The tragic cognitive decline of Old Europe
Geo-dementia is a terrible thing.
Ever since Donald Rumsfeld put Old Europe in a home, it’s been so sad to watch its slow yet steady mental deterioration. It used to be so robust, even feisty. Now, Old Europe struggles with even basic tasks, like forming governments and providing for its citizens. It often babbles senselessly, in incomprehensible technocrat-speak that no one can really understand, about needing to become more like an erstwhile friend whose financial crisis nearly destroyed it and whose distant wars helped trigger migratory flows that gave its own latent ideas of supremacy something to run on.
Sure, Old Europe has its good days. It can overcome roaming fees and make airlines pay for delays. But it hurts to admit that the bad days are happening more and more often.
Just look how disoriented Old Europe has become. As it “scrambles” to come up with some answer to tariffs and mopes about getting left out of talks with Russia, “shocked” and “blindsided” by a more agile almost-octogenarian across the Atlantic, it is painfully obvious how Old Europe can’t remember doing the very same thing before. It can’t even seem to recall that, in just the past few months, it was muttering to itself to watch out for this guy.
When you’re senile, how can you know how transactional he is from the last time he was? When your cognitive faculties have shrunk to the size of Luxembourg, it makes sense that “European sovereignty” still sounds new and possible.
Old Europe doesn’t even remember Rumsfeld putting it in a home in the first place, nor his boss’s successor gently telling it he wouldn’t be visiting as much anymore. The cognitive decline has gotten so bad, Old Europe forgets it has been repeating the same thing about economy and technology for years.
It’s time to be honest with ourselves. Denying reality helps no one. Old Europe is suffering from geo-dementia — and it has been for some time.
Nowadays, Old Europe is more often than not found in a rocking chair, wrapped in a quilt, looking out the window with a glassy stare, as a mug of tea on the side table gets cold because it forgot it was there. Occasionally, a passing noise will momentarily jolt Old Europe out of this state of catatonia, only to reveal just how much it has become a silent prisoner of its own demise — locked in a cell of cosmic indifference as it retells the same story of that time its Uncle Sam gave it chocolate and herpes.
That was 1950. But for Old Europe, it could have been yesterday.