He's a New World Man (right?)

I am a notorious snail, if not sloth, at processing news. But especially the kind of news that's sure to attract a flurry of publicity and controversy. So naturally, here it is, almost a month since the latest US Presidential State of the Union address, and I have no clearer notion of what it signals or portends - whether of the recent past or the near future - than I did when I first heard it. I just wish I could be reasonably sure, one way or the other, that we as a country have been turning a real corner - and a good one (as distinct, of course, from one that takes us straight into the waiting arms of a potentially epic-scale[?] global health crisis).

I repeat: a good corner - one such as finds America at last starting down a fresh, what I'd like to call emphatically post-Clinton-Bush-Obama path of national (in)security. As opposed to continuing down the same, 25-years-familiar road of Permanent War as both Way of Profit and Way of Peace. Only now with the wretched difference of the same Exceptionalist message being delivered in a more crass, bombastic and "populistic" style of presentation.

In fact, about the only thing I'm fairly convinced of is the nature of the street we've been on so far, for the better part of at least the 21st century. For some time now it has seemed to me that the world as a whole has been shaping up into a most interesting and exciting place. The kind of place not altogether unlike certain rougher, more lawless times and spaces of the Old American West: a sort of world in which those with the most drive, cold rationality and initiative - along with, some might argue, the least sensitive consciences and faculties of remorse - are more or less free to dispose of the rest of us as they choose. In brief, it has seemed to be becoming a kind of globe consisting of more and more lawless places, regions, countries, etc, in which men and women with, yes, sufficient wealth and connections - but also more than enough grit and gumption - were now free as never before to become as big as they liked. With ultimately the only thing constraining them (within their particular compass of influence anyway) being some other men and women getting bigger and likely meaner still, and then taking their place. And of course there would always remain the time-honored option of the two or more of them combining, splitting the difference, etc.

There were also two notable ways, as I saw it, in which this expanding New World seemed to differ from that of the Old West:

(1) There were, or would soon be, fewer and fewer places of stable settlement, law-abidingness, peace and comparative democracy surrounding these, as it were, emerging Global Frontiers, such as might otherwise be able to contain, much less engulf, these various titans, Goliaths, emerging Leviathans, etc. (Indeed, at times it has seemed to me more like one big continuous Modern Global Frontier, which unlike the old ones, does far more encroaching than it is encroached upon, and whose one officially titled and recognized Federal Marshal - the US Blob - seems at least as much on the side of the outlaws as of the homesteaders.)

(2) These same titans, much like the Robber Barons of the late 19th century, were fully capable of being not just fronted by, but actually becoming corporations: collective Goliaths, as it were, seemingly now faceless, yet in a strange way still able to embody and perpetuate the spirit of the founding giant.

And naturally the bigger and more conglomerate the giants got, the less they would be satisfied with anything short of the entire globe as their Old West-style play- and stomping-grounds. And after that - why, what would there be left for anyone else to do? Except to watch as the Big Fish turned this great big globe - at least so far as its smaller fish were concerned - into the littlest, most cramped, most unbreatheable pond you ever saw. Much less tried to swim and feed in.

But again, that may be just one more phase of history turning its corner and rounding off to a close. I just wish I could be sure of it. More specifically, I wish I might be reasonably persuaded that the seeming wild cards, the mavericks of this past decade - Trumps, Putins, Orbans, Salvinis, etc - really were a different kettle of fish: that they really are - eventually? - going to provide some semblance of multipolar balance, stability and sanity to this otherwise increasingly volatile, friendly-only-to-the-biggest-and-wealthiest Global Wild West. As opposed to their being, you know, more of the same old Big Fish, just of a slightly different color.