This Is Not the Age of Defeat

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/chris-floyd/48830/this-is-not-the-age-of-defeat

This Is Not the Age of Defeat
Peace & Justice
by Chris Floyd | March 30, 2013 - 9:44am

This is the age of loss, not the age of defeat.

Drone strikes, kill lists, murderers and torturers approved for high office. Austerity for the poor, record profits for the rich. Truthtellers shackled, liars lauded, ignorance exalted, cruelty and callousness gilded with righteous piety. Everywhere, goodness is driven to its knees, and this brutality is not decried but celebrated.

As in that age of iron that lowered over our forbears during dark night of the Thirties, you see faces once thought kind and kindred turn suddenly feral. Fear is behind it, but not just fear: also a self-hatred for what fear has turned them into, a self-hatred that cannot be borne and so is turned outward, thrown outward, into harsh projections of hatefulness, violence and desolation.

The avid embrace of what was once denounced, or the sad but “savvy” acceptance of the “lesser evil”: this is what we see at every turn today among ourselves, among those we thought were our own, and sometimes, maybe – when the lowering is darkest, heaviest – in mirrors as we pass. When the lowering is darkest, when the soul is lost. In them. In us.

[MADem]

1. My goodness--is this "the" smirking chimp? nt

[unhappycamper]

2. I've been reading smirkingchimp for years.

I personally think the web site name should be tehsmirkingchimp, but that's just me.

[MADem]

3. Hee hee! I read it during the Bush years, and then ... perhaps it was me... I thought

it went offline. I thought it was one of several I used to frequent that rolled up shop and went away (I still mourn the loss of Media Whores Online). The format is a bit different but the material seems to be the same good stuff--I'm pleasantly surprised!