The Sole Remaining Stupidpower in the World

Best of all, though, we hominids are unsurpassed at finding new and improved ways to murder each other en masse in the name of these very same peace-bringing deities.

If the nearly the whole human race is down for that, why should anything surprise me?

Still.

You have to stand in awe at the glory that is America in the early twenty-first century, though not, er, in a good way.

What I do know is that we’ve spent the last generation or so hell-bent to self-destruct.  And what I do know is that the deeper we get into our self-inflicted pit of national devastation, the more – not less – we turn to the same ideas, brought to us by the same discredited monsters, and inquire, “Thank you sir, may I have another?”  The tea party troglodytes are only the most recent manifestation of that peculiar American addiction to global and self-destruction.  After McCarthy we went for Nixon.  After Nixon we went for Reagan.  After Reagan we stooped so low we put the Caligula Kid in the White House.  Twice.  That little dry-drunk planetary-scale disaster of rampant personal insecurity spent almost the entirety of his last term in office with job approval ratings down around twenty-five or thirty percent.  But since he didn’t commit the grave crime of getting a blow job from someone other than his wife, no one even talked about removing him from office.  No, he only was asleep at the wheel for 9/11, lied us into a disastrous war, shredded the Constitution, allowed one of our major cities to drown, plunged us into debt, made the whole world hate us, polarized the country, and then left us the goodbye gift of the worst global economic catastrophe since the Great Depression.  But here we are, a mere two years later, having brought back the same crowd in record-setting droves, only this time they’re even worse, as unimaginable as that seems, like a tribe of political crackhead vampire zombies, locked in mindless unrelenting pursuit of sucking dry the national blood supply.

For that matter, who thinks at all?  Evidently, no one in America.  This country’s problem is that it continues to believe that lazy detachment is the surest way to solve our national problems.  It’s the Deadbeat Dad model of politics.  You spend twenty years raising your kid by maybe – maybe – checking in with him for about fifteen minutes every two or four years.  You show up, tick a few boxes, sign a form, pat the kid on the head, and then disappear til the next time.  “Hey man, how you been, little dude?!  Yer lookin’ good.  Hey, sorry, gotta run now.”  Next thing you know, your child is a young adult, sitting on death row, busted for committing some heinous capital offense.  What a surprise, eh?  You worked so hard to raise him right.  You invested so much energy in doing everything you could to watch out for his interests.  How could it possibly have all gone so wrong?

That’s how we owners of American democracy treat our charge.

But here we are, a mere two years later, having brought back the same crowd in record-setting droves, only this time they’re even worse, as unimaginable as that seems, like a tribe of political crackhead vampire zombies, locked in mindless unrelenting pursuit of sucking dry the national blood supply.