“Three time’s the charm” globally failed to scale on Tuesday, November 15th, 2022, for Putin, McCarthy, Trump, Musk, Bankman-Fried and Planet Earth.
First up that day, Russia fired dozens of missiles against Ukraine and one Russian missile, an accident “caused by an errant Ukrainian air defense missile launched in response to Russian strikes”, landed across the border in Poland. The incident killed two local citizens in NATO territory for the first time during Putin’s four Ukraine invasions that started with annexing Crimea in February 2014. Fears of a “what if”, World War One chain reaction repeat a full century later bred geopolitical frenzy over whether to invoke NATO articles four & five defending member territory integrity. Aging, untested trigger protocols added to the threat of continental-wide military confrontation deploying ever more efficient weapons of mutual assured destruction.
On the same day, hours later in another time zone, an election denying Republican Party caucus nominated Kevin McCarthy to serve as U.S. House of Representatives Speaker who then publicly implied his intention to recycle the two-year Benghazi special committee hearings tactic he inadvertently revealed seven years earlier to be a Clinton 2016 campaign sabotage master plan. Domestic terrorists on January 6th,2021, killed one more American holding the U.S. Capitol line against McCarthy’s insurrectionists than Ansar al-Sharia global terrorists attacking the CIA’s compound in Libya managed on September 11th, 2012. As supreme Potomac-Ptolemaic congressional navigator, McCarthy marks his political odyssey ending where it began in center radar scope position, finger in the wind, maximum profile invested with minimum courage, permanently moored to a DOA policy pier in his legacy image and likeness, run aground betraying true north humanity, honor, patriotism and freedom.
That evening, Mar a Lago’s MAGA-Magnus announced a third run at the U.S. Presidency seeking a “get out of jail free” card to thwart multiple criminal trials, re-virtualize mythic powers to declassify national intelligence at will, and unleash white-heat grievance resenting two impeachments resulting in mounting electoral losses in 2020 and 2022, punctuated by a failed coup against the country whose constitution he swore an oath, on U.S. Capitol steps, to defend. His cultish “will be done on earth as it is in heaven” exhumes America’s body politic corpse for another “all-you-can-eat” personal revenge buffet. In sync, his patented fundraising scam platforms repurpose financial algorithms for-hire grifting U.S. Treasury, Evangelical, QAnon, and GOP donor accounts to deposit unregulatable, off-book slush funds at will and replenish personal larders after running low on tapping other people’s money.
We see like-minded, neo Gilded Age, crypto-twitter billionaire drama queens act out as obscenely over privileged, tantrum-throwing petty tyrants nailing global precariat to the shareholder primacy cross, destroying alpha & trashing omega. Workers trapped in corporate personhood fiefdoms receive out of scope, impulsive, cruel and destructive lightning bolt tweets hurled from “fake it till you make it”, Valhalla tax havens. Arbitraging and commoditizing immortals get to throw mere humans to the curb, run them over in driverless vehicles, and then escape to outer space in taxpayer funded private rockets to victimize-colonize another disposable world.
Climate Armageddon demon deniers wipe out species and habitat at will, socializing public troughs to transition unseemly private profits to themselves without social or environmental justice reconstruction. Dire warnings of “mankind’s honors becoming punishments from the gods” surface and go unheeded with every “COP” (Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) defunded and left behind.
Maybe it’s Genghis Khan’s thirteenth century warning to religionizing fundamentalists, judicial textualists, nativists and militant nationalists stopping us from leaving their plantations behind in search of better common good: “I am the punishment of God…If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you”.
Maybe the eternal Gautama Buddha (who willingly surrendered his inherited Hindu princeling power and wealth to seek enlightenment as a spiritual ascetic over 2,600 years ago) can serve as inspiration: “just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.”
