THE PASSING OF THE UNITED STATES OF MENDACITY

The United States has, like all great powers before it in our long tormented world, manufactured, exhibited, propagated, and consumed vast amounts of mendacity.

Nothing new here - the Romans had bread & circus, observed Juvenal. The Americans build the Society of the Spectacle, observed Guy Debord. And yet, civilizations rose - for a while, at least.

In our case, oh, what fantasies of glory have accompanied the fetid swamps of deeds that have recurrently flooded our history (no need to recount them); oh, the proclamations of divine exceptionalism, manifest destiny, when in fact, from the very beginning, so many major decisions revolved around the most prosaic of pursuits - greed, etcetera.

But here's the thing: the mendacity - abundant, official, ubiquitous - was meant for the masses. The truth was jealously cultivated, institutionally protected and respected in the abodes of power, amply shared and utilized by the ruling circles successively in charge of the country. Yes, debate, sometimes fierce enough it lead to blows, but always firmly grounded on a shared assessment of the factual plane of reality.

What this op-ed by Tom Friedman - an organic intellectual of the liberal establishment - laments above all, it seems to me, is the loss of any semblance of that former allegiance to elite-wide, shared truth-platform, the precious kind that, indeed, requires to be properly "guarded by a bodyguard of lies," as Winston Churchill once said regarding war, but that applies to class rule in general.

Consider Friedman, a Jewish American opinion molder that even now, does not lament the repulsive lies and duplicities that have nurtured and sustained the lopsided, disastrous U.S. policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past seven decades, even as the world watches in horror where it has led in Gaza (genocide) and the West Bank (apartheid).

Or consider the rampant, bipartisan, bald lies sustaining the paranoid delusion of a perpetual "security" crisis along the Mexico-US border, or the egregious ones behind the phony "war on drugs" since the 1970s, or the ones used since the 1990s to justify erecting the monstrous, for-profit, American Gulag of extra-constitutional immigrant concentration camps - which just got showered, along with the other "immigration enforcement" activities, with $170.7 billion. It's all now part of the new common sense.

We can go on and on. The elites, at least those worth their status and power, usually know how to lie: on the basis of well-researched reading of actual reality, then pondered on to how best lie about - to spin it into stories publicly, officially, legally, to satisfy their own very special, unique, class interests. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's History 101 not just for the United States since its inception, but all other great powers and most other modern nation-states. (Theocracies, by the way, had it much simpler).

The problem of our late modern world, after centuries of exporting and externalizing insanity and abuse to the colonial regions and subordinate classes, first became obvious in Nazi Germany, burst later in China's "Cultural Revolution," and is now sweeping Maga America.

The social system implodes AT THE TOP, when for a variety of reasons the lies begin to swallow the governing elites' ability to truthfully face and manage reality for their own ends.

What happens when the social system literally becomes utterly irrational at the top, sinks in utter ideological chaos and embraces magical thinking to such a degree that what may be deemed assumed incontrovertible truth one day, is condemned as "rigged" and "fraud" the next, and people at the top become exposed as incoherent fraudsters and toadies.

Not even George Orwell, in his famous novel "1984," envisioned the arrival of such a state of total elite madness and instant revision of what is and what is not real, on a daily basis, as we now witness at the very top of our American political system, suddenly leaving us *undirected* by the usual pervasive lies. A single word suffices to describe the total disorientation that has resulted from so much lying catching up with the liars: Epstein.

The elites in Maga America are becoming, just as the mentioned previous elites became in Nazi Germany and later on during the Cultural Revolution China (a complicated story both), raving mad, bat shit crazy - there's just no better way to put it.

Consider the afflicted state of our Maga rulers today: Haunted by the specter of invading brown hordes, so deathly afraid of being replaced by them they're actually forcing their women to give up their rights and breed white babies; so paranoid they're military assaulting their cities cores and deporting their essential workers; so demented they're stocking on alligators and dog robots and armed drones to guard refugee families; so unhinged they're pouring billions into building vast tracts of easily-evadable walls in the lonely desert... and I can go on and on. Want to talk about DEI? How about evil vaccines, or cure-all tariffs, or subversive public television/radio?

So now, after slashing and burning, they're beginning to eat their own elite cadres, their essential scientists and policy experts, they're destroying the citadels of knowledge - the crown jewel of elite education, the envy of the world. They are purging *themselves* of the suspect, the disloyal, the not yet insane - one area of governance at a time, one domain of prior excellence after another - based solely on unconditional loyalty to... what? to whatever the Dear Leader might say today, but flip on by tomorrow? Are you - or are you not - for tariffs -- wait, never mind. Ukraine? Oh boy. The great plan for resorts in Gaza???

Many more nights of the long knives lie ahead - and this time it's to stab each other, the whole lot of them that previously, so habitually, so effortlessly, abided by the most reasonable methods of American elite rule - the tested, successful, simultaneous methods of duopoly-regulated, elite-enunciated, *truth-searching* and *lie-spreading*.

The world, rather than urgently and radically transform for the better, has been set on fire. The arsonists are in Washington. Elites don’t give up their privileges without a fight. They first lose their legitimacy to rule, then they lose their power, finally their senses. Ruling classes that devour themselves may drag the world down with them, unleash horrors on all the rest of us, domestically, internationally; but they will eventually crash and be overtaken by all the rest of us, their original victims, the legions that have always been ruled with lies, the salt of the Earth - we shall overcome them, we shall inherit the world. They, the prior commanding heights, will inherit the wind.

I just came back from Rome, where I visited the ruins of Nero's palace called the Domus Aurea, which translates to "Golden House" in Latin. One of the most magnificent palaces ever built, it was built after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, covering some 300 acres. It lies buried under a hill of rubble now, right next the Coliseum (built later over his vast pool). Only with the aid of 3D imagery upon its cavernous, dark, bare walls, can we gauge its splendor. Nero, who is famous for his insanity, said upon its completion he “at last begun to feel like a man." Soon the Senate declared him a Public Enemy. As he avoided capture by killing himself, he uttered "Qualis artifex pereo" - "What kind of artist am I?" Bat shit crazy.

Reminds you of anyone?

So read this essay and ponder what really is passing - is it America at large, or just those that have ran and profited from it for too long with impunity, by propagating lies while plying the truth as a sharp dagger, getting away, literally, with murder.

Only now, it's their own.

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ARTICLE: The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away