A Philip K. Dick Moment: Idiots Waving Flags While Ukraine Burns

Then, his comforting reality returns, but then the rest of his cozy secure existence starts blinking out of existence to be replaced with other single words all scrawled on pieces of paper instead. In fact, Gumm is living in the radioactive remains of Kammerer, Wyoming in 1998 during a thermonuclear war with breakaway lunar colonies

More than a half a century after it was published, Dick’s dystopian nightmare – wildly beyond anything dreamed of by Franz Kafka – has come to pass in the highest, most exalted chambers of America.

On April 23, as reporter Justin Papp wrote in “Roll Call,” dozens of Democratic members of the House of Representatives celebrated the passing of a gigantic $60.8 billion aid package to Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s brutal, murderously incompetent catastrophic regime in Kiev by wildly waving Ukraine flags in celebration. It was, as Mr. Papp justly observed, “a memorable scene.”

But none of that $60.8 billion was going to defend the suffering people of Ukraine, first robbed of their own independence, democracy and political freedom in the February 2014 Maidan coup, orchestrated by the US government of President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden and by the leaders of the European Union.

Instead, it was going to prolong their agony – forced on them at the point of guns, martial law, conscription and the relentless destruction of all their civil rights by a puppet regime incompetently directed by the Biden administration, that had forced them into frontal attacks  against the Russian army over the past two years that have so far cost at least 600,000 Ukrainian lives and decimated the country with millions more maimed and traumatized for life.

And of course, none of all those compassionate, heroic, wonderfully principled members of the United States Congress who voted for all those easy credits for the continuation of the war have provided absolutely zero financial, medical or psychological care for the victims of the bloodbath they instigated and urged on from a safe distance for so long.

Soi why were all those flags waving under the Capitol Dome on April 23, under all that magnificent architecture, noble inscriptions and statuary to inspire America’s leaders to do their Brightest and Best for the American people and the rest of the world.

It was, of course, a “Time Out of Joint” moment, just as Philip K. Dick, who died in 1982, had visualized and prophesied. 

All those gibbering gleeful chimpanzees (and I apologize to the primate population of Africa for the unjust comparison. I have no intention of slandering them by association) were doing, was to act out their own “Time Out of Joint” conditioning.

They had been brainwashed by endless “confidential briefings”, rhetoric and mindless Newszak sessions watching the US television news shows, Public Broadcasting NewsHour and reading all those witless, “Thoughtful” Content-Free “serious” editorials in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Hill and Politico to send their Ukrainian people to their deaths, maiming and impoverishment and provoke Russia into a separate annihilating thermonuclear attack against the United States and the American people.

Yet this awful Ukraine war and US support for the never-democratic corrupt clique of radical extremists in Kiev serves no conceivable American purpose and could never have been won. Instead, it could and should have peacefully and honorably been settled any time in the past two and half years. And, it could and should have easily been prevented any time in the eight years from the Maiden coup in February 2014 to its outbreak in February 2022.

Each one of those ridiculous little flags on April 23 represented the pieces of paper conditioning the (anti-) hero in “Time Out of Joint.” There was no reality of Ukrainian democracy, statehood, security, peace or prosperity for the real-life, crucified and still suffering people of Ukraine behind any of them. 

None of those idiotically waved little flags served the real interests of the Ukrainian people for a nano-second. They did not then. They do not now.

Those contemptible little flags were and are an insult to the real-life, suffering, tormented, and endlessly manipulated Ukrainian people. They only served to make a few dozen infantile-regressive corrupt cowards and clowns perpetually reelected to the United States Congress by a moribund, and dying political system feel good.

None of them lost a second of sleep over the reality that their votes and policies had sent hundreds of thousands of brave young Ukrainian men and boys to their needless deaths as cynical cannon fodder for wicked and mad geopolitical fantasies.

None of them lost a moment’s sleep and never will for millions of other Ukrainians doomed to look for their rest of their lives on the empty chairs, the cold beds, the forlorn, lonely homes, the orphaned children that their wicked, incompetent policies continue to generate by the million.

That was the real meaning of all those contemptible, cowardly, fake-macho fools who fulfilled the observation of England’s Dr. Samuel Johnson a quarter of a millennium ago that patriotism is the last refuge for scoundrels and rogues.

If they had any self-respect left, they would all now crawl away to die alone in filth-filled latrines that no civilized dog would touch.  

But even that level of self-awareness and moral responsibility is beyond them. Until the day of exterminating judgment falls upon them all.

So it must be.

Philip K. Dick Understood.