It's the end of the world as we know it

I saw this Australian movie from the late 70s sometime in the early 80s. It was on one of those weekend late-night TV shows that specialized in playing odd movies from around the world. I happened to come across it at the beginning.

It was called The Last Wave, starred Richard Chamberlain, was directed by Peter Weir, and it was very, very strange. Chamberlain is a lawyer defending aborigines from a murder charge who discovers what is really going on involves the end of the world. Or more specifically, the end of this contemporary world and the beginning of the next. As a result, at the end of the film, you feel positive, even good, about the end of the world. You know this has happened countless times before and will happen countless times again.

This has become my view of what is an almost certain end to contemporary civilization. I'm not a believer that the planet itself will somehow be destroyed. Pretty unlikely. I think what's likelier is how humans live and even their ability to live will end.

I'm all right with that.

The direction climate change is going will destroy much of the Third World in the near future, and while most Americans, if they think about it at all, and most of us don't, think it will have minimal effect on them, it's not a question of if it will but when it will. It may take some time, maybe years, a few decades, but it will have tremendous effects on us. At first it will be economic, but it will encroach on our lives more. It will be burdensome and painful, and we'll be uncomfortable and some of us will determine "It's them or us," and that might work for a while. Eventually, either because we develop a greater moral sense or we simply run out of people to exploit, Americans and other elites whose lives depend on other people doing most of the work for them, will be forced to do things we don't understand or haven't taken the time to adapt, and we will peter out as a species.

Today is The Day of Remembrance, a day one acknowledges death, including the death of the fantasy one can continue pretending not to know about what is being done in one's name or at one's side. We should acknowledge that we've reached beyond the point of holding off whatever form our species' death is coming in for more than a handful of years, and most of us don't care.

I do care. I feel fine.

Impeachment isn't the answer

Now it's become reality, it's time to recognize that, for most of us, impeachment of trump is not a dream come true but the shameful recognition we screwed up so badly we have to use extraordinary measures to fix our error.

I'm old enough to remember the people crowing that Nixon's impeachment hearings and subsequent quitting was evidence of the system working the way it was intended. That may have been true, but trump's trial and potential ouster wouldn't be a proof of the system's efficacy but of how, faced with a misbehaving and harmful leader, who should have been surrounded by people who could check the worst impulses of a candidate who had proved he was all impulse, the system allowed him to dismiss the adults in the room, bring in his sycophants, and allow his fantasies of making himself chief executive officer over not just a corporation but over a nation where real lives are affected, and now has to make the argument that only in his removal can the system be set back to factory settings. This should be easy, too, given his predilection to act out in public. But he's shown to have surrounded himself with such toadying miscreants willing to excuse and ignore all the harm he does that there's a genuine fear not only could he receive exoneration from them, but they could actually enable his reelection.

Despite all the harm and abuse he and his family, both blood and behavioral, have done the American people and the people relying on them, I don't want him impeached. I want an end to his reign more in keeping with it. I want him, his family, and his upper administration sneaking onto Air Force One at midnight with the clothes on their backs, clutching loot grabbed from White House shelves in last-minute desperation, heading to permanent exile in Moscow, knowing their alternative is arrest and the Hague, living out the ends of their lives like Marcos, Duvalier, Pahlevi, in constant fear one of those toadies will gladly give them up to curry favor with the new administration. They have made this country a banana republic, let them endure the poetic endings of those rulers.

They can have Air Force One.