Yes, the Good Old Days are back, where women knew their place, welcomed as many babies as God gave them, and retreated into silence because protesting rape or assault would be met with death threats and police neglect. Back then, in the Good Old Days, you could send your children to schools which had already done the racial segregating you required, there were none of those pesky “Vota Aqui” signs because everyone spoke perfect English, and the coal miners were hard at work. In a welcome, more modern, development, the rising temperatures now allow you to grow orchids and avocados in your back yard.
Now, in the Even Better Days, corporations are people who can take over your land for a pipeline, armed militias can occupy public property at will, and every family has its own AK-47, just like the Constitution says. America has finally become a Christian nation, and I have become afraid to write a blog post like this.
The Barbarians are at the gate as Nero sits fiddling in his golden tower.
This is the fault of another authoritarian, Hillary Clinton, who suffocated the fresh voices in the Democratic party, locked in her victory before the elections even began, and overlooked partisan actions in her favor by the DNC, including the disenfranchisement of thousands of Democratic voters in New York. Through her foundation, she has as many unsavory ties to foreign powers as Trump, and while she has not been indicted, she is guilty of gross stupidity in the use of her email server, to name but one dumb decision. I voted for her because I did not want Rome to fall.
Trump cannot put the dogs of war that he unleashed back in their cages; he empowered them, organized them, and welcomed them. Our savior will probably be the Republican who detests him, a moderately powerful being who looks him in the eye and says, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
They have finally won, after an organized campaign of intransigence and insult that goes back to the 1980s, though I trace my own disillusionment back to JFK’s assassination in 1963, when the alleged assassin was killed in a police station, on television. During the Vietnam War, I read that the Viet Cong’s modus operandi was to “cut off the head,” and that tactic has worked in the United States as well. We have lost Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, and the much-surveilled John Lennon, though the intellectual carnage has not been limited to leftists. I have marveled for decades that we can allow the loss of 30,000 Americans a year by firearm, and we haven’t cared enough to even try to stop it. “That’s just the price of freedom,” they say.
In 2008, the Elites caused a stock market crash which resulted in millions of people losing their homes, their jobs, and their future. Nobody was punished. It is now the future that those people never had, and the People have caused the stock market to plunge by voting in Donald Trump. Hey! The market’s up this morning, so who knows, and who cares? The People don’t own stocks any more, they don’t have retirement funds, and they will be fined if they don’t pay for their health care. College is unattainable, and there are fewer businesses that can use their underdeveloped skills.
The People have bafflingly voted for the very people who caused all this to happen, through deregulation, a diversion of wealth to a tiny sliver of families, privatization of education, including outsourcing education funding to corporations, a war which crippled thousands and increased the national debt, cutting off unemployment support, denying funds for retraining of the work force, allowing the infrastructure, which greases the wheels of commerce, to crumble, and defending the business titans who kept their jobs after destroying the People’s lives. Among other things.
It was all so yummy that it is hard to find a politician who hasn’t succumbed to the lucre of lobbyism. Public service has become personal service. Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri is salivating over his win, which bolsters the lobbying careers of his wife and children (except the 12-year-old), but so is Hillary, whose aide and surrogate daughter, Huma Abedin, was raking it in from a lobbying firm as well, while working at the State Department. Hillary has been enriched quickly by fees paid by the corporations that she, and Bill, have protected.
Perhaps this is the moment when the Civil War has finally ended, and the South has won, led by a Yankee quisling.