Emperor's New Prose

It didn’t work because the memetic imagery the administration and its supporters chose over the weeks and months that followed broke a story that the crowd needed to be true: they needed to believe that they were not cruel.

Rusty, both of these notes helped me regain a semblance of hope. I’ve figuratively been the boy at the parade seeing what everyone must see, while it seemed no one was acknowledging it. The discovery, via polling and narrative, that the Trump administration has lost the plot with the majority of the citizenry leads to the conclusion that there are actually shared norms that still mean something to Americans. Maybe it is a fleeting misstep. But, maybe it is a “mask off” moment that Ben referenced in OH that will not be forgotten quickly.

Amen Rusty

You’re speaking to my heart.

Jim

A man who is ill-adjusted to the world is always on the verge of finding himself. One who is adjusted to the world never finds himself, but gets to be a cabinet minister.
-Herman Hesse

An elder with the mind of a child, offering hope (with the help of spell check, grammar check, and a recursive, subversive, serendipity synchronicity word processor on steroids):

A tender letter to our great-great-great-grandchildren-yet-to-be

July 15, 2025

To all our children yet unborn—
whose laughter I can almost hear across the vast bridge of time,

You may one day inherit a world even more dazzling in its verisimilitude, where screens wrap your very eyes, and every illusion is hyper-real. You may live among countless semiosimilitudes, symbols stacked upon symbols, meanings doubling back on themselves in recursive splendor.

But be gentle with these things.
And be wary of the apparatchiks—those outer ones who declare what is true, and those inner ones who march your thoughts in old parades. They are only doing what they were trained to do, enforcing inherited scripts.

Know that I, your old ancestor, spent a lifetime slowly unlearning. I wandered through myth and science, poetry and politics, chasing the spaces between words, listening for the small hush at the end of an exhale.

There, in that tender pause, I found what felt most real—not a thought, not a creed, not a system, but a simple presence, shared by all who breathe. It is yours too.

I send this letter not as a rulebook or a sermon, but as a small lamp in the darkness. May it help you see that beneath the world’s elaborate stage, there is a deeper music playing—one that welcomes you, always, just as you are.

With all the wonder of a child
and all the grace of an old man,

Jimmy

I hope so. But for the immigrant it’s not feelings but actual action that will dictate any difference to their support of Trump administration or not. It probably won’t matter to them that the military could shoot them with tears in their eyes. Ice got 100s of billions to continue on and I doubt the damage is going to stop or go away. Greek tragedies are tragic because we already know the outcome. I don’t see any heroes in this story.

Kaiser,

As I understand the Greek sense of tragedy, is that if you take what one feels is one’s greatest attribute (i.e. good looks, brains, wealth, etc.) it is often identical to one’s tragic flaw.

The political, economic and religious dysfunction I see in Epsilon Theory’s Great Ravine is felt by our elected representatives, oligarchs and priests as their greatest attribute. They see no dysfunction.

It’s the thinking that was given (gifted?) to us that is the tragedy. We think it is The Reality, not a reality. Thinking is a small part of it.

It’s the tyranny of language itself. The myth of the Tower of Babel.