Political analysis
Where is America headed?
America: The Midnight Train to Nowhere
- By Chronically Pissed
- September 08, 2006
I hate for my first submission to Constitutional Matters to be heavy-handed and decidedly unfunny, but I’m afraid this is just what came out this week. These past few months have engendered new feelings in this already cynical citizen. As the birth of my first child approaches with what seems like exponentially compounding speed, I have begun to think a lot about what our lives will look like in the next five, ten, or twenty years. For what feels like the first time, my perspective has shifted from the present to the long-term future, where I find surprisingly little hope for a better life, or for a life that even remotely resembles the one we have now. I am less convinced than ever that working hard, behaving responsibly and being a kind and decent citizen of the universe are enough to ensure that my family will thrive or even survive in a world that fails to change it’s ways, and fast.
Pardon the lame cliché, but we are on a runaway train. I would be less concerned if it was just going to crash head-on into a brick wall of mass extinction, doing us all the favor of an efficient and relatively painless execution. My fear is that this train is chugging determinedly into the past, spilling it’s overflow capacity into the darkest corners of our history, leaving us to fend for ourselves in a mad-made Darwinian horror show in which not the fittest, but the richest and most depraved survive. Not all of my fears and complaints, as you might expect, are explicitly aimed at the Bush administration, but I would argue that they have certainly taken a giant shit on every potential silver lining that existed when they came to power and mangled every subsequent opportunity to repair, redress or repent.
Let’s begin with the obvious. Everyone already knows that we are completely and utterly dependent upon a fossil fuel that is most abundantly found in some of the world’s most geographically and geopolitically inconvenient places – an energy source, it must be noted, which will run out someday, after destroying the economies of all nations who were foolish enough to rely on it with reckless abandon. It would be nice if we had not allowed ourselves the unseemly indulgence of turning over obscenely gigantic truckloads of money to some of the most intellectually underdeveloped civilizations on the planet, thereby granting enormous status and power to peoples who should have been subjected to the same sorts of evolutionary forces that, for better or worse, brought us to America. Alas, our thirst for oil was so great that we could not see the consequences of allowing people who still think that women are property to acquire wealth, weapons and puissance.
So. There we are. Attempting to sedate the beast. Pissing away our resources, our reputation, our military might, and our soldiers. There we are, lighting a match in the middle of an oil field, setting ablaze the ethnic and tribal bonfires that desperately needed to play out before the civilized world intervened. There we are, conferring legitimacy on primal conflicts and archaic modes of thought that now threaten to drag – or blast – the rest of us into the abyss.
And what are we fighting for? The Land Of Opportunity doesn’t offer much, well…opportunity, anymore. The poor are staying poor or getting poorer. The middle class is no longer upwardly mobile. The richest among us are getting excessively, criminally, disgustingly, filthy fucking richer with every breath they draw, and then charging us for the rancid, second-hand air they exhale. Clive Crook wrote a brilliant piece for this month’s Atlantic that details the sad state of affairs, focusing on the how the fat cats have absconded with the fruits of Americans’ boundless productivity increases. (Read it here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200609/crook-inequality.)
To make matters worse, at some point, we stopped getting smarter. Oh sure, we’ve still got the best and the brightest here – creating revolutionary new technologies, developing life-saving medicines, delving deeper and farther into the history of our planet, magnifying and studying incomprehensibly infinitesimal matter, exploring the vastness of our solar system, explaining the mysteries that were once left to the realm of magic – but tragically, no one gives a shit. Worse yet, people are offended by the notion that anyone is snooty enough to know that much. They’re just too busy catching up on the latest details in the decade-old death of a seven year old pageant queen, or watching Boy George get humiliated by an Inside Edition reporter while he sweeps the streets of New York, or perusing People Magazine in the checkout line to see, once and for all, if Jen is actually engaged to Vince and how she’s feeling about Brad these days, or watching cars drive in a circle 500 times, or seeing Menopause, The Musical.
Or electing George W. Bush. Twice.
And, of course, no one sees any irony in the fact that our country, as it rapidly becomes the Christian theocracy it was created to escape from, is pretending to act as referee and/or freedom-dispenser in a part of the world where another set of antiquated myths are deftly racking up the total amount of blood that has been spilled for god(s) since the dawn of man. But I’ll give you 28,000 to 1 that 78% of Americans can’t even tell you what the fuck irony is. So what’s the difference?
I turned 16 the year that Bill Clinton was elected President. My everlasting adoration of the man is probably due in no small part to the youthful naiveté that colored my perceptions during his presidency. As I approach 30, I’ve grown less fond of some of his more conservative policies and I’ve even begrudgingly admitted that he might have made an occasional mistake. Whatever his shortcomings, personally or politically, it is an inescapable truth that he presided over a more hopeful, forward-thinking and good-natured America. My deepest, most agonizing fantasy – the one that haunts me with every nightmarish headline – is that we could go back and hand him the bullhorn in the rubble of the World Trade Center – because it’s perfectly clear to me, that George W. Bush is right about one thing: September 11 was a turning point in our history. For him and his cronies, it was the perfect opportunity to impose their warped vision on the planet. I don’t know whether they are idiotic or evil. I just know that they closed and welded shut their eyes, ears, hearts and minds as they forged, full speed ahead, into a catastrophically flawed master plan. And I know that Bill Clinton, or any other human being with half an ounce of fucking decency, would have stopped this train, would have asked us to sacrifice something for the future of our children and our nation and our planet, would have challenged and inspired us to build, nurture, cultivate, adapt and serve, would have earned the respect and assistance of the world community, rather than demanding it’s obedience, would have reshaped this great land with the vast resources that had been accumulated over the 200 years prior to the current administration’s pathetically short-sighted, criminally inept and incomprehensibly ignorant attempt at governance.
What’s my point? I don’t really know. The fact that Americans have left the Republicans in power this long, after this much dismal failure, coupled with the fact that it is not at all clear that Democrats will take back either house in the midterms, leads me to the conclusion that our empire, or at least the one I grew up reading about, may simply be in it’s last throes. I can rant and rave, and will certainly continue to do so until my voice gives out and my fingers are reduced to useless, bloody stumps – but to what end? At what point will people realize that our way of life is not threatened by boys who like to fuck each other getting married and raising children together or by husbands pulling the plugs on hopelessly, endlessly vegetative wives? At what point will people turn off American Idol and turn on The History Channel, where they might get a glimpse of the fate that awaits us if we continue to replicate the mistakes of the past? At what point will people stop praying to and fighting over their useless, bullshit gods and start doing something constructive for themselves and their neighbors?
I don’t have a pretty ribbon to tie this all up with. I don’t even have a smelly, shit-stained scrap of old rag to tie this up with. Maybe I just need some Prozac. Maybe I just need a drink. Or twelve. Maybe it’s not as bad as I think.
Maybe it is…
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I’m also a cynical citizen. I have been since the invasion of Iraq. I knew that it was a bad idea and that we would not be successful. I guess I and every other decent thinker was right.
However, hold your head high my friend. November is around the bend and we are charging full steam. The fascists are on the ropes and we are pounding their abs setting up the final blow.
Liberal Democrat warriors are on the march to RESTORE Freedom and take back this country!
CHANGE IS COMING CHRONIC!
794 days ago by Dr. Hope