Wall Street, that gleaming cathedral of collective delusion, has finally found a cliff it likes. On a day that will be remembered by history—provided the rising sea levels do not wash away the archives first—the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its most profound involuntary spasm since October. The cause? Not a famine, not a plague, and certainly not a sudden outbreak of collective intelligence. No, the global economy took a header into the pavement because the current tenant of the White House decided to treat the world’s largest island like a foreclosed casino in Atlantic City. The sheer, unadulterated absurdity of the situation is enough to make one nostalgic for the plague years. We are witnessing the geopolitical equivalent of a man trying to buy his neighbor’s yard because he thinks there might be a buried treasure map hidden under the dog house, only to find out the neighbor doesn't speak the same language and the dog is actually a wolf.

Greenland, a territory currently occupied by a few thousand people and a lot of very worried ice, has become the latest obsession for a man who views the entire planet through the narrow lens of a 1980s real estate seminar. The threat—and it is presented as a threat, because diplomacy is a dead language—to ‘take’ or ‘purchase’ Greenland has sent the markets into a tailspin. Why? Because the ‘invisible hand’ of the market is actually a trembling, caffeinated mess of high-frequency trading algorithms that panic whenever the leader of the free world starts eyeing the Arctic like a buffet line. The volatility of the Dow is merely a reflection of the volatility of our species. We have built a global financial system on the premise that things will remain predictable, only to hand the keys to a man who thinks geography is a negotiable suggestion.

The ‘Left,’ of course, is performing its usual choreographed dance of performative horror. They decry the ‘imperialist’ undertones of the Greenland gambit while ignoring the fact that their own preferred brand of globalism has been strip-mining the soul of the planet for decades. They weep for Danish sovereignty while forgetting that Denmark itself is a member of the very neoliberal structures that make such absurd transactions theoretically possible in the first place. Their outrage is as thin as the ozone layer and twice as holes-ridden. They don't actually care about the people of Greenland; they just hate the man making the offer because he’s doing it without the requisite veneer of polite, bureaucratic doublespeak. They want their imperialism served with a side of ‘equity’ and a sustainably sourced garnish, not shouted from a helicopter.

Meanwhile, the ‘Right’ continues its descent into a sycophantic void where every erratic whim is treated as a masterstroke of 4-D chess. They will tell you this is a strategic necessity, a way to counter China or Russia, ignoring the reality that you cannot simply buy a country like you’re purchasing a used Buick from a lot in Queens. They cheer for the ‘Art of the Deal’ while their own 401ks evaporate in the heat of a market fire caused by the very man they worship. It is a suicide cult with a tax break. They are so desperate for a ‘win’ that they are willing to advocate for the purchase of a melting glacier, presumably so they can build a golden tower on the slush before the whole thing sinks into the North Atlantic.

Consider the existential comedy of the situation: we are arguing over the ownership of ice in an era when ice is becoming a historical curiosity. It is the ultimate irony of the human condition. We are fighting over who gets to claim the land that will eventually drown our coastal cities. The markets are crashing because they realize, in a rare moment of lucidity, that the people running the show have the foresight of a goldfish. The investors, those supposedly cold-blooded rationalists, are fleeing to ‘safe havens’ that don’t exist. There is no safe haven when the world’s primary reserve currency is backed by a government that thinks it can buy its way out of the 21st century by expanding into the 19th.

The Danish response has been one of polite confusion mixed with a growing sense of dread, as if they’ve just realized they share a border with a particularly aggressive hoarder. They insist Greenland is not for sale. But in this world, everything is for sale; the only question is whether the currency is dollars, blood, or the utter loss of dignity. The markets aren’t just reacting to a potential real estate deal; they are reacting to the total collapse of the narrative that anyone in power has a plan. We are drifting on a piece of calving ice, arguing about who owns the rights to the water we’re about to drown in. It’s not just a market crash; it’s a sanity crash. And frankly, we’re long overdue for the bottom to drop out.