As economic self-mastery dissipates, public madness predominates. No longer can we pretend that our system works. No system appears to work at all. Public morality, ever more strident, reeks of farce. But this clown has no sense of humor, and would annihilate laughter with fire. Every system set up to protect us, harms us. Environmental Protection Agency presides over destruction. Food and Drug administration presides over poisoning. Department of Defense presides over offensive global war. The most sacred words alike violated, all political recourse seems impossible. Dictatorships watch with amusement at the tarnish and hypocrisy of our ideals. Surely this is an epochal crisis. The cacophony of representative democracy laughs in the face of all idealisms. Surely we are depressed by the failure not of kings or aristocrats, but ourselves.
But we must look back to see who we are, by comparison as it were, our internet democracy, the television democracy of the Cold War, and the radio democracy of World War II. The death of news print meant also the death of natural journalism, meaning the original writing of articles, and the individual control of subject matter. The prehistory of our failure today - whether measured by climate change, endless war, industrial pollution, civic degeneration, extreme inequality, or the apparent instability of a globalized Pax Americana - makes our subject - democracy, self-governance, economic independence - challenging for Americans. We are conflicted. Wages of empire! Sons of the republic, granddaughters of the empire, the frauds of public life are as old as the Revolution, and the demoralizing spectacle of an all-consuming horde trying to somehow govern ourselves democratically and peacefully, is almost unimaginable.
We persist, and have long placed faith in persistence: but our failures have caused a crisis of destruction. With it, the crisis of legitimacy. Enter the dictator. As government fails, the Corporation has the whipping hand: the concentration of American media is unprecedented, it's the echo chamber of surveillance-based censorship bringing new terrors, beyond mere propaganda or censorship, into the very act of listening or reading. We are pushed to the precipice. Nowhere are these events even acknowledged. How do we find our feet? And where to leap?