Sol Invictus – New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon: Art Market Place

Sunday Reader – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

Now that Trump is gone, the CIA can tell the truth.

Well, sort of anyway.

They could have just quoted the Book of Revelations and been done with it. It’s an old, familiar story.

The first trumpet sounds: Hail, fire, and blood rain down on earth, burning up a third of the trees and killing all green grass, blah, blah, blah…

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (Rev. 12 1–4), William Blake, 1803–1805: Brooklyn Museum

But no! They — not really the CIA, but the National Intelligence Council — made up of 18 different spy agencies (do we really need that many?) just released a 144-page report called Global Trends 2040. You don’t have to read the whole thing.

They could have just quoted the cynic.

People are stupid. We’re all going to die.

But just for the sake of argument, let’s look at a bit of it. I feel like I’m quoting myself here, since this is a story I’ve been writing for 30 years.

“In the environment, the physical effects of climate change are likely to intensify during the next two decades, especially in the 2030s,” the report’s executive summary states. “More extreme storms, droughts, and floods; melting glaciers and ice caps; and rising sea levels will accompany rising temperatures.

“The impact will disproportionately fall on the developing world and poorer regions and intersect with environmental degradation to create new vulnerabilities and exacerbate existing risks to economic prosperity, food, water, health, and energy security,” it goes on. “Governments, societies, and the private sector are likely to expand adaptation and resilience measures to manage existing threats, but these measures are unlikely to be evenly distributed, leaving some populations behind. Debates will grow over how and how quickly to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions.”

I loved The New York Times editorial version of the story. The editorial board is such a funny group.

Why Spy Agencies Say the Future Is Bleak: Climate change, technology, disease and financial crises will pose big challenges for the world …

It points out that in 2008, the report warned about the potential emergence of a global pandemic originating in East Asia and spreading rapidly around the world.

Huh. That just happened, I do believe. Of course it was just a hoax, according to the previous president, which is why this story couldn’t come out until now.

This new report, ominously subtitled “A More Contested World,” says the coronavirus pandemic proved to be “the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II,” with medical, political and security implications that will reverberate for years.

No kidding?

To summarize what we have to look forward to, the Earth is being torn asunder by a changing climate, aging populations, disease, financial crises and technologies that divide more than they unite, all straining societies and generating “shocks that could be catastrophic.”

The gap between the challenges and the institutions meant to deal with them continues to grow, so that “politics within states are likely to grow more volatile and contentious, and no region, ideology, or governance system seems immune or to have the answers.”

At the international level, it will be a world increasingly “shaped by China’s challenge to the United States and Western-led international system,” with a greater risk of conflict.

A few cheery quotes from the report for light Sunday reading.

* “Large segments of the global population are becoming wary of institutions and governments that they see as unwilling or unable to address their needs. People are gravitating to familiar and like-minded groups for community and security, including ethnic, religious, and cultural identities as well as groupings around interests and causes, such as environmentalism.”

* “At the same time that populations are increasingly empowered and demanding more, governments are coming under greater pressure from new challenges and more limited resources. This widening gap portends more political volatility, erosion of democracy, and expanding roles for alternative providers of governance.”

* “Accelerating shifts in military power, demographics, economic growth, environmental conditions, and technology, as well as hardening divisions over governance models, are likely to further ratchet up competition between China and a Western coalition led by the United States.”

* “At the state level, the relationships between societies and their governments in every region are likely to face persistent strains and tensions because of a growing mismatch between what publics need and expect and what governments can and will deliver.”

According to The Times, experts in Washington who have read these reports said they do not recall a gloomier one.

“The gloom, however, should not come as a surprise,” the editors say. “Most of what Global Trends provides are reminders of the dangers we know and the warnings we’ve heard. We know that the world was ill prepared for the coronavirus and that the pandemic was grievously mishandled in most parts of the world, including the United States. We know the Arctic caps are melting at a perilous rate, raising sea levels and threatening dire consequences the world over. We know that for all the grand benefits of the internet, digital technology has also unleashed lies, conspiracies and distrust, fragmenting societies and poisoning political discourse. We know from the past four years what polarized and self-serving rule is like. We know that China is on the rise, and that it is essential to find a manageable balance between containment and cooperation.”

Someone decided they couldn’t put out a report with nothing but gloom and doom, however, so some PR person with an English degree from Yale working for the CIA wrote a hopeful section called “Renaissance of Democracies.”

Thanks to the defeat of Trump and the election of Joe Biden, apparently, the CIA thinks the United States and its allies are leading a world of “resurgent democracies” again, and it indicates that human beings or Homo sapiens could, in principle, turn things around.

“But nothing in the report suggests it is likely,” according to The Times.

No policy solutions are offered in the report, and of course that’s prohibited by law. So it will be up to the Democrats to go through this and offer solutions. The Republicans will certainly have nothing to say about it, except, well, to quote the Book of Revelations and say it will be up to God to deal with it.

All the while that great white hope Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will stand up and block the door in the Senate to solutions, like he was George C. Wallace blocking the school house door down in Alabama.

If there was a God and he or she had wanted the human species to succeed and go on populating the Earth, he would have made the fruit from the tree of knowledge free for everybody and not placed a prohibition on partaking of the proverbial apple.

Policy Solutions: The Separation of Church and State

Here’s a policy solution, which used to be an American ideal. To illustrate, I will quote the great Supreme Court Justice from Alabama Hugo Black.

In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), which first applied the First Amendment’s establishment clause to the states, the Supreme Court relied on Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor in announcing a strict standard of separation between church and state.

Justice Hugo L. Black concluded his opinion for the Court’s majority with the pronouncement that “the First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach…”

Related: Wall of Separation

Of course that wall was breached in 1980 when the Moral Majority helped get Ronald Reagan elected president, and the breaches have continued unabated since. There are more holes in this wall now than the wall between Texas and Mexico, and the Democrats won’t even stand up for this wall anymore. Look at President Joe Biden openly talking about his Catholic “faith.”

A third of the American people are totally enthralled by the story of the death of Prince Philip, and the Netflix series “The Crown,” and don’t seem to realize that they are celebrating a form of church run government called monarchy, not democracy.

As long as that is the case, as the report concludes:

“These challenges will repeatedly test the resilience and adaptability of communities, states, and the international system, often exceeding the capacity of existing systems and models. This looming disequilibrium between existing and future challenges and the ability of institutions and systems to respond is likely to grow and produce greater contestation at every level.

“In this more contested world, communities are increasingly fractured as people seek security with like-minded groups based on established and newly prominent identities; states of all types and in all regions are struggling to meet the needs and expectations of more connected, more urban, and more empowered populations; and the international system is more competitive—shaped in part by challenges from a rising China…”

The Elephant: China

Yes, the looming elephant in the room is China, which is described as perfecting a new economic and political system model called “State Capitalism.” Yes, it’s still run by the Communist Party, and in places it still looks a little like socialism, but … it is capitalism.

The clueless Americans, like Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgie, literally think the way to counter this is with Christian Capitalism. And not just any form of Christian Capitalism. White Christian Capitalism.

Far-right Republicans in Congress are now forming what they are calling a nationalist “America First Caucus,” which is really just a racist trope to “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,” which of course don’t in fact exist.

This idea is so stupid and potentially destructive, even for the Republican Party itself, that Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy from California came out sort of against the formation of the caucus, though he did not call it or its members out by name.

“America is built on the idea that we are all created equal and success is earned through honest, hard work. It isn’t built on identity, race, or religion,” McCarthy tweeted. “The Republican Party is the party of Lincoln & the party of more opportunity for all Americans — not nativist dog whistles.”

Trump Voters Refuse Vaccines

The best news out this week, which might or might not be enough to help in saving democracy and the world, is that data shows both in terms of a willingness to receive a COVID vaccine and actual vaccination rates so far are much lower, on average, in counties around the country where a majority of residents voted to re-elect former President Donald Trump in 2020.

Related: Least Vaccinated U.S. Counties Have Something in Common: Trump Voters

So if we’re all going to die anyway, there is some consolation in that at least more Trump voters will die first.

Maybe if enough of them would die soon some of the damn mass shootings might stop too. It’s gun-toting Trump voters who are disrupting our ability to have policy debates about real issues, because the news media can’t resist rushing out with all their cameras and microphones to the site of the next shooting.

You know the old saw: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Never mind that every time we seem to begin having a worthy debate in Washington about finding solutions to real problems, like an infrastructure bill to provide jobs and rebuild the country at the same time, there is another shooting, and we have to spend another two weeks talking about what to do about regulating access to guns.

There are not enough shotguns or even assault rifles in the entire American South and West to stop North Korea or Iran from developing nuclear weapons and raining down hell fire and brimstone on us all.

In a section of the intelligence report called “Existential Risks,” the analysts say, “Technological advances may increase the number of existential threats; threats that could damage life on a global scale challenge our ability to imagine and comprehend their potential scope and scale, and they require the development of resilient strategies to survive. Technology plays a role in both generating these existential risks and in mitigating them. Anthropomorphic risks include runaway AI, engineered pandemics, nanotechnology weapons or nuclear war. Such low-probability, high-impact events are difficult to forecast and expensive to prepare for…”

Yep. We’re all going to die.

A Way Out

There is only one sure fire survival method we could turn to, but no one is actually talking about it, except for us, and well, Martin Luther King Jr. back in his day.

“Everyone must decide whether they will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness,” he once wisely said.

If that became the new motto of the world, we might find a way to make it past all the existential and other threats. It’s how early humans survived and how we made it this far.

But narcissism and the selfish gene took over the country in 2016, and that will be a hard trend to break, especially on Facebook, which thrives on the selfie and the idea that every human being is the center of the universe. As long as that’s the dominant philosophy, there is very little hope at least in the long-term.

At least Trump is gone for now, and we can get a few things done to make progress in the short term. Once most people get vaccinated, maybe we can at least travel and have a little fun again.

If we’re all going to die anyway, I’m going to do it in a beautiful campground in the midst of nature, hopefully with a panoramic view of the sunset. See you out on the trail in the mountains, the best place to escape global warming and climate change in the summertime in America.

A summer sunset view from the Appalachian Trail by the Loft Mountain Campground in Shenandoah National Park, Sunday, July 12, 2020: Glynn Wilson

We will leave you this Sunday morning with a new song and video out from Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger.

“I wanted to share this song that I wrote about eventually coming out of lockdown, with some much needed optimism,” Jagger says. He is joined by Dave Grohl on drums, bass and guitar in this incongruous number called “Eazy Sleazy.”