We the People are living the beginning of the end of the nation that sought to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,”
The agencies this nation established to achieve and safeguard those noble goals will be directed by individuals who have publicly dedicated themselves to the destruction of the agencies they will head, who are zealously devoted to thwarting those very goals.
Not just the country is in danger. Recent climate science suggests that the destruction of the planet as a habitat for humanity and many other forms of life is more advanced than even the most dire previous findings had projected. With a new regime of greedy capitalists, dedicated polluters, science deniers and bellicose generals running the once United States of America, the planet, too, may be doomed.
Some hunk of space junk will continue to float around the galaxy, perhaps even serving as host to some form of surviving life. Appropriately, perhaps, roaches or other insects are the likeliest candidates to inherit the Earth. But humanity and the fools who wrought its demise will be dust.
Why are we surprised that this sorry state of affairs has come to pass? Why did we not see that someone like this snake-oil seller, this pussy-grabbing fraud, this sleazy, scheming know-nothing, was the inevitable end of the path we were following?
When did it begin, this precipitate slide into ignominy?
If not before, then surely in 1980, when Iranians exposed the myth of American exceptionalism, and our ignorant masses blamed them and the luckless Jimmy carter for being the messengers of truth. Carter, perhaps the last decent man to occupy the White House and surely among the least effective, happened to be in office when 52 U.S. diplomats and citizens were taken hostage at the American embassy in Tehran. Worse, an ill-designed rescue effort called “Operation Eagle Claw” failed when two faulty helicopters crashed.
Our citizenry, already dumbed down by a diet of television sitcoms and disheartened by losing a war in Vietnam, reacted not rationally but emotionally, putting blind faith in the presidential aspirations of a B movie actor who had portrayed heroes on the motion picture screens of our childhood. Ronnie Reagan, a good memorizer of scripts, emoted masterfully playing the role of world statesman while at the same time allowing his scurrilous surrogates to dismantle and deregulate, to bust unions and let corporations run roughshod over our freedoms. The great American moral and ethical decay was on.
Bush I presided over the continued rightward drift of the country, the death by a thousand cuts of the New Deal. the belief in voodoo economics, and gave us a vice president, Dan Quayle, who couldn’t even spell.
Bill Clinton, a smart and ambitious Democrat, read the political tea leaves and turned his party and his administration into Republican Lite. His people called it “centrism” but as long as the tech and housing bubbles didn’t burst, many people prospered. While Congress and the citizenry fretted about the blow jobs he got from a witless young White House intern, the country quietly continued to go to hell.
Bush II, the first of the worst of presidents, left a legacy of illegal and unending war and a sick and foundering economy.
Barack Obama, our first black president whose articulate speechifying was welcome after his predecessor’s quasi-literacy, promised much but delivered little. He not only continued most of the worst of te Bush II policies, he actually worsened some of them. His signature accomplishments — a slightly improved national health care program, and the nuclear agreement with Iran — will soon be dismantled by the incoming regime.
And that’s where we are. Burning in a hell of our own making. Eat, drink and be merry, those of you who voted for this vain and venal Pussy-Grabber, for tomorrow . . . . well, there is no tomorrow.
