Decadence

News Story: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 41,000 hours of surveillance footage taken during the U.S. Capitol attack. Carlson is a cynical, self-serving, right-wing conspiracy theory-promoting propagandist. McCarthy wasn’t instantly removed from his position of Speakership for perpetrating this outrage because it was sanctioned by the MAGA-cult right-wing extremists who control the House of Representatives.

I’m reading From Dawn to Decadence, the 800-page cultural history of the West from 1500 – 2000 by the renowned historian Jacques Barzun. The title suggests that by the end of the twentieth century the West was in a state of decadence. Barzun says that an indication of decadence is when futility and the absurd have become normal. I wonder how he would characterize the state of the West as we’re approaching the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century: extreme decadence, maybe?