Is it snark? It doesn’t feel like snark.
There is too much doomsaying out there. It is hard to say how much is aimed, like trolling, at getting a rise out of people. Maybe just for the hell of it. Maybe just to get them to snap out of their stupor and goad them into action.
The problem for non-news junkies is that most of their neighbors aren’t glued to cable news. How they hear what’s going on in the world is less intentional, more organic. Our readers here may believe Rome is burning while life goes on for non-politicos.
I glanced around an uncrowded downtown restaurant about 10 days ago while waiting for our dinner and said, “This is life in a dictatorship.” Nothing seemed any different.
The rolling national 50501, etc. protests may change that. Or not. Calls for a nationwide general strike are mounting, if slowly and not yet loudly. I’d like to see one if, for no other reason, to see what happens.
Columnist Joe Mathews contributed to the doomsaying genre on Sunday by publishing an obituary for the United States of America in the San Francisco Chronicle:
The American democratic republic, a modest British colony that transformed itself into the world’s richest country and greatest military power, has died.
No official announcement was made of the end of the long-enduring republic, which was launched in 1789. No autopsy was scheduled.
Mathews goes on without saying whether the death was of natural causes or the result of foul play. He notes pointedly that a multiple felon named Trump who launched a failed coup and in his second term “governed in a way that drew comparisons to the Mafia” had a hand in terminating the Constitution.
The American democratic republic is survived by a country of the same name, the United States of America, now a presidential dictatorship.
The dictator not identified as the Constitution’s murderer had a slew of accomplices who go unnamed in the obituary. Among them, the Supreme Court with its “2024 decision putting the president explicitly above the law and immune from criminal punishment for official actions.” And the Americans who called for burning it down plus others who stood by and watched as it heaved its last breath. (And the tech bros whose AI products can’t seem to get a simple epitaph right after multiple attempts.)
“Few Americans were aware of the republic’s death,” Mathews explains. “Confusion and fear of violence reigned among those who recognized the loss.” The rest were enjoying their meals at downtown restaurants.
You get the point.
Since irony is dead too, the piece feels less like a wake-up call than a shrug. Not sure how that works as a troll. Maybe it’s a San Francisco thing.
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