The United States of ...Jenga?
What is the ultimate aim?
Fans of Pink Floyd will easily recall their anthem 'Another Brick in the Wall'. To this day, it serves as a call to action against oppression in all forms both external and internal - political, social conformity, or internal struggles with personal limitations. It inspires individuals to break free from their own metaphorical brick walls.
I start this piece with reference to a brick wall to have an image firmly in your mind. If not a wall, exactly, then an enormous construct made from thousands, nay, millions of tiny pieces. All the pieces contribute something towards the stability of the whole. Perhaps none are truly vital – acting as the metaphorical keystone from which all others take their security and the removal of which would threaten imminent collapse.
The entity might be a house. A residence for a single family. Or perhaps a block of apartments to house many families. It could be much bigger - a commercial building – an office block. Or some vast edifice, like a castle, providing places to live and work and socialise for all who were accepted within its gate.
Stay with me here as we go further up the scale. Let’s think about a collection of houses, apartments and office blocks. A village; heck, a whole town, while we’re at it. Did I write ‘town’? Make it a city. Yeah, a big city. Like London. Or New York.
Actually, in the same way as you can gather houses together to make a town, why not gather cities in the same way to make a country? Add all the towns and villages and individual homesteads dotted between them, too. A whole country – think of that. All those bricks. All those individual pieces which together make up the whole.
But the country isn’t just physical bricks, is it? No – someone has to build it and maintain it and someone else has to grow food to feed the people doing the building. There has to be a team of doctors and nurses to attend to illness or accident. And all those workers will have children, so they’ll need to be educated. And although what I’ve switched to isn’t a collection of physical objects – nevertheless, these societal elements are the glue which holds the vast construct of the country together. A bit like mortar holds bricks together.
You may have read thrilling stories about prisoners managing to escape their cell by scraping away that mortar, day after day, night after night - until they loosen a brick and can wiggle it out. The next brick is a little easier. And the next. All the bricks have to be replaced temporarily, of course, to pass cursory inspection by the guards. And the trick is to remove only enough bricks for a person to squeeze through. If too many are taken out at once, a wall might collapse and alert the authorities. But when the time comes, the loose bricks can be removed in seconds, the prisoners make their escape and disappear into the night.
There are instances of what I’m driving at in reality as well as fictional examples in stories.
A fun party game (at which small children usually excel) is to build a tower out of 54 wooden blocks and then take turns to remove one at a time. The loser is the one causing the tower to collapse. As a side note, research tells me the game was invented by a chap named Leslie Scott. He shortened the Swahili word ‘kujenga’ (meaning ‘to build’) to call it ‘Jenga’.
Now consider that vast edifice I referred to above. Let’s take a large country, comprising buildings, industrial complexes, offices, bridges, houses of every size and type. It teems with people – some to make the country bigger, some to look after the builders. They have a monetary system, a social support system, world-beating technology in all manner of activities.
What would happen to that country if you scraped away some of the mortar? Reduced the number of builders, for example; or restricted the capability of those looking after them. Maybe took away the resources from those who were doing research at the frontiers of science and providing education to the people at all levels. It would be helpful to prevent large segments of the population receiving healthcare when they need it. How about handicapping the agricultural sector which grows food for the populace? People would be quite annoyed, wouldn’t they?
Just in case any of the annoyed people decided to make some sort of physical protest, it would be better if those in the forces of law and order are able to take preventative action. They should be beefed up. Recruit more, give them big guns and tell them to hit first and answer questions later. Objections filed in a more civilised manner, through the pathway of the law courts must be dealt with in the same way – it is essential to recruit and install judges and other officials who can block and parry attempts to stop the scraping away of mortar.
Not so much that the edifice collapses, but enough that big holes can be created in a flash when the order is given.
Consider some recent events in America:
· Healthcare for large numbers of people has been reduced or removed.
· Pregnancy terminations are now unavailable and are even illegal in some states, notwithstanding medical necessity. A young mother in South Carolina miscarried at her home and was charged with murder last year.
· Many administrative departments in the government have been denuded of experienced personnel, hampering their functioning. Political appointees were substituted for career civil servants.
· Many civil rights have been wiped from the statute books.
· The Supreme Court of the country gave the President clearance to do any act within his term of office, whether legal or illegal.
· A new head has been appointed to the Department of Education – someone with zero experience of education - with a brief to downsize as though to remove it entirely.
· The President has instituted a trade war with most of the rest of the world. His acolytes appear to have been told in advance what was going to happen so they could position their own investment portfolios accordingly. Yet the mass of population is told their country is receiving huge sums from abroad. They generally don’t understand that it is the men and women of the country who end up paying the tariffs. They also don’t understand this is inflationary.
· When the economic results of the edifice showed a downturn, the head of the department gathering that data was fired.
· When the central bank resisted calls to lower interest rates and the governor was threatened with dismissal, he refused to go. Now others there are under attack. Dropping interest rates would be inflationary at this stage too.
· Federal resources already slated for distribution to poor and rural areas and to address racial imbalances were withdrawn.
· The US Agency for Global Media, home of ‘Voice of America’ has been eviscerated. Funding for news agencies like NPR is being cut and even withdrawn – the information they broadcast to the people is ‘unhelpful’. Others are being castigated and denigrated as broadcasters of ‘fake news’ and agents of ‘the enemy’.
There are many, many such scrapings away of the mortar which binds American society. They were all laid out in a tome entitled ‘Project 2025’, published in 2023 and prepared over the last five years or so by the ‘Heritage Foundation’.
There are signs of The People noticing this removal of their rights. They are like the guards who hear scraping noises and ask if anyone else can hear that noise? The farmer whose crop is normally sold to Canada but loses his market and his immigrant workers to harvest the crops. The automobile dealer who imports cars from abroad has to pass along the price increases stemming from tariffs. The general hardware and grocery chains which import all manner of items cannot absorb all the cost increases. So everyone pays more to live, to eat, to travel. People see their pocketbooks are slimmer than ever. There is real hardship out there.
Will any of the guards do a cell inspection soon and alert the others that so much of the mortar is gone? If they don’t, when will that order be given to bring it all tumbling down?
And by whom?
