Cashing In the Chips

A tale I have wanted to tell for some time now, so here goes:

Since long before the United States became a country, there has been a theme to Western settlement in America: that each generation, economically, socially, culturally, would be a little bit more than the ones that have passed.  In the end, this was the most fundamental part of the American dream; the thing on which all the rest depended.

And it worked pretty damned well, too, despite the millions of you-know-who that were trampled in the process, and the others who were left out; it led within a couple centuries of our independence to our being the economic powerhouse of the world, and the breeding ground of the conditions that led to a thriving middle class.  It led to a place where just about anyone had at least a fair chance of a decent life, and a better one for their kids.

It worked pretty well until...well, let's just say the time that can be marked by the election of Ronald Reagan, a greedy, racist rich man, to be our President, and his enthronement as the High Priest of American Morality, while he preached a gospel of avarice and self absorption, at least for white people.

And that's the point, I think, where the rich monsters who were coming more and more to dominate American political life, decided to abandon the ongoing efforts to build a better country, and just decided to cash in the chips; to take the money and run.

The whole story of the country since then can pretty well be reduced to the effort of a cadre of hyper-rich sociopaths, by any means they could pay for,  to pocket the nation's entire wealth for themselves, knowing perfectly well that this entails reducing everyone else to penury, and destroying everything that protects ordinary civilians from a life of misery.

The funny thing is that, having had phony patriotism crammed down their throats from the day of their birth, the vast majority of Americans could not conceive of people who had been given so much by our nation, who would deliberately destroy all of it, for short term economic gains for themselves.

But that is what has happened in this country.  People just stood by and averted their eyes through Presidential treason, two stolen Presidential elections, laws making it possible for the entire national media to fall into the hands of a few right wing billionaires, a corrupt Supreme Court that made it "legal" to openly buy Congressmen, and a party that spewed open contempt for every bit of morality that stood in their way.

And now this malignant cadre of perhaps only a couple thousand families has gained so much momentum, and has so much economic power that it can finance Republican political campaigns all on their own,  that it is hard to see a way out of the problem, short of a violent revolution, or devolving many of the worst Republican States into a country of their own, which will soon fall into third world chaos and poverty.

Unfortunately, we are not even close to either of these eventualities, so you can expect things in this country to get worse and worse for the foreseeable future, until...well, until who knows what horrible fate awaits us in a decade or two.