Forum Post: Darkest Before the Dawn

http://stevebeckow.com

I watch very little CNN these days. They make little pretense of covering the news of the world. In fact its coverage is more or less restricted to talking up the latest gimmicks and prospects of a very small group of mostly men, all vying for the increasingly inconsequential seat of the one who sits in the White House, presiding over a shrinking empire and a political machine that is rapidly falling apart.

No one has shown more splendidly than Barack Obama how an American leader today who challenges power even from the White House can make little headway against a political structure so corrupt and elitist as modern-day Washington is. Never mind that he came from the wrong side of the color divide and thus lacked the genteel roots and political IOUs of the last reformer in that seat – John Kennedy. Look at what happened to Kennedy even so.

Presidents like Bill Clinton, himself mired in crime and corruption such as his drug connection through Mena Airport which he as Arkansas governor coordinated with another one-time president, German-born George Bush Sr., nonetheless made sure that they remained aloof from any reformist actions that would attract to them the same fate as JFK.

By rights the power should be centered in the national-security state, with its once-dominant military and bulging intelligence and surveillance apparatus. But even more secretive powers than they are working to bring them down, leaving a vacuum in Washington that only rhetoric and posturing can fill, until the curtain is finally brought down on the whole charade that Washington has become these days.

Still CNN each day seems content to endlessly discuss the sexual improprieties and fresh gimmicks that a small group of dull and bankrupt politicians project onto an until-recently complacent public.

Very little news even leaks out of Congress these days. One wonders what they are doing to pass their time, although a recently-leaked picture of members playing computer games may give us a hint of what it must be.

I'd imagine that most members of Congress are spending their time avoiding the press and the press seems happy to oblige. There's a sense that nothing is going on in Washington these days. The power is transitioning from Congress to the general assemblies of the Occupy Together movement who are searching for a way to describe their opposition to the political enslavement and economic impoverishment that Washington until today was rapidly imposing on them.

The elite, beaten at their game of dumbing down and eliminating the bulk of the people, are now frozen in the headlights, awaiting their political overthrow and the arrival of an entirely-new political and economic arrangement which few in the general public even suspect exists. We know of it and await it eagerly. But the man and woman in the street are probably pre-occupied with wondering how to make ends meet in a world that, on the surface of things, seems to be falling apart.

All is waiting these days as we approach the climactic winding-down of the powers that used to be. Once any of the major events occur that we're expecting within weeks or at the most a month or two, all will change overnight.

But until then, we're obliged to pretend that what is happening in our national media, this freezing of once-compelling events into a script more stylized and meaningless than a Noh drama, that we're given each day and evening, is somehow news.

Even the chaos of recent months is subsiding and we here who know what will happen to this bereft Titanic but still steam ahead are obliged endlessly to wait for the final scene and the ship to sink. I haven't the heart to turn the channel utterly off. That probably awaits the airing of a report so completely senseless that my curiosity succumbs. And that may come within days.

It is indeed darkest just before the dawn. Perhaps this darkness is intentional, putting us utterly to sleep before we're awakened by the brilliance of the morning sun.