It started 30 years ago under a Republican president with little more than attitude and platitudes between his eyebrows and his pompadour -- a posturing "Class B" actor somehow engineered into the most powerful position in the world, served by an obeisant electorate who should have known better but performed to the ringmaster's cue. And over the next 30 years the house that Roosevelt built comes a-tumblin' down.
Why? How, for god sake? Beyond psychology, beyond politics -- the science that could explain such mass self-destructive behavior hasn't been invented yet, but the behavior in its mass and effects, if not its precise style, has parallels to that of Germany, circa 1930's, with human lemmings leaping over the cliff at a fantastical master's behest.
The trend continues, is pronounced. But now, what was once the label of the plutocrats' political opposition, i.e. Democrat, has slithered across the spectrum to become Tweedledee to the Republican Tweedledum. As they say in baseball: "You can't tell the players without a scorecard." But the score is written across the sky: Demorepublicrats-30, Suckerpopulans-ZIP.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch on Pennsylvania Avenue, the Master of Preemptive Compromise cuts deals with the putative opposition before discussing them with his own partisans, then changes into his Commander-in-Chief pants to preside over America's longest and historically least justified mass slaughter 8,000 miles from the Potomac Basin in another hemisphere.
All the while, the "great American electorate" -- millions of them unemployed by the nation's leading export program (i.e. jobs) but somehow still responsible for re-financing failed banksters and fraudulent mortgageteers, along with their multi-million dollar "performance" bonuses -- wave their flaggies, in the spaces permitted by security thugs, to "Support Our Troops" -- their very own sons, husbands, fathers, and now daughters, wives and mothers, sacrificed to the War of Lies for the Oil Guys.
Is it nationalized madness? Or a plague of mass stupidity?
The Dim Donkey atop the Repuke Pachyderm is charging down from Capitol Hill and across America -- unnoticed? No one rises to stop it? Even to admit it? "We need to support the lesser evil"? Which one is it? How do you tell the difference? Is it the angry one? Or the one incapable of reaction regardless of abuse?
Wars make and break empires. WWII made ours, but the current War of Lies may very likely break it. If we cannot grasp awareness and admit this moral morass to neither our conscience nor even our consciousness, then we deserve history's verdict.
Recalling the fable of the old-time King, one wonders if a future story will frame us as the witless society who could not admit to themselves the fraud of The President's New Suit.
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