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“Sir, I know you’re not feeling all that well, but we need you to get up and go back to work.” (US Defense Department photo)
Please, America, I know you are not well, but open your eyes just a little and listen to me. I know you were too weak to fend off Trumpicitis a year ago, and that it left you too weak in the aftermath to do much except marvel at your own ensuing insanity. I know your doctors have been trying some untested experimental treatments on you — the 25th Amendment, the Emoluments Clause, probiotics, that sort of thing — without any success. But dammit, sit up and listen to me, and stop mumbling “Do not resuscitate.”
You used to be “the last, best hope of earth,” for a lot of good reasons. I can remember when you still were, although you started to lose it in the 1960s. It was understandable; you lost three of history’s finest public figures to assassination in just a few years, and you became ensnared in Vietnam. But it was in the 1980s that you became really sick. That’s when the awful, metastasizing cancer of greed overwhelmed your defenses and began turning you into a pathetic shadow of your former self.
The genial dunce who played President of the U.S. for most of that decade oversaw a stupefaction of the American electorate from which you have never recovered, America, and maybe never will. It had lots of moving parts: trickle-down economics, the criminalization of poverty, the marshaling of government power to defend the rich, the crapification of political campaigns with oppo research and creative advertising (by which I mean lies, backed up by big budgets and high production values).
No wonder you haven’t felt really good since 1959. Back then your diet was mostly truth and vegetables, now you are forced to subsist on a toxic soup of daily lies. Back then your people faced the future with confidence and hope, based as much as anything on their confidence in each other, now they live in warring camps watching their own prospects and those of their children turning sour in front of them, responding to their growing fear with hate.
Stop trying to go back to sleep and follow the light. You’re needed here. Urgent voices are calling you back, back to your life and your purpose, back to the struggle for justice and security. People like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, reminding all of us of the things we used to care about, the country you used to be. Reminding us how much we would like to live there again.
We know it might not be possible. We know you might just give up and die. But some of us would like to get in a lick or two before that happens:
You and I are old.
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
–Ulysses, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Your people are voting in Alabama next week, and they could choose an invigorating path toward a somewhat better time, or they could plunge us all further into the rising dark of this age. Help them remove Roy Moore from your body politic like the malignant cyst he is (not just for his sexual depravity, for his entire moral depravity). Let us help the good people of Alabama, the non-racist, non-stupid, non-Pit-Bull majority, to forge a small victory, in the name of the country you used to be, and see if we can take a few steps back toward the way it was.
Sit up, dammit, and fog this mirror. I need to know you’re still alive, and that you’re gonna try.
HAHAHA!!!! Honest, the voting won’t be rigged. Honest, as long as the sun shines this is your land. Honest, work hard and be rewarded. Honest, this crap cracks me up. If voting changed anything it would be illegal. In the Soviet Union, 97% of the voters participated.
[cue Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb]
It’s so far from too late that there’s no sense of present time anymore. We’re in the early stages of being overwhelmed like that giant tsunami that swept Japan’s nuclear station away.
Economics gets more precarious by the day.
Nuclear war is clearly on the horizon – which seems closer every time I look.
Environmentally, all one need do is look around, let alone remember a few months ago to a world that doesn’t exist anymore (for Barbuda, Puerto Rico, etc).
Overnight a wildfire started in the dry tinder down in a small town in southern CA. Fanned by the Santa Ana winds, firefighters could only get out ahead of it to evacuate everyone in it’s path. The transmission line for a large area was affected by the fire, so some of the hydrants didn’t work (the hospital is out of commission too). There are millions of dead trees from the 5 year drought CA just emerged from – well, until this year – that provided ready fuel for this monster that roared though the valleys in the early hours – people having to leave their homes and all their possessions on a moment’s notice, some grabbed their pets.
With the EPA gutted and led by an anti-EPA zealot, there’s great legislation/policy changes coming like mining companies no longer having to put aside a significant amount of money in case of “accident” or “spill.” Nope, too burdensome on the poor corporation. Just hope for the best.
Politics is going to be our undoing as a nation. Well, that and all the social unrest coming from a brain-addled population, on prescription meds, with a concealed-carry license and packing, since ya can’t even go to a dang concert anymore, never mind the inner city, and somebody shoots up the place. Never any follow-through with the alphabet “protection” agencies (nor the msm) – makes me think they’re hidin’ something. I guess we’ll just hope for the best.
Everything is a mess now. Unaffordable health care on one end and agricultural companies out to poison us with Frankenfood on the other. We’re overworked, over-stressed, under paid, under appreciated with totally clueless kids that want no part of moving out or living in reality.
Education isn’t even glorified baby-sitting any longer. Now they’re out to break your spirit, drive you crazy and “graduate” you with no real skills into an environment of part-time gig work, unpaid “internships,” and other McJobs that will soon be replaced by robotics.
But it’s far worse than all this. What I’ve described is tinsel on the tree. Try living with pneumonic plague (yes, THAT plague) in the vicinity.
Try breathing air so toxic you may as well be sucking on a bus tail-pipe, or “farming” on newly volcanic-ash covered land, as far as the eye can see.
Thanks for the essay, Mr. Lewis. Always a good read that stirs a response.
Sure, it’s too late. But we were always going to die anyway, and it was always a question of how we were going to live until it happened. The question remains…..
It is not too late. 9/11 was an inside job. Force that undeniable truth on the common and the whole crooked edifice comes tumbling down.
Instantaneously, Elizabeth Warren would be your next President. Bernie might be Liz’s preferred consigliere. Jill Stein could and should be nominated and confirmed … Secretary to the World. Whatever. The good possibilities are endless.
Better yet, the feckless corporate media would be eliminated. The tumefied MIC would be decimated. The treasonous Federal Reserve is would be slow roasted until it was entirely immolated.
Global warming denialists would be shunned and scorned. Peak Oil naysayers would recede and vanish. Big Money in politic would be gone, gone, gone …forever.
Best of all, though, by a long shot: the last putrid sounds we would ever hear from the Republican party, would be their pathetically incoherent death prattle.
Then, a plan could be put in place. A weak plan, to be sure. A plan with almost no chance of success. A close to hopeless plan to save this near dead planet.
But as players say in chess, when their up against it; develop a last-ditch plan, for a plan with little chance of success is much better than mindlessly operating with no plan at all, as it can, and oft time does, lead to last-ditch miracles.
I wouldn’t start with 9/11 but I heartily agree with all your outcomes. By all means, let’s have a last-ditch plan. But it’s too late.
The only [plan] to save this planet is depopulation.
Really? Concealed carry holders shooting up the place? Facts please.
As an enthusiastic American declinist, I am eagerly anticipating Moore’s election as the next step down. Anything that hastens the collapse of this hideous monstrosity we call America is a huge positive.
Hey, what’s with all the negative vibes? Cheer up, dudes! The Last Jedi is going to hit the cinemas in a few days! :D
(Yes, I’m being sarcastic. And no, I’m not a Star Wars fan.)
I’m in a good mood, despite the fact that apparently, Guy McPherson just gave us weeks or months to live. A friend informed me of this earlier tonight. He prefaced the news by saying, “Hey, you wanna hear a bold prediction?”
Too funny.
Seriously though, f*ck that. We are making it to at least 2020. I wanna see my scenario play out. It could. I figure it’s sitting at 20 to 1 against, which ain’t bad. It all depends on 9/11 reality.
If it does, that means I get to see Cheney, Bush, Rummy (is he still alive?) et al, swinging from the highest yardarms in the US Navy.
Better yet, it also means I get to see the Republican Party pulverized to dust and scattered to the winds.
I was a little tough on my main man Chomsky earlier in the thread. He deserves it ( investigate Noam, do what you have always done, and LOOK AT THE DATA, that’s all we’re asking). Still, he has been battling Goliath for fifty something years, and I haven’t, and he did give us, perhaps, the all-time profundity. It is, and I think I quote:
“The Republican Party is greatest force of evil the world has ever known.”
Amen to that, brother.