CLASH OF THE CRETINS

Paul Edwards

Ron Kovic was literally born on the 4th of July, and truly believed in the American dream. Paralyzed in the Vietnam war, he became an anti-war and pro-human rights political activist after feeling betrayed by the country he fought for. Kovic was lucky to wake up from the dream, even though he paid a high price. Most Americans never see through the con. (Still: Tom Cruise as Kovic, in Born on the Fourth of July).

Come out from under your beds, America.  Get up off your knees and stop staring into the porcelain bowl.  It’s over.  Dry your eyes, stiffen your upper lip, grow a pair, and prepare to meet your fate like a man, woman, or person of indeterminate gender.  There is no escaping the coming Thermopylae of the American Empire.

Your shock is great.  You kept the faith.  You believed we were Number One.  Clinging to that baseless hallucination, you let yourself be financially sodomized for decades, paying ever more in taxes, to make great, big weapons, to kill people you’d never even heard of, believing that those fiendishly expensive gizmos would work great, and that if it took killing millions of little, brown people for you to make your rent and car payments, why, fine!

You couldn’t believe most of that pricey hardware didn’t work, or never got fixed, or was never even made, and your money went to make rich pricks richer.  Government, see, is a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Inc., of which you are not a stockholder, love.  Shares in the War Machine are definitely not in your portfolio.

There are those who would tell you that this has been obvious since before you were born, but, shucks, it doesn’t matter now.  Now the clothes are truly off the Emperor.  The Clash of Cretins did the Full Monte for all to behold.  You’ve seen the Elephant.  And the Ass, as well.  And what you saw in that hog wrassle of psychopaths—America’s Beavis and Butthead—is what you’re going to get.

It would be amusing to continue to make fun of this present situation, if it were not for the fact that our lives are at great risk, and it is almost certain that we are looking down the barrel of a gigantic catastrophe, no matter which of these sorry, stinking excrescences of our diseased, paralyzed criminal empire wins.

Nothing can save this nation because it has ceased to be a nation.  A nation is a political entity that represents and defends the interests of a people.  America, in contrast, is dirty Capitalism embodied.  It is an enormous machine whose only purpose is to grind out profit for its owners, the vacuous billionaire coven.

It has no ideal, no ethic or principle, and so, no animating spirit at its core.  If it ever had, beyond lust for money and the power to get it, that spirit has burned out in the bonfire of those vaunted, never implemented, virtues that were its best-selling points.

For it was never the thing it represented itself to be at its outset.  The Founding Cons designed it and built it for themselves, counting Blacks as two-thirds of a person, and Indians as none at all.  They made three branches of government for the vastly rich, whom they called “The People”, to control, stacking the legislature and judiciary with plutocrats, insuring one of them would front the scam, and bragged that they had no king.

All an old story.  Their chicanery was bold, but what followed has been stupefying.  No need to detail it.  You know it and feel it.  In the space of one long lifetime Capitalist necrophiliacs exhausted an industrially virgin continent, ripped up its earth, cut down its trees, acidified and poisoned its land and water, obliterated its wildlife, privatized and fouled its natural wonders, and used it up ecologically for money, none of which you ever saw.

In return, they have grudgingly furnished you a vicious tax hustle, a dirt poor, propagandizing education farce, a money-grubbing, inhumane healthcare con, a network of crumbling, collapsing, antique infrastructure, and a rusted, defunct system of public transportation that is the butt of the whole world’s jokes.

They have done all this while wanking you off about being the “exceptional nation”, the City on the Hill, the Light of the World, and having their loud, proud Military whipped by skinny, hungry men in sandals with M-1s, while claiming to be the toughest, baddest, regime changer and nation builder ever.

What further degradation remains to an arteriosclerotic hegemon already so disgraced and humiliated?  Can a nation commit suicide?  But we’re doing that already.

The recent burlesque of two geriatric, doddering reprobates, armed with mental nerf bats, flailing each other in ludicrous impotence, for the booby prize of fronting a creaking, groaning, political apparatus in the terminal stages of meltdown and failure, has just shown you the Punch an’ Judy show of our future.

I suppose one should be grateful that the country is not aflame with civil war right now, but somehow that fails to elate me.

We, Americans, our nation, are now so irremediably corrupted in all aspects of our public lives, so devoid of genuine principles in our political behavior, so submerged and absorbed in the most trivial and infantile distractions with our electronic toys and our imbecile entertainment, that the idea of it being all obliterated, so that the survivors could take another run at crafting a beneficent, humane culture seems dangerously attractive.

Empires, like individuals, have their span and end.  Like people, they are judged by their deeds, not their talk of power and glory.