New Moon Edition October 2025
Does it seem to you these days we’re looking for the foot of the fair princess that fits the glass slipper and only wicked stepsisters appear? I think of the world in which we were raised, proud, prosperous post-War America, beacon of democracy, leader of the free world, place of equality and boundless opportunity, land of the free and home of the brave. Where did she go, Lady Liberty, just before the clock struck midnight and reality dawned? Perhaps the season is appropriate to see America not as a carriage but rather a pumpkin, its face lit from within by a grimace or an evil grin.
The fellow who created James Bond might be exercising that license to kill when he said of our nation: “America has progressed from infancy to senility without having passed through maturity.” Ian Fleming was merely paraphrasing what has been said about other nations over the years, perhaps none of it as poignantly applied though as what fits this mightiest of nations. The decline and fall presupposes a period of primacy and what was ours? A promise unkept? Vast potential unrealized because beneath the pomposity, the hubris, and the hidden ills, we were essentially insecure and uncertain about our true place, the imposter syndrome at our core?
Did any of us ever imagine, even in our wildest dreams and greatest fears, our society would reach this place of absolute insanity that afflicts us now? We appear literally and figuratively to be mad. Angry, yes, but badly out of balance, too, a people for all intents and purposes who have lost our mind. The absurdity of what claims to be our political leadership is breathtaking but its audacity is exactly what we permit it to be. Where there are no subjects there can be no king. Is it senility that has overcome us or, hopefully, is this the last gasp of our infantility and we might yet mature?
Perspective. A hard thing to gather and harder to keep. How can we remember what once was when we no longer can concentrate on any one thing for longer than Tic Tok takes to pass through our awareness and return to Play Again? Were we to gather our wits and pay attention to the narrative arc of our time in the maw of this thing called progress, we could look back 55 years to the day when the promise of free enterprise seemed to know no bounds.
In 1970 we were a quarter century into the booming capitalism of post-War America. There were jobs for everyone, food was plentiful, housing was cheap, education was free to all, and college tuition was a pittance. White collar, blue collar, or no collar at all, a single wage earner could comfortably support a family. The middle class was well within the reach of nearly everybody. Then as now Defense and its military was the driver of the economic engine and it consumed a third of public expenditures.
At the core of the free market economy was a rapacious need to grow, build, expand, consume at any cost to keep the profits flowing. Prosperity came to be defined by the size of your income and how much you could buy. Longer hours at your job grew your pay. Two incomes per family bought more than one. Productivity and not excellence became the worker’s primary objective. 55 years later all that effort and all the largess of unfettered capitalism has left the vast majority of American workers less wealthy than they were in 1970, to say nothing of the steep decline in their quality of life.
How to get those critters back in the box once they’ve been loosed in the air? Are late stage capitalism and unhinged democracy running on parallel tracks? Is the pretense of decency once abandoned irredeemable as an effective social modulator? Are we being shown in no uncertain terms that the adulation of wealth and position we so desperately covet has let fly the most successful practitioners of accumulating riches to do exactly as they please, unfettered by law, shame, empathy, or even satiation?
When words have no meaning, black is white, wrong is right, and deeds are whatever we claim them to be all evidence to the contrary, nothing much matters any longer, it seems. Perception being reality, artifice now has its way with us because it shows us what it wants to portray, the actual being irrelevant as the words that once described it. What we see is what we get and what is real and true has absolutely nothing to do with it any longer. That the Wizard behind the curtain is merely an elf matters not at all.
The brave new world is made of thoroughly addled imagery culled by manipulators in fantasy factories for people too addicted to sensationalism to think or care. Whose purpose is being served, we might wonder? Those two dozen families whose personal wealth exceeds all the rest of us combined might merit our suspicion. They and the politicians who do their bidding. When you bring elected officials to their knees and bend the highest courts in the land to your will, harvesting yet more riches from the hoi polloi is child’s play. If it indeed is late stage capitalism and democracy finally is undone, we turnips still may have blood to give and no one now to protect us.