Thomas Frank: Rendezvous With Oblivion - A Time of Cascading Collapse

John Alexander, Ship of Fools

"This is what a society looks like when the glue that holds it together starts to dissolve. This is the way ordinary citizens react when they learn that the structure beneath them is crumbling. And this is the thrill that pulses through the veins of the well-to-do when they discover that there is no longer any limit on their power to accumulate."

Thomas Frank

The title of this book by Thomas Frank is an obvious play on the prescient quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech to the Democratic Convention in 1936:

"There is a mysterious cycle in human events.  To some generations much is given.  Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."

In the past I often speculated that the US was extraordinarily fortunate, a high-toned way of saying damned lucky, that in the mix of leadership that came out of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression the US had its Roosevelt—  while Italy had Mussolini, Germany had its Hitler, Russia was in the hands of Stalin, Japan with Tojo, and Span with Franco.

This time around the American voters were shortchanged when they thought  they had chosen their new FDR, the great reformer and bringer of Hope and Change in Obama.

And having failed in that, they next turned to an alternative choice, a new breed of populist, similar to Huey Long in rhetoric and common appeal, but without Huey's long years of practical experience in government.

The failure to make the necessary changes and reforms that follows on these political hoaxes reverberates, with the adherents of either 'great reformer' clinging to their dashed hopes and expectation like survivors stubbornly clinging to their favorite wreckage of a ship of fools, shutting their eyes in determined denial, drifting towards some yet to be realized rendezvous with oblivion.






Thom Hartmann reads a short excerpt from Thomas Frank's new collection of essays, Rendezvous With Oblivion.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Where Sin Abounds, Grace Abounds More

“If a leader allows weariness to so grip the mind that its strength is sapped and reason gives up the reins, if a leader is so overcome by heavy-hearted sleep that he neglects to do what the duty of his office requires— like the cowardly ship’s captain who is so disheartened by the furious din of the storm that he deserts the helm, hides away cowering in some cranny, and abandons the ship to the waves—if a leader does this, I would certainly not hesitate to juxtapose and compare his sadness with the sadness that leads, as Paul says, to hell."

Thomas More, The Sadness of Christ and Final Prayers


“I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: they struggle with the evil inside a human being, inside every human being. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within ourselves.

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Stocks attempted to rally today, but fell off from much of their gains into the close.

Silver held its ground, while gold gave up a little.

The US Dollar finished higher.

The hysteria continues to spread, infecting both with blindness and hatred.   It will find its culmination.

No one will have asked for it, or even seen it coming.  Again.

If anything might tend to discourage my outlook it is the lack of financial reform, and the reassertion of deregulation as a good for its own sake.

Without financial and political reform there will be no change in the long term trends to inequality. And that condition may not cohere into longer term sustainability.

Defy the world with love, and a light will come into your life.   And so you may save the best in yourselves.

Have a pleasant evening.

Silencing Dissident Voices: Consortium News Interviews State Department Whistleblower Peter Van Buren

"In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship."

Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist


"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Constitution of the United States, Amendment I


"Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."

Martin Luther King

"On the premiere edition of Consortium News Radio we speak with Peter Van Buren, a former State Department official, whistleblower and victim of Twitter censorship.

Van Buren speaks about his experiences in Iraq, the critical book he wrote about those experiences and how the Obama State Department eventually attempted to have him tried under the Espionage Act.

This week Van Buren had his Twitter account permanently shut down and seven years of his Tweets wiped from the record. Why? Because he challenged mainstream journalists who contested a Tweet from journalist Glenn Greenwald that mainstream reporters support America’s wars and help bring them about.

One corporate journalist decided to silence Van Buren by complaining to Twitter, which, within two days, and with no due process, obliged.

Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News, interviewed Van Buren on Wednesday, August 8 for 40 minutes."

You can view the Consortium News website here.

I am sure most of us have forgotten Van Buren, and the other 'whistleblowers, activists, and dissenters' that were prosecuted, and sometimes vindictively persecuted, by Obama/Clinton.

Julian Assange comes to mind as well, among others.  How he has been treated is disgraceful and an abusive use of state power and 'the letter of the law.'   But going forward it will set the tone for freedom of the press for everyone who chooses to say things that are at odds with, or even unflattering to, the prevailing narrative.

Pervastive platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth should be treated like common carriers.   That would relieve them from having to bear the burden of defining what is to be censored and what is not.  This places that burden on the government, subject to all the checks and balances and recourse therein.

It is all too easy for government to pressure private companies to excess, and then point the finger at them, holding them as scapegoats.

And those on both right and left should be able to see the excesses that may be justified by this current climate of hysteria, which truth be told, emanates from the corporate Democrats as much as any of the many excesses of the GOP.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Long Division

"Just because so many things are in conflict does not mean that we ourselves should be divided.  Yet time and time again one hears it said that since we have been put into a conflicted world, we have to adapt to it.  Oddly, this completely unchristian idea is most often espoused by so-called Christians.  How can we expect a righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone who will devote themselves undividedly to a righteous cause?"

Sophie Scholl


"People who know nothing of God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world.   They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all.

They can only conceive one way of becoming real: cutting themselves off from other people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves and other men.  They do not know that reality is to be sought not in division but in unity, for we are ‘members one of another.’ “

Thomas Merton


“In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in His own Person restored the image of God in all.   Through our relationship with the Incarnation we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our familiality with all mankind."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Stocks closed largely unchanged today.

Volatility as measured by VIX continued to move lower.

Gold and silver moved slightly higher with the Dollar largely unchanged.

Defy the world with love, and a light will come into your life.

Have a pleasant evening.