Okay, we’ve had it. It’s America in 2010 and the ridiculous people just won’t go away. We’re surrounded by Christian Fascists who would have you love Jesus or die, freshly minted conservatives who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground about the ice cold realities of conservative politics and techie losers who want to wire our brains into the internet so we can all be as geeky as they are.
The earth is getting so hot that really old people are threatening to leave Florida and move back north, throwing their grown children who never liked them much in the first place into a panic. When scientists tell us it will only get worse, the Science Denial Industry holds another press conference to steer us back to the proper guide to predicting the future, the hallucinogenic Book of Revelations.
The Catholic Church is more famous for perverts than for saints these days, our athletes are morphing into Not-so-incredible Hulks and our televisions are fouled with phony “reality shows” celebrating the talent-free, the mean-spirited and the just plain dumb-as-a-turtle among us, and more ignorant blowhard Cable TV clowns than a healthy society can sustain.
Now we’ve got an arrogant young twat movie star grabbing headlines because she insists it is her right as a celebrity to use brick walls and pedestrians to stop her SUV instead of wearing out her brakes. Enough!
No sense asking the government for help either, they’ve got their hands full trying to clean up 8 years of serious damage done by our first dictator, Papa Doc Cheney. They’re also pretty busy trying to create jobs out of nothing since the bankers stole all the money, getting Big Oil to stop turning the Gulf of Mexico into an XXXL oil reserve tank, and trying to figure out how to pass a law when you’ve got a solid majority in both Houses of Congress.
Maybe math just isn’t Professor Obama’s strong suit. To our untrained eyes, in a 51 to 49 vote, 51 wins. What’s with all the hand-wringing, Hamlet? This guy gets a little too dramatic sometimes. Maybe it’s all that nation building this country is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, probably the two most difficult nations on earth to re-invent.
Nation building. Which is a good idea, once we finish building this one. That’s the thing America had that no one else did, a fresh start. When Europeans came here, they came from nations that had been built for many centuries. They were done. What you saw is what you got. Iraq and Afghanistan have both been done for two thousand years. Good luck to their nation builders.
Not so in America. We weren’t done the day after George Washington was sworn in, since there were only 13 states, slaves and indentured servants counted as 3/5 of a person and women couldn’t vote. We weren’t done when the slaves were freed, or women voted, when ordinary workers gained government recognition and support under FDR, when Civil Rights passed or when we put a guy on the moon just for the hell of it (how cool was that?).
We’re still not done. Just like the entrenched mindset that led to the compromise of slavery in the United States Constitution, there are still pockets of blindness and injustice yet to be addressed in America. We still deny gay people, our last niggers, their civil rights, and can’t seem to figure out immigration, which is odd seeing as how immigration is almost exclusively how America was populated.
The people that were already living here were mostly done away with, another stain on our national character we are still coming to terms with. After a stunning and complete victory in World War 2, we made some rookie mistakes in being the world’s biggest superpower, a rarefied perch previously reserved for the Romes, the Spains, the Englands and Frances of this world, nations with many centuries of political preparation for becoming dominant empires in a treacherous world.
America pretty much made it up as we went along, showcasing our happy and prosperous citizenry and wearing the Big Dog target on our back as our navies sailed the 7 oceans for whatever reason navies sail the 7 oceans when there is no war going on.
Mostly to play cat and mouse with the 7 ocean-presence of the Soviet Navy. The Soviet Union played our made-to-order swarthy villain for 50 years in a Cold War our leaders never got tired of but scared the shit out of everyone on earth. The Cuban Missile Crisis was very nearly instant global warming, and this would be going out by smoke signal.
That finally went away, then other crazy traumatic things happened, as they always do, and now we’re alone at the top trying to plug every leak in the dyke and running out of fingers. Americans are wondering what’s next for us, because in America you can still wonder that. America has always been as much an ideal as a nation. We’re not done yet and we can always change things. Better days are coming.