Absolute Success

Submitted by Lindsay
Melbourne Australia!

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship
 of the bitch-goddess success
 - William James 1920

(7/2018) Forget power, forget status, the most important thing in life is success. It’s the first lesson we learn – find that milk spigot and suck! Make the potty in time, button that shirt. From then on every achievement creates a minute spark of satisfaction, another squirt of endorphin that helps muscles smile. Everyone values these feel good fixes that makes the day worthwhile. We learn to admire successful people, those celebrities who hope to profit from a brief adoration of their mediocre talents, while our own successes so often come down to catching the bus and surviving the day.

Life is, in fact, one of innumerable small victories that keep us going, but some folk get so good at making this happen that they get addicted. Naturally, they promote their achievements to prove their claims, and we believe them. Success is its own reward, and who knows, it might rub off if we get near enough to them. We might even get our five minutes of fame, our own web site and win the like crown. The midwife in all this is the net, the boy wonder of a new age who has grown up to be a crazed genius. The world is drowning in information while being starving of fact. Superstition is on the rise, the meme is king, and logic a dirty word. No one foresaw this, but a kind of maniac zeal took over this giddy new means of communication, and now we are wallowing in a sea of confusion.

So, enter the King of Success. Skilled at deals and cover-ups, rants and blandishments, Donald Trump has made triumph his motto. He is an excess of success and a super-model of double speak, with only one dream – to be famous. To be written about, to know that in 100 years time his name will still be in lights.

And that first step has been realized; he’s become an inflatable Dumbo on the world stage winning puffed up contests. If Kim actually does what he has agreed to do Donald is the savior of mankind. If he doesn’t, he proves his pulchritude to which there is no answer by anyone. And either way God Don will sit on his throne dispensing idiocy with aplomb. An excess of success will be the goal of all. Failure doesn’t exist, because it is never the fault of the principal. That’s always caused by underlings who are jealous, incompetent or in the pay of foreigners.

And of course his dream is correct. A hundred years is a tiny span for the memory he is creating to survive. Hitler, Stalin, Milosevic, even Khengis Khan will be forgotten and Trump’s name will still be the one that brings survivors to their knees and their prayer books. The one who successfully destroyed America and allowed China to rule unhindered, whose stupidity is used as example of the ultimate decline in American probity and sense. The faults in the system of electing all powerful presidents will have come to a crashing conclusion, and his name will be so abhorrent that using it will be the ultimate in contempt.

Of course that’s supposition. Someone will have to find a way of removing him from office or Republican representatives and senators will have to swallow their pride and admit they were wrong. If they persist in having their noses up the rear end of the Donald, they will finish wearing the stink of defeat as they bow to the new powers from Beijing. Or worse, the Democrats.

Maybe Europe, Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the rest of the countries that he turned from friend to foe will form a new bloc of their own. Political tectonics, that graphic analogy for the way the earth’s surface moves, will have had been realigned by the volcano from hell. Or a horrid truth may have emerged: Donald, Kim and Vladimir have formed the new triumvirate of power. Whatever happens, the world will never be the same again. It has changed already, and like climate change, the consequences cannot be foreseen, but they will be grievous.

Especially for Australia, almost totally dependant on China for trade, the outcome of a war of that kind would be devastating; while we have always assumed America would come to our aid if hostilities broke out, as we have done for you, there is zero possibility of that happening in if the war is about trade. For one thing Donald is looking inwardly and has an abhorrence of what might lie out there in the real world, for another you will have been weakened irreparably, meaning we will have no option but to be nice to the conqueror.

The notion of denuclearizing North Korea is a diversion. Less realistic but no less a blatant lie about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it is a ploy to make Mr. Trump look like a statesman. Cosying up to a person who should be on the list of mass murderers but who poses no real threat is just about the form of someone who ran a mediocre TV show. It should be noted that China has no interest in letting Kim destroy anything or starting a war of any kind, that’s their prerogative and one to be used only when all else has failed.

Their whole aim is to have everyone bow before them. Trade, technology, production, agriculture, banking, all will be under their sway. They have no intention of going to war to obtain territory; it’s easier and far less costly to buy it, as they are doing now all around the world. King Don is part of their strategy, and they could have had no idea how successful their deal with Putin would turn out.

If ever critical thinking and clear eyed appraisal were needed it is now. The drug of success makes the brain flabby, so now is the time for all of us who still have that organ functioning to take to the barricades. Forget party politics, this is survival. The great pity is that I had to write it.