It’s embarrassing to watch TV. This is the state of American ‘leadership’ in 2019: a cartoonishly self-absorbed pseudo-Boomer trying to convince the audience (and himself) of his orgiastic, lubricious vitality at an age when geezers have trouble remembering what they ate for breakfast.

“Quick! What’s your mother’s middle name?”

America, that Shining City on the Hill, the Golden Door upon which the eternal beacon of Liberty has been raised, has become the Land of … um, I don’t recall.

Our entire establishment is senile. Sorry, nobody recovers from this one. One day you are yourself. A few weeks later you are yourself without pants, standing on the street corner waiting for a bus. “Which bus?” someone asks. “What’s … a bus?” you reply. Afterward, you’re off to the ‘rest home’: a gulag with better decor, a long and inexorable list of unalterable rules, inedible food, restraints and convulsive agony. The inmates are desperate to escape but they can’t remember what the window does. The bell tolls for all of us but our onrushing social- and political dementia is more like a steeple-full of bells bonking down a hundred story elevator shaft, the dissonant clatter ending with a sickening thump.

This is the background noise for the petty- and not so petty thefts of public funds, the bribery, the cross-dealing, the bald-faced peddling of influence, the dirty political tricksterisms, organized terror, the lies and self-interested schemes; the waste, abuse and fraud. Statesmanship is a lost art, forgotten like marquetry or plastering. ‘Policy’ has become the substitution of nostalgia for anything resembling strategy, belief in the place of evidence and/or facts; it’s gaslighting whatever dog or cat is in range, ultimately gaslighting oneself. It’s the willful suspension of reality for immediate term trivial and pointless (pseudo-) returns: the triumph of Boomer narcissism over everything and ultimately, nothing.

Front-runner candidate Biden is performing his obligatory ‘Sistah Souljah’ theatric, barking at a client … the ‘customer is always wrong’ display of leadership ability! A candidate doesn’t need to have any ideas about anything, he just has to show he can get mad! Most people don’t remember who Sistah Souljah is other than she had something to do with Bill Clinton. Nobody cared at the time Clinton’s claims about Sistah Souljah were entirely fabricated. What mattered was that Clinton had picked the right punching bag; smashing the establishment- approved dirty hippie in the face!

Presumably, president Biden’s job would be to run the federal government … that’s what the president does. Biden could have simply pointed this out and explained that because he has spent his entire working life in government, he knows how it functions, how it benefits some at the expense of everyone else. Biden can legitimately claim to be an expert on government and how to make it perform better. Instead he makes with the infantile crotch-grabbing. Perhaps this is a way for him to show caution: promises to repair government would annoy donors and industry groups for whom Biden is a proxy; groups who are satisfied with things being the way they are right now.

Poor Boomers, they started their collective stroll down the driveway of life on the wrong foot, being actively despised by their ‘Greatest Generation’ parents. Looking back, maybe the parents were on to something. Children of the Jazz Age had been handed steaming plates of horse manure when they were promised ice cream and cake. Many spent their formative years in destitution and hardship during the Great Depression, others were sent off to die in Hürtgen Forest and Okinawa and a thousand other nameless, squalid places. None of this was their fault. After their ‘stupendous victory’ over ‘unquestioned evil’, their consolation prize was a two-bed-one-bath government subsidized crackerbox in a lily white, soul-killing Levittown twenty miles from anywhere, accessible only by car where they could be bombarded with endless advertising.

The Boomers became America’s first suburban generation; millions of them spawned like salmon in a few desperate moments of chaotic and guilty lust. The Cape Cods, Chesterfields, station wagons and black-and-white TVs became the Boomers’ birthright along with alcoholism, Doctor Spock and regular beatings. Yet, there was something faintly subversive and untrustworthy about the whole enterprise in view of the Greatest Generation; their children lacked seasoning. They had it too easy right from the get-go. More than the occasional taste of the knout, the kids needed to be fed enough horse shit of their own to toughen them up, to develop character. The parents didn’t want to kill their kids, at least not right away, they wanted to ‘improve’ them. The alternative might be communism. That would never do.

The Greatest Generation never did find the proper balance point between pampering and abuse. Their inner conflict plus the burdens of child-rearing graduated into resentment, then fury; they were suffering from a bizarre kind of survivors’ guilt that they took out on their children. They also had victory disease, which imparts a false sense of superiority to those benefiting from a turn of fortune. Sufferers believe they are infallible and cannot do anything wrong; the American version was a consequence of the country’s World War successes in 1918 and 1945.

Americans also believe in technology and that applying it to war possesses a form of morality superior to the forms it takes elsewhere … that war is integral to the American narrative of progress: more war = more progress. This had to be a universal truth because America had followed the philosophy since the founding of the country and had always won.

The Greatest intended Vietnam to be the Boomers’ trial by fire and what looked to be an easy score. Here, the two strains of Americanische pathology, guilt and arrogance combined together to form a perfect storm of hubris. Happy outcomes seemed assured: Marxists would be punched in the mouth, Boomers would earn the respect of their elders; America’s place as the World’s Greatest Country would be confirmed. The US had the biggest economy, the most progress and the best technology. We were putting men in space, the Vietnamese were stupid peasants lacking indoor plumbing. The difference between the two countries was less a gap than a kind of cosmic chasm, like that between the 16th century Spanish conquistadors with their horses, cannon and three-masted sailing ships … and the stone-age Aztecs. It didn’t register with management the same Vietnamese peasants had recently defeated the heavily armed and thoroughly modern French. Americans didn’t care because they believed themselves superior to both. They also believed their anti-communist crusade in Vietnam was just and necessary. It didn’t cross anyone’s mind in Washington or elsewhere the Vietnamese cause — to unify their country and expel foreign invaders — might be more just, and that the Vietnamese would willingly absorb millions of casualties if necessary, something the Americans would never countenance.

The establishment’s Big Idea for managing the war was for ‘others’ — the not-quite-real Americans — to do the actual bleeding. US ground forces were largely made up of conscripts: the children of the well-to-do would get deferments and reserve posts while the always-expendable riffraff from throw-away places and urban ghettos would be marched into the fire, along with beatniks and other malcontents. This was unfair on its face but it was deemed to not matter because the war would be over quickly, nobody would have the chance to complain. Unfortunately, the Vietnam adventure did not work out as intended, the fighting dragged on and casualties mounted. In a political war fought on television and in Congress, tech-y advantages were interesting but not particularly relevant. Unfairness became a social and political issue, opposition to the war swelled. There were complaints on moral grounds and against the government’s mismanagement, the war-progress equation was revealed as a fallacy in real time.

The treatment for victory disease is defeat, Boomers took the cure and the country got the side-effects. The Greatest still had their World War victories, they were able to escape responsibility for the debacle and hang the onus of failure on the kids who turned out to be the victims of their own earnestness. As with the British leadership after World War One, nobody of importance in the establishment was ever put in the dock for their murderous blunders or self-dealing. The Boomers found themselves as bag-holders for what at the time was America’s greatest fraud: they were left with disabilities, some names on a wall plus a narrative they had no place in.

Because the entire US establishment suffers from a kind of institutional Alzheimer’s, ‘policy’ lessons are forgotten, the same blunders are repeated over and over. The lesson of Vietnam — that the war was not only bad but criminally idiotic — was inverted. It was the defeat that was bad; the war itself was excellent! Certain trivial adjustments would be made at the margins so future wars could work better, with a doubling down on technology. The military would stop conscripting society’s losers it would hire them, instead. The conduct of war would be removed from the prying eyes of the media and buried under layers of classification. Military employment would be glorified along with the military itself; there would be a wallowing in Prussian-style pomp-with-a-twist: there would be parades, color guards, fly-overs and sanctification of combat heroes and the dead; also movies, shoot-em up video games and TV shows glorifying élan and killing. Despite all this, perhaps because of it, outcomes never change. Victories remain elusively out of reach despite our best efforts. Because the main lesson was ignored we choose to re-fight the Vietnam war repeatedly in different locales around the world. Even when we enjoy success — as we have recently in northern Syria — we throw it away.

Meanwhile, each Boomer endeavors to prove him- or herself more manly, violent and barbaric than all the other Boomers. Having had their big chance at imperial triumph snatched away, they now over-compensate, hoping boorishness and lousy anger management will bring back their missing Vietnam victory and the (grudging) approval of their (now ghostly) parents.

It must be daunting for a Boomer seeking political relevance to confront the ultra-billionaires who own everything, particularly the Generation X variety. The candidate’s position viz a viz the billionaire is simple: the candidate is the vassal, the tycoon is his lordship. Yet, approval from the billionaires is but a bailout away. In fact, bailouts are taking place right now: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars of cheap, short-term loans into the repo market every week in a kind of discount window operation. Why? Is there a recession? Short-term emergency lending usually only takes place when there is a run on the banks. Is there a run on a bank … anywhere? Apparently nobody remembers. Or it’s a secret. Or, whatever … The public is not hearing about any of this from any candidate. It could be funds are a-flowing because, a) the president is a Boomer and, b) other ‘Brand X’ candidates are also Boomers: the billionaires are being bailed out preemptively! It’s far fetched, but absent better information, it’s as good a theory as any.

The blank-mindedness of the elites is amplified by the laziness of the electorate, which is largely made up of millions of non-candidate Boomers. The inner workings of government can be difficult to grasp. In an environment of confusion there is the yearning for simplicity and certainty. Out with the republic, in with a monarchy! Both Biden and presumably Trump are the putative crown princes; wannabe ‘King Boomers’, legitimate (or not) heirs to the Clinton-Bush dynasties. Trailing behind are a gaggle of eager archdukes, barons and dowager empresses. Here is a costume operetta performed by dwarfs to amuse the tycoon overlords. Are they not entertained? There are already wars and horse racing; all that remains is breaking heretics on the wheel and-or burning them at the stake …

Just wait until the Obama mask comes off. A Biden presidency would be a sordid rerun of Clinton I with the familiar, depressing cast of inept, shark-jumping, pooch-screwing thieves: Henry Paulson, John Podesta, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Robert Rubin, Sandy Weill … Do we deserve this? Probably. Wisdom insists we must repeat mistakes until we learn not to. Learning takes time, which we don’t really have, only enough for the Boomers to take one last tumble down that elevator shaft.