, speaking of suspension of belief, let's conveniently forget that roughly 85+% of black men die at the hands of other blacks and not from attacks by whites.

Video surveillance footage shows Aubery stopping (while ostensibly jogging) to turn to his right and enter a house that was under construction along that street. Now as a jogger, runner and exerciser myself of many years standing, I have to ask myself “How many ‘joggers’ interrupt their run to deviate from the path to take a stroll through a house that is under construction?” The answer would logically be ‘none’. Unless, of course, they aren’t actually jogging or running recreationally and are merely moving quickly down a street (big difference) and decide to stop to see if there’s anything of value to be taken in a house there that’s under construction. Furthermore, how many black people, (statistically speaking) count running and/or recreational jogging as a favorite sport? Again, the answer is ‘precious few’.

In over 40 years of running and jogging, I’ve yet to observe a single black person out there on the pathways by himself engaging in this sort of cardiovascular activity for recreation. Further, it goes without saying that I’ve never seen ANY local jogger/runner of ANY color interrupt a run to check out a home being built, before resuming his run. That doesn’t mean that the ‘just innocently jogging’ claim made by Aubery’s family isn’t at all possible, but merely that the odds of it being correct and absolutely true are about as favorable as the possibility of winning the Mega-Millions Lottery. Hmmmmm. ‘Benefit of the doubt’ therefore doesn’t have much to do with any realities that may exist in this particular case.

It’s therefore entirely possible that Aubery was not jogging for fitness but that he was simply engaged in checking out the uncompleted home to see if there was anything he could take. This possibility, which is at least as plausible (or more so) as the family’s claim that he was merely jogging and minding his own business when brutally murdered, has been totally obfuscated by the media broadcast networks…despite the fact that actual video footage clearly shows the ‘interrupted jog’ and thereby creates a very viable alternative scenario possibility that is being deliberately left unexplored by so-called unbiased media.

As so many astute observers have pointed out time and time again, there IS a definite (and inarguable) sentiment existing among a great many white Americans that blacks are more ‘likely’ to be involved in criminal activities merely because they are black. This is the ‘profiling’ bugaboo we hear so much about, with specific regard to police arrests. But whoa! Any look at the copious stats compiled involving a comparison of crimes committed by various racial groups quickly demonstrates that that semi-paranoic bias has a very factual basis for its existence. Proportionately, blacks are far and away responsible for more ‘criminal activity than other racial groups (excepting perhaps Hispanics).

This bias was very much present in Georgia when Aubery was killed and yet true to form, this case is being tried in the ‘Court of Public Opinion’, where evidence and facts are carefully, most partisanly dispersed and/or even dispensed with, consistent with the pre-existing liberal biases within the media…which in the USA are absolutely and inarguably, uniformly slanted to the left of center (as any number of respected authorities will affirm). The fact that most (if not quite all) of today’s television news media viewers fail utterly to either reflect upon and consider this elephant in the newsroom, or resort to the ‘la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you’ avoidance ritual, is both a slamming indictment of American leftist self-delusions and the slide into a complete fantasy environment wherein facts and objective analysis have become as extinct as common courtesy and polite manners.

Now obviously (I hope), I am not defending the perpetrators of this tragic and outrageous crime, since murder is murder, after all, and the attackers' actions were both reprehensible and unacceptable by any definition of either legality or morality (black or white). However, the whole media circus that is now the Ahmaud Aubery case is an excellent example of how far into complete substitute realities we have, as a society, retreated in our desire to fabricate a false concept of the human experience…and how far from that former, sober perspective we have deviated in our collective rush to revel in the highly speculative alternative world of wishful make-believe.

It saddens me that so widespread is this leftish-liberal-progressive whitewash that is so pervasive in journalism today that even formerly reasonably objective news sources such as BBC and PBS are now almost as far-left as the major media broadcasting networks. Whereas BBC (UK) was once very objective in its reporting, its American clone (BBC America) is now showing all the signs of the leftist liberal progressive mindset that is so painfully obvious in our indigenous network media.

Over the past 15 years I have further witnessed American Public Broadcasting (PBS) skew so far to the hyper-liberal left that one could think that we are ALL totally obsessed by the diversity mania that has now become a totally compulsive infatuation among the young leftists who are so conspicuously outspoken across all sectors of American society today. It is to me both shameful and flagrantly condemnatory in that the few broad-minded intellectuals left out there amongst the hoi polloi masses (that’s a double-positive, admittedly…sorry!) fail to resist this insidious mind ‘pollution’ as ferociously as, say, an NRA gun-nut might!

This closing of the American mind, as Allan Bloom so memorably phrased it in his book, has inextricable ties to the thesis submitted by Fantasyland’s author, Kurt Andersen, as do so many other works that also focus on this disturbing distortion of reality that commands the contemporary ‘herd consciousness’ in America. Kudos, therefore, to Andersen, and I sincerely hope that at least a few of you who have read my words here will obtain a copy of his book and read it.

OK. Having blathered on for the usual 3000-4000 words or so here, I’ll leave you all with some positive thoughts about former Secretary of State and Supreme Commander of the US Army Forces, General Collin Powell, who sadly passed away yesterday at the age of 84. I have very few heroes in my life, but Powell was at the very top of my short-list!

General Powell (as a military person, he shall always be remembered by me as a soldier first and a statesman second, as were many ancient Roman generals) was, in my opinion, one of the finest and most admirable Americans of our past 100 years! He blazed new paths for both America and for the black people in America and possessed a wise sense of balance and moral rectitude unmatched by far too many in our country.

Although I had the greatest respect for him and his great humanity, and although I regretted his election to not run for the nation’s Presidency, I also admired him all the more for refusing to immerse himself in the ethical/moral swamp that is today’s highest American political office. Powell was too great a man to lower himself in such a manner and he remains, therefore and in my opinion, a man among men in our pantheon of national heroes of truly great stature. Powell was, self-admittedly, not perfect; he had a few notable flaws in his makeup and a life that marked him out as a human being just like all the rest of us, but he also had the admirable integrity to recognise and face up to those personal shortcomings and, when appropriate, to admit them and correct them.

Powell thus deserves our absolute respect on this occasion of his passing. He left us with many things, not least of them being an admonishment to “…stop arguing about blacks and whites and start acting like we’re all Americans.”

That is admittedly somewhat of a misquote, but Powell had much to say about race relations in his sagaciously constrained manner and we should never fail to overlook the fact that, rather than being the product of a poor American ghetto, this son of Jamaican immigrant parents understood the racial issues that still divide us from a uniquely distinct and elevated perspective. He was also an excellent example of what ‘diversity’ can be, if held to the highest level of social accountability rather than to the mere mindlessness of dogma that unthinkingly repeats a hysterically emotional, rote mantra.

Thank you, General Powell, for having served America so long and so well! We’ll miss you!