Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016
on July 11, 2024, 6:17 pm
America does not deserve to be called The Empire any more. It belongs in the junk yard of colossal failures.
By Paul Edwards
Americans grow up—if they do—being told every Presidential election is critical to the survival of democracy, so they must vote as if their future depended on it. This is both completely fatuous and absolutely true, and the fact that they have no future now is, sure enough, the result of those elections and the string of liars, crooks, wankers, chiselers, bullshitters and twits they elected.
This one just ahead, though it will not alter the coming doom of our pampered, dimwitted, clueless electorate, is going to be a grim and gaudy idiot’s delight. You might call it “exceptional”.
You have an addled, unprincipled Bozo in office, a career pimp for Big, Dirty Money, whose son is up on a Federal gun rap who, whoring and coke blitzed, sold the Grifter-in-Chief’s name to Eurotrash hoods for bags of Franklins, running against a sleazy, bloviating, con man, and ham-handed serial abuser convicted for paying hush money to an emeritus porn queen, who belittled his diminutive tool, going head to head for all the marbles.
This, then, is the glorious end result of the Grand Democratic Experiment crafted by our deified forefathers. This is the nunc dimittis for the Land of The Free. And it was long predicted.
H.L. Mencken, assessing our system, put it this way, ages back.
“…all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most easily, adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a vacuum. The Presidency tends to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
We reached that milestone elections ago. Now we have men running who are not mere defectives, but blatant psychopaths. Well, you ask, what does it matter, in a country that’s clearly insane, when lunatics have been running the asylum all along?
It doesn’t. The Machine is on autopilot. The Executive Wanks are clowns hired to moon the supine electorate, selling odious bullshit as Deep Strategic Thinking, salubrious for the Great Unwashed. It’s a pompous, Stuffed Shirt Goon Show, to con vacuous boobs into believing their gullibility will be rewarded.
In astronomy, the term White Dwarf describes the remnant of a great star in its final death throes, that has dissipated all of its once tremendous energy and, no longer having the force that made it burn, brilliant and vital, has collapsed and shrunken into irreversible decline that will end with its total dissolution.
What are the sure indicators of the demise of a star of empire? The first is that its rulers deny what they know: that it’s over.
An empire at apex is supremely confident, in control of the world, and ignores internal critics. At ease with its power, it does not deny its crimes, much less squirm to excuse them. All other nations pay it homage, often tribute. It does not vaunt its power or boast its image. Its force speaks volumes without words.
America does not deserve to be called The Empire any more. It belongs in the junk yard of colossal failures like Weimar, Czarist Russia, and the sick, conflicted French Third Republic.
Externally, it is riding a chain of disastrous failures in war, and snubs and rebuffs in diplomacy. Its financial hegemony, once absolute, has so eroded that the dollar’s dominance is shaky and foredoomed. Its once giant industrial engine has seized up—our only exports are devices to kill people—and we import everything we can no longer make from our biggest declared enemy.
Our Congress, Stock Market, and Supreme Court are rank whore houses and casinos, peopled by sleazeballs, grifters and flimflam men, our Treasury and Federal Reserve are wizards in the dark art of making money from nothing, and our hugest billionaires pay no taxes, as working paupers foot the bill for their owners.
In a vast economic crisis in which millions work for wages they can’t live on, Capitalism kills human labor in favor of automation, the majority own nothing, and even those with medical insurance go broke if they get sick, our government—bitch slapped in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria—sends billions to Nazi Israel to support its genocide, and bankrolls a war that Ukraine lost on day one.
Meanwhile, Congress’ insane concerns are sealing the border, forbidding abortion, censoring free speech, and investigating each other. It is so grossly, obviously incapable of functioning, has so totally, slavishly abandoned independent thought and action, and is so hysterically lost in probing the outer boundaries of human stupidity that, by itself, it signals national collapse. And there is nothing you, or anyone, can do to prevent it.
Trump or Biden will only exacerbate dysfunction in the mud pit of governance. The parties are enthusiastically making everything worse by their obvious disinterest in anything but money, and their cynical boosting of those loopy, ludicrous Pagliaccis, their defective Duces, in a scenario straight out of Lewis Carroll.
When was the last time you could discuss your country’s political affairs with a neighbor without explosive laughter or fisticuffs? We’re done. Over. Franklin said we had a Republic, if we could keep it. We haven’t. We sold it. To The Money… The Lords of Capitalism took it all and left us nothing. Kristofferson wrote, and Janice sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” In that sad and ironic sense, we still have our freedom.
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
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