Day 907

Day 907 Tuesday July 2, 2019

489 Days until the 2020 election and 567 days until the Inauguration

The End of Civilization as We Know It

The above sentence was the last line of a Mad Magazine take off on The Daily News, which they called The Daily Dirt. The Daily News was (and is?) a New York City sensationalist newspaper reporting things like alien abductions and starlet’s bare skin. In the Mad Magazine take off there was a brief article on the front page at the bottom of one column that noted that Russia and the U.S. had started a nuclear was and that this was “the end of civilization” (article continued at the top of the next column for one line) “as we know it.”

A buddy of mine who was on one of my tours to the Mayan area in Guatemala told me his grandparents grew up in Germany when Hitler was coming to power, He said, “They knew he was crazy, but when they decided to do something it was too late.”

The Ed Sullivan Show* had a comic on who said he was a school teacher in NYC. One of the things he bemoaned was how “Kids today, you can’t …” Can’t mark them wrong for an answer like this to the question, “Why did the Roman Empire fall?” Answer “The Roman Empire fell because of carelessness.”

*The Ed Sullivan Show was a variety show. Mr. Sullivan introduced America to all sorts of comics, jugglers, musical acts, and vaudevillians. His show followed Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” on Sunday nights. To get on Ed Sullivan was to signal you had made it. The Beatles were introduced to America via Ed Sullivan, as was Elvis Presley a generation before. Although Mr. Presley hip gyrations were considered very salacious and stirred much consternation in conservative religious parts of the country. Jimi Hendrix did not play on Ed Sullivan as he was considered too whatever to do so.

I am here to tell you that the end of the American way of life is at hand unless we do something. 

Call me what you want, but the evidence is there. You may want to pooh pooh it, but do so at your own and my peril. Once it is gone we will not get it back. We will be relegated to the dustbin of history, and this proud experiment will have come to an end. 

You may think I’m being overly dramatic. I have a tendency to be so. But, consider the evidence. (I know – facts, so passé. )

Since 1980 the middle class has not made any economic progress, while the rich have become richer.

The middle class has been asked to pay more, make less, and has gone in debt more. It is now to the point that a large number of Americans live at or below the poverty line, struggling til the next paycheck, working two and three jobs, and going ever deeper in debt. 

Meanwhile the gap between rich and the rest is growing. The gap between the rich and the super-rich is also growing. Statistics and phrases like “three people in the United States own more that the bottom 30%” are common comparisons.

What happened? What is happening? What can we do?

I’m not sure of the answer to the third question, unfortunately, but I can outline some of the root causes of the first two.

First and foremost we have allowed ourselves to be lulled into a stupor by idiotic and fearful ideas: be they economic, religious, social, or political. These ideas have been pushed by various people and groups with in some cases hidden agendas, in others they are straight up in your face wacky, but they are believed!

Take for instance Ran and Ron Paul. They push an economic idea that came out of Austria. It has at its core the idea that you can turn an economy around by diddling with various rates. What do most Nobel prize winning mainstream economists say to this? Bull shit. But they persist and they have enough catchy little phrases and quips that people like that they hang around.

Or if you want another example take Reagan’s “Trickle down economics.” Well, it’s been 39 years since he started saying that how’s it working out for you? This has been debunked so many ways… It’s basically an excuse to enrich the rich. It’s worked pretty good for them but how many pool boys, yachts, and lawn technicians do they need? (In the case of Betsy De Vos I think the yacht count is five. Not enough to really restart the economy.)

Or what about the Trump tax cut? The effect of that was to deplete the treasury, put the nation in more debt at the rate of $1,000,000,000,000.00 per year and enrich the rich. This was magically supposed to trickle down to the rest of us but it didn’t. Companies were going to reinvest in America, but they didn’t. They bought back their stock, and like the bank bailout, they gave themselves huge bonuses without helping those that really needed the help.

Let’s move on to how religious quacks have inserted themselves into the political process and sowed seeds to undo our democracy. Where to start? 

How about that pastor who, like many fundamentalists want to bring about the apocalypse and part of that requires moving the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, which Trump has done. So what if it pisses off a bunch of folks living there? When Jesus descends to lift us all up …

Or what about the pastors who prey (not pray, prey) upon the innocent telling them to send money to them instead of spending it on medicine to fight the cancer the people have that is destroying their bodies?   

Or what about Jerry Fallwell Jr.? It turns out that the son of the man who started Liberty University, a rather strange place full of “Christian values” and wacky ideas that generates a lot of money for the Fallwell family, seems to have supported Trump for president over Ted Cruz (who kicked off his bid at Liberty and is the son of a pastor), not because he deeply believed in Trump’s values but because he was being and is still being blackmailed. It has to do with a pool boy in Miami, some photos Michael Cohen had (and claims to still have one), questionable business loans, jets, money, sex … you know … the usual.

Then there are the folks who believe it is their duty to force other people to do things with their bodies that they don’t want to do, that can lead them to death, a living hell, poverty and a miserable existence. They call themselves pro-life, but once again that’s crap, because forcing a woman into an unwanted pregnancy and making her bring it to term results in many women dying from unsafe abortions and/or bringing a child into the world that they don’t want and will force them into a life of economic disadvantage. There is evidence to suggest that the downturn in crime in the early 1990s was the result to the legalization of abortions in 1973. That is to say that there weren’t as many unwanted children roaming America in the early 90s when they would have come of age and hence lower crime rates. (This has been disputed but all the chest thumping Rudy Guliani’s and chiefs of police have never offered a better provable explanation.)

Let’s move onto the social and political spheres.

In the book “Democracy in Chains” by Barb MacClean the review in google starts with this sentence, “An explosive expose of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, and change the Constitution.” This has been an ongoing campaign funded by the Koch brothers and their allies for decades and we are watching it play out in real time before our very eyes. Betsy DeVos is Secretary of Education. She had never been to a public school as a student, teacher or administrator. She has carried out a failed charter school effort in Detroit. She has been working relentlessly to siphon money away from public schools and into charter schools, notably Christian charter schools. She is doing whatever she can to weaken public education in this country. Plus, she’s not very bright.

The right has hidden their motives behind patriotic slogans and economic “freedom” messaging, but in private correspondence they reveal their true motives. There is a belief and many regular folks are adopting this attitude that: taxation is theft (or socialism and that’s bad), and under the guise of “freedom” it’s “every man for himself” or “I got mine you get yours.” The attitude is pervasive now. What is always striking about these folks is the way they harken back to “the way it used to be”, “ the good old days” etc. What they conveniently forget is that some of the things they attribute their success to are the very things they are dead set against now. Either that or they forget that the good old days weren’t that good. Take for instance clean air. In the 1970s major cities’ skylines were obscured by a haze of smog. Now, many want to do away with the EPA. Rivers had so much sludge in them that they caught on fire. Now, we’re letting coal companies push their waste into the rivers we cleaned up. 

The rich who are orchestrating this are incensed at the idea of paying taxes, especially property taxes. They see it as stealing. Howls of socialism are rampant. They like to forget that capitalism unchecked is just as dangerous as other economic ideas when taken to an extreme. Well, maybe they know, but don’t care.

Now, the Trump Administration led by a man who knows little and has no interest in learning, is attacking scientists who are trying to let people know basic facts about the condition of the Earth. In the Department of Agriculture he is trying to dismantle many of the scientific agencies that led the world in basic research about our food, and water. In two weeks they will all be fired (or have to move to Kansas where there isn’t even a building for them to work in.) Yup, don’t want to know stuff that might make him look bad.

We used to be the nation that solved problems. Now we are leading the world in stupidity and ignorance. 

I don’t know what to do other than to point out what is happening.

Let’s not be like my buddy’s Prussian grandparents who saw it coming but acted too late.

489 Days until the 2020 election and 567 days until the Inauguration

The end of civilization as we know it and the end of our democracy is at hand.

PS A total eclipse of the sun.