Our slow steady slide

 We carry our phones with us. They are the one essential item for many of us. I know some people brag about not having a smartphone, as if they are roughing it in the urbs and suburbs like frontier people, with old fashioned wind up watches and rolled up newspapers tossed onto their lawns and televisions plugged into their walls and rotary dial phones on their desks and maybe carry one flip phone, maybe, as their one concession to the demands of the millennium.

But I carry my smartphone. I clock in to my job on my phone, when the ADP app works, and take a photo of the sunrise or yet another picture of the Statue of Liberty or a painting I just finished, and check news for updates on the empire’s slow but steady slide into chaos and oblivion.

The scandal of the week is the top secret planning for an apparently illegal act of war and the scandal isn’t that the President’s team circumvented Congress to bomb people in Yemen but that they used a relatively insecure commercial app and mistakenly invited a journalist. They compromised security by discussing a secret military operation on their smartphones and put our own pilots in danger.

The SecDef, a notorious DUI hire, complained about having to do something to secure shipping lanes for our “pathetic”, his word, European allies.

NATO is pretty much over, our former allies are beginning to suspect. Had any European asked any Native American if America could be trusted to honor a treaty they would have gotten an earful of laughter. Now we do what Putin wants, for some reason, for whatever reason Trump thinks is in his personal interest and for his personal profit. My guess is that he is in debt to Russian mobsters.

My Norwegian friend says she is leaving the USA because she no longer feels safe here. This surprised me but I can’t reassure her.

Maybe our technology will be taken over by an artificial intelligence that is wiser than us. Our robot friends will dream new goals for us.

Or maybe a pandemic of sanity will deliver us. and maybe we will organize a democracy movement and heal our republic.

You are tripping, you say.

What do I know? I’m just another wage slave with a smart phone.