Who? You.

There has been an ongoing conversation regarding the U.S.A.’s pending candidacy for Failed State Status. I am sure that this goes back further than 2006, when Noam Chomsky wrote a 240 page indictment in the shape of a book, nominating the U.S. for this distinction. (Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy). I found Chomsky’s book searching for an article written by Derek Thompson for The Atlantic’s online edition, “America is Acting Like a Failed State.” (March 14, 2020)

Chomsky and Thompson aren’t exactly on the same page, but the idea that the U.S.A. has abdicated its responsibility as a world leader, much less as that Shining City on a Hill, is, by now, well understood.  Our nation’s nearly complete failure, at the federal level, to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic highlights what the Trump Administration has been intentionally inflicting upon our governmental institutions for the past 3+ years. As previously posted, Steve Bannon put it in motion — he set out to deconstruct the administrative state and, with Trump’s endorsement, the “administration” made quicker work of it than most of us thought possible, from the EPA to the FDA to the USDA it is as if Trump and his acolytes inoculated the U.S. government not with COVID-19, but ebola: it doesn’t matter that our government can’t breathe — there’s no point, its internal organs are dissolving into mush. 

And that gets to the question at the end of my last post: In an environment like this and being members of an industry that takes great pains to hold itself out as “conscious,” how do we conduct ourselves?

I don’t pretend that I’m the best messenger here, in fact, one of the things that I appreciate about Trump is that he has made me more aware of the responsibility I have as a citizen of this nation and how important it is for all of us to behave as if we believed that we might get our country back in the not-to-distant future (if we don’t soon, we won’t).

In an era when it’s easy to sell something as something else, then, do we take the high road, or the low? — do we even remember what that metaphor means? How do we label what we sell? How specific and honest are we obliged to be? Are we really interested in “transparency,” or is it just the new “natural,” of our era?  With FSMA on a long hiatus do we act as if it were still the law of the land? 

I am not sure, actually, and the slopes are getting so slippery that it isn’t exhilarating, it’s getting falling-from-a-plane-in-a-nightmare scary.