Degringolade

Naïve Art (Primitivism) / Grandma Moses/ Sugaring Off

I realize that I am not the most optimistic person on the planet.  Yep.  Not in the least.

This flies directly in the face of the obligatory optimism that pervades the common tongue today.  Time must get better because if time get worse, that would mean that what we have is transient.  This is not a welcome train of thought anywhere here in the land of the free.  

Folks point out to me that my gloom has not panned out into an apocalypse painting that they thought I was describing.  But truthfully, that was never, ever in the theme that I was painting.

Normal curves are pretty interesting things to look at and ponder.  One could argue the lifespan that I have been allotted encompasses the area immediately before and after the peak of a secular cycle.  I tend to think that the year that I graduated high school was the peak of the cycle and that the life this callow mark have just been a quite comfortable slide down a slope.

People think that I look back at history too much, after all, the same things can’t happen to us because we are smarter and better people than folks in the past.  Our society seems to have cast that judgement centuries ago and by god, we are sticking to it.  But I do want to point out that what seems to be the consensus date of the roman empire’s peak was around 117 AD and the consensus for it’s date of fall is 395 AD.  Two-hundred and seventy-eight years is quite a long time.   

But one has to also look at the other end of the spectrum, the fucking limeys.  The sun never set on the empire in 1921.  But the Empire officially ended in 1997.  Seventy-six years is not really all that impressive when looked at with historical lenses.

Carolingian Empire is even harder to pin down.  I am calling its peak at around 807 AD, and it fall at 888 AD.  Let’s call it 81 years.

So, I am going to make a guess at the lower end of the peak/fall guesstimation.  I am going to call the decline and fall to be around eighty years (a little like Strauss–Howe generational theory without being an asshole).

So, if we are looking at 1972 as the American Empire’s Peak, and take the 80 years as the expected time to fall, and place a ten year range around both the dependent and independent variables, I came to a fall of empire for the land o’ the free between 2032 AD and 2072 AD.

So we are looking at a -year span ahead of us starting in around eight years.  I am figuring the probability of collapse will be around 2052 with a 1 in 3 chance with a decline before and after:

Percent chance of final collapse of American Empire

So.  fifty two is thirty years from now.  The chances of me seeing collapse is there, but there are thirty years of steadily increasing shit to deal with.  No end of world, no cannabalism, not apocalyptic plague, just a steady downward crawl where things get a little weirder each year and vain and awkward attempts to stabilize the situation are implemented.  I think that any attempt to pretend to return to the role of principle of the empire or re-establishment of the material excesses of the past will simply be stillborn.  

Lowbrow Art / Robert Williams/ Psychic Pedestrians On a Spiral Horizon (Barycenter)

Drinking tea on a Sunday morning.  Gonna spend time today being Betty Homemaker.  

I am trying hard to stay disinterested.  I hope that I can stay out of either side's sites.  The trouble is that there are so many sides that it is a difficult navigation through a strait full of ways to run aground.  

I am trying to keep tabs on all the factions that constitute the sandbar.  Not that I have any particular love for any of the worldviews being presented.  Nope, it is kind of like when you move into a new suburb and you spend the first little while just smiling and being pleasant while you tot up a mental inventory of your neighbors religions and political leanings so that you can steer clear of those particular subjects when you are one-on-one or you can vamoose when a group conversation is heading in a bad direction due to the vagaries of the group.

I am guessing that a lot of folks don’t bother with this.  For some odd reason, over the past twenty years or so folks don’t seem to bother taking this simple inventory into account.  I think that the biggest surprise to me is the parochialism of folks' worldviews.  I am coming to the conclusion that the hippie dippie nonsense of the sixties and the execrable slime coming out of the New Age moment has fully taken hold. Everyone seems to feel that, if they just wish and believe hard enough, their individual and self-centered worldview will suddenly become the gold standard throughout the myriad of individuals and cultures that constitute the planet’s population.

Nope, the world is not about a single “truth”.  It is a very large and very fine-grained spectrum of belief systems, many of which are mutually exclusive.  None of these have proved to be universal.  I sincerely doubt that any of them can be modified sufficiently to become so.