When in the course of human events, the government of the United States becomes the exclusive province of overfed white men trained by ossified institutions, funded in their ambitions by a viciously irresponsible oligarchy, and certified by a ritualized political system severed from anything resembling a natural constituency, this is apparently what we can expect:
from the center left, the Vietnam war,
from the center right, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,
from the fascist right, the Iran war.
There’s an implied progression here. Predicting what comes next in the sequence isn’t quite as certain as predicting the next number in a sequence of primes, but if you’re betting on anyone in a suit Making America Great Again, I suggest you consider upping the dosage of your favorite nepenthe.
“…but if you’re betting on anyone in a suit …”
Any anticipated difference allowed for a person in a skirt?
Or, nah?
“Suit,” as I’ve dragooned it into service here, is just poetic shorthand for a class and a political culture which, despite centuries of principled opposition, is still dominated by men committed to a very specific set of largely gender-based stupidities. Considering political figures like Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, though, or Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton in their roles as Secretary of State, I’d say no, I definitely don’t anticipate any difference being allowed for people in skirts. If we’re talking figures like Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, or AOC, though, I’d definitely anticipate allowing a difference.
“If you want to make progress, put up with being perceived as ignorant or naive in worldly matters, don’t aspire to a reputation for sagacity. If you do impress others as somebody, don’t altogether believe it. You have to realize, it isn’t easy to keep your will in agreement with nature, as well as externals. Caring about the one inevitably means you are going to shortchange the other.”
LWM
“Inevitably” is doing a lot of work there. My classical education isn’t good enough to evaluate how subtle the despair was that led to the original all those centuries ago, but I’m pretty sure I share that despair, if not its subtlety. With men of action, or stupid and belligerent bullies hoping to pass for men of action—Hegseth springs to mind—you get something much less subtle, namely the smug assertion that eggs have to be broken to make omelettes, or the juvenile crowing about making reality and leaving it for you eggheads to study it.
In an age festooned with nuclear weapons, concentration camps, and mega-data centers, these supposed truisms seem to me to be long past their sell-by date, but it also seems to me that an emancipated slave has a necessarily narrow view of human possibility writ large. Optimism, creativity, have to be what’s truly driving history, or there’d be no one left at this point to think Epictetus was still worth quoting. Modesty may be wise counsel in an age like his—and ours, if we’re being honest—but the truth is we’d all be better off if we lived a society where peacocks could be admired for their joie de vivre, and not have fingers shaken at them for threatening to draw divine lightning down on less flamboyant members of the community,