Great American Turning Points And Barfing While Yelling At The Television

The country is on the verge of a great turning point politically, economically, and socially, and frankly I’m sick and tired of the whole damned mess. I’m getting permanently hoarse from yelling at the television.

Look at us.

We’re fighting two wars, neither of which we should be fighting, and we started both of them, the second of which should have seen its political fathers tossed in jail, and the first of which was a useless waste of men, materiel and money from the beginning.

The economy is in the tank, in part because we’re fighting two draining, useless wars, in part because the people charged with governing are in the pockets of the rich people who put the country into its current financial hole, in part because the people who want to actually act responsibly to get us back to normal are being blocked by a bunch of know-nothing, power hungry, flat out stupid Republicans who couldn’t govern a two-house hick town. (Yes, ‘house’.)

Our education system is turning out so-called students whose only knowledge comprises how to take a multiple-choice test, who are hard pressed to write an intelligible sentence, whose knowledge of American history extends to last week if it’s the week before the test and to yesterday if it’s the week after the test. Compared to other Western civilizations, we have raised a nation of idiots who think television is truth. We’ve fallen so far behind in math and science that the ancient Greeks, Babylonians, and Egyptians look to be nations full of Einsteins.

Twenty percent of adults in the United States think the sun moves around the earth. Huge numbers think evolution is a myth or a lie, and huge numbers think the earth is maybe six thousand years old. These people are ignorant or stupid or both. And they vote. And they want public-school teachers to tell the children that evolution is a lie and that the sun moves around an earth which is six thousand years old.

We have two political parties in thrall to the wealthy and to the rich corporations, all of whom care about nothing but how much ‘more’ they can get for themselves, and don’t give a damn about the country, about its people, about the environment, about anything but cash and silver and gold.

We have one political party, the Republicans, which values only money and power. Not the power to do anything to make anyone’s life better, lest it be the life of one of their many rich corporate benefactors, but the power to get ‘more’ for themselves. They have no program and when asked to offer one, they produce documents that would shame a first-grader. Their vaunted healthcare plan that they waved during one of the President’s State of the Union speeches was nothing but blank paper. Their so-called budgets never contain numbers, except possibly for numbers they made up in the Congressional bathroom while gathered around a toilet stall. Their entire policy since 2008 has been to say ‘No!’ to everything and to lie about everything.

Look at them! Their leaders, or leading lights if you will, are Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell. They are all idiots, and the latter two are probably virulently corrupt. Boehner at least once on the floor of the House handed out envelopes of lobbyist money. He plays more golf than Tiger Woods. All the women are certifiable idiots, and Palin and O’Donnell are in it for the fame and the money: they’ve got nothing to offer and neither one could think their way through a lab rat’s maze if they had a map. If you parse these peoples’ words, you’d begin to think Alvin Greene was a genius.

And that’s what America’s got to offer the world, a world in environmental crisis that could become, if it hasn’t already, a cauldron of extinction; a world in financial crisis so dark that no one can truly identify its roots or its cure. America offers idiots offering idiot solutions. The face America presents to the world today is a cross between a lying, hypocritical Rush Limbaugh and a psychotic Glen Beck, and the Three Stooges. With a gun and bombs. We’re the number one terrorist power in the world, killing without cause, without reason, without sense. The whole world is going to hell in a handbasket and the fearless American leadership is worried about a relative handful of people who want nothing more than for us to get out of their faces and their countries. We’re big on bullets, and infinitely short on useful solutions.

Our political discourse has sunk to the level of the question of whether Christine O’Donnell is now or ever has been a witch. It doesn’t matter. She’s a dumb broad who has no business in the Senate, or the House, or the town clerk’s office. Those places have already exceeded their quota of fools. O’Donnell wants the fame and the power and all the money she can grab as a Senator, and in return she offers her greed and empty-headedness for all the news puffheads to wonder at what they’ve created.

Our political candidates don’t discuss issues and how best to provide solutions. They discuss penises and witchery and adultery. They make things up to shout about, and they get television puffheads to shout with them. The entire system feels about to collapse under the weight of stupidity.

And every day we are offered a new catastrophe. This one’s ahead by two points. Chile mine disaster. Environmental sludge flood. That one’s ahead by three points, or behind by four points. Oil price going up. Oil price going down. Oil flooding the Gulf. Republicans say no. Republicans say yes to foreign cash. Supreme Court sucks corporate penis, screws country. Pro-life. Pro-choice. Give us money or the world will end.

And tomorrow will be the same story, with the same world-ending big finish.

Jesus H. Christ!! I wish they would all shut up. Maybe one in a hundred has something to say that makes sense, that he’s actually thought about, that he’s actually qualified to think about and speak intelligently about.

But they won’t shut up. They’ll still be jibbering and jabbering and shouting and pissing and moaning and begging when we’re all choking to death on greenhouse gasses.

I’m sick to death of it. I’m going to stop listening, stop watching, stop pretending that anything I do will matter to the whole process. We’re a nation of fools, a ship of fools with a hole in the hull and a storm wind raging.

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