"Credat Iudaeus Apella, non ego."
"Eventus Stultorum Magister."
*America: Natation of Pussies* A Final Note...?

Perhaps I was a little hasty in my previous utterances. After all, to see something beloved wounded, perhaps fatally, is a slap to the face like few others. Still, love, true love, sometimes means being tough. And "tough love", ironically enough, isn't always found in firmness of hand, but sometimes more in letting go. Yes, just like a bird, if something has its mind made up to go a certain way, holding it back is only staving off the inevitable.

When I was born, America had about the best chance it will ever get at being a free nation again. The soft communism of Keynes was being rejected, inflation was still understood to not merely be the price of a loaf of bread, and the masses wanted what a nigh-libertarian Californian govenor was promising them, out on the campaign trail.

All of that today is an anarchronism. It was a zietgeist, though noble, that has been demonized by its enemies and quietly relinquished by its former champions. Like a precious metal standard in money, like republicanism and federalism, like inalienable rights, like the seperation and enumeration of powers, it's all floating out from the river of living memory and into a watery grave trolled and sifted only by the nets of deconstruction and academia.

Just as the "America" my father inherited from his father had little resembalance to the world grand-pappy was born into, neither will the "America" my children will come to know resemble much of the one I was born into.

Dialeticism and Deweyism have reduced what "America" means into ever blurring simulacrum, with each version capable of being liquidated at the drop of the latest trend in thought. And this isn't just the back-and-forth of politics. Most think this is a good thing. We like the thought of "evolving" societies, because it offers what was hitherto only promised in Kingdom Come: paradise on Earth. We're told legislation and civil practice are a soft science labratory. That slowly, but surely, through statistical engineering, we can falsify what doesn't "work" and through the gospel of abstract induction, formulate an optimal code of governance. As long as a vague sense of democratic choice is implied in all this, than it is germane.

The smugness of this self-assurance has crowded out even seeds that gave rise to it, as the average man on the street couldn't name off his city councilman, let alone his congressman, senator, or lt. govenor. The children of the baby boomers have all been reared in government schools that look back on the past with humanist self-righteousness, simply for its own sake. We aren't really taught what people actually said and thought, in the context of their time. We are only taught that it was wrong and here's what they were missing because they weren't enlightened like us. The lessons of history have thus been reduced to a maze of corrective bracers, absent ideas which they were meant to rectifiy.

And so here we are today, riding the heap of history, self-assured our shit doesn't stink.
After all, the rachet-effect of political "science" assures only what works is carried forward into the future. It is in this Hegelian synthesis, the end justifying the means, that modern society puts its faith. "The Constitution isn't a suicide pact!" Jay Severin is oft fond of quoting Alan Dershowitz, a man otherwise antithetical to him. (Try telling that to the southern confederates.)

This, coupled with the Dewey take on knowledge that it's not what you know, but how what you know helps you to cope, sums up our justificaiton. After all, what good are economics if there's a minimum wage, burgers to flip, and an iPod you can afford? We don't have to really worry, we've got newspapers and Katie Couric to tell us if something's wrong, right? Everything works itself out...

But what of this? If people are happy in it, well, who am I to judge? No one, to be honest. Everyone knows George Santayana caveat. Conmsumer goodies are our bread and wine. Advertising and marketing are our new sermons. An ever flowing sucession of apolonic muses and gods flow out of the television and movie theatres to keep something in us eternally young. And now we have internet porn for saints of aphrodite and temple prostitutes. Image is now substance. Liberty took the pepsi-challenge against bread and circus. Liberty lost. We are content to be a nation with the soul of a moth.

Hence, we are left with a generation that doesn't even know that banks and the government can rob them with their own money. That anything uttered on televesion, or read in the Metro, must be true. That corprorate Wizards of Oz, are somehow greater than sum of the smoke, curtains, ink and paper that constitute them. That they, and all the acronyms on letterhead, are not only equal with citizens, but first among them.

Thus you begin to understand how we became a Nation of Pussies. Despite the fact our homes, our wealth, our privacy, and even our persons are not safe, we are content to hide in the safety of the law of averages. "That won't happen to me", a nation quitely tells itself. The show must go on, and no omlet was born of an unbroken egg.

Of course, this wholesale auctioning off of America to those who neither built it or contributed to its prosperity isn't an all bad thing. After all, the Fed admits outright its bankrupting us. Allowing the peso, USD, and loon to merge into an Amero will probably be about the only thing to keep the economy propped up. In the meantime, grab yourself some CADs before they're par with the USD. A loony that's par with the buck will make building a trans-rockies pipeline from Alaska a bit more affordable, and Ameica's oil problems will dry up. To those who don't mind kicking peasents off their land, the undeveloped mineral and energy deposits in Mexico are an open secret the press might figure out, if they read anything other than press kit releases.

So, if bread and circus is the price of freedom, well, than at least someone, somewhere, is getting a hell of a bargain.