Happy Birthday Doctor Strangelove

As I write this article Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is sixty years old.

And the story, intended to expose the idiocy and madness of nuclear armaments and war, continues to be a vital lesson unlearned. Each character portrayed in the film represents incompetent, deranged leadership. The film even presages some of the Trump nominees and includes a moronic, bloviating character (amongst many others), Brig. General Jack D. Ripper, believes that fluoridation of the American water supply is a Soviet plot to poison the U.S. populace. Ironically not much different from the ravings of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., criminal-elect Trump’s Cabinet nominee to lead Health and Human Services.

Fashion and Fascism

When a particular fashion is no longer “in style” it is not necessarily dead. Bell bottoms and mini-skirts become fashionable again. Crop tops return to style.

Unfortunately the same is true of greedy, ruthless power-mad tyrants like Putin. Orbán. Trump. Netanyahu, Milei, LePen, Bolsonaro, and other right-wing authoritarians. Pretty much anyone (except journalists) attending a CPAC event for example -greedy power-mad tyrants, and/or fascist wannabes or young fascists in training.

The global rinse/repeat cycle pattern of fascism:

1. First, prolonged economic downturn cycles cause frustration, anger, and generational despair.

2. Blame the group or groups of the day for the economic downturn(s).
   It’s the Immigrants! Refugees! Cadillac-driving welfare queens, Big Nanny Government!, Federal Overreach (you know, like food safety and keeping toxic poison out of our drinking water supply -except in impoverished communities like Flint), it’s the intellectual Ivy-league college elitists! It’s the teachers, the books we must ban, it’s abortion, pension plans, activist judges, It’s Hollywood, It’s the LGBTQ+ community, the feminists, the civil rights activists, the peace demonstrators, the hippies, and the list of right-wing blame goes on, and on (and of course it’s never the obscenely wealthy, it’s not private equity, it’s not real estate developers, it’s not the banks, and it’s not Wall Street!!!)

3. Elect tyrants who then say “We’re going to Make (Nation) Great Again!!!” -while enriching themselves, and friends, staying out of prison, and concentrating wealth/power/control.

   

4. People were already impatient -now become worse off. As the right-wing leadership concentrates wealth and power, it is doing so by shifting wealth and power from millions of people to a few.

5. People finally get beyond a threshold of pain and elect new leadership.

6. New leadership is left with a vastly unequal society, no democratic guardrails, and it takes at least a generation or more to rebuild.

7. People get impatient with the rebuilding process.

8. People re-elect tyrants.

   

9. Rinse/repeat as unfortunately necessary.

The United States, once seen as a “shining city on a hill”, a successful experiment in representative democracy has fallen into the deep dark abyss of this pattern throughout my lifetime.

Other nations trying to cast off greedy, fascist, authoritarian tyrants are also falling into the same pattern. Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Netherlands, Argentina, and even the rise of the right-wing Chega political party by Andre Ventura in Portugal, where democracy, after the Carnation Revolution, is only fifty years old (a democracy in its childhood years).

Let’s face reality. Throughout the 20th Century, the world experienced the suffering, death, and destruction wrought by far-right fascists and madmen. And now we have the kind of nuclear arsenals that even Dr. Strangelove would have thought impossible as we speed toward the next Hiroshima and Nagasaki led by mass murdering thugs like Putin and incompetent, corrupt, sociopathic circus clowns like Trump.

I’m going to sound like an elitist and I’ve been called far worse.

Maybe democracy is just too hard. It requires constant effort. It requires a well-educated, informed, and engaged society.

Democracy requires patience. And in the U.S. we’ve cleverly learned it cannot co-exist with an extreme concentration of wealth and power.

As long as there are power-mad greedy a*holes like Trump and Putin, supported by obscenely wealthy imbeciles and oligarchs, societies working toward justice, equality, and democracy will always, ALWAYS, be under attack. Take one election thinking the co-star to Bonzo the chimpanzee will make a great leader and it can set a nation on a path to ruin.

And make no mistake, greedy, ruthless, despotic tyrants will suck the lifeblood and future out of every person within the borders of the nations in which they operate or even beyond such borders as Putin and Netanyahu continue to prove in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.