Labeling Ourselves

Now that the US has decided to speed up the country's decline into a failed empire and 3rd world banana dictatorship, pretty much everything that once resembled civil society is vanishing. Which means the loud pipe morons are proudly demonstrating their assholiness with every opportunity. Apparently, our degeneration has given every spoiled white boy license to act like an asshole; from eBikers to bikers to neo-Nazis (alt-right, to the genteel) to your neighbors and their yard tools.Bicyclists are engaging in hit-and-run road warrior crap. In our fading empire, every nitwit with $200 to blow can buy an assault weapon and another $100 turns it into a machine gun with enough bullets to take out a theater full of victims. We have elected officials who set levels of stupidity and assholiness that astound the rest of the world. Not us, though. We haven't had anything near enough stupidity.

Back here in Minnesota, I have a neighbor, who I  call "Slo Mow Man," who mows his lawn "conservatively" every 2-3 days. He's a retired California civil servant who moved to Minnesota to spread his retirement money further into the 21st Century. I have never seen anyone drive a riding lawn mower so slowly. He mist have had a low-low gear installed at the local Hardly shop. Likewise, when he uses his wood chipper, he fires up the motor and, apparently, wanders around his several-acre-yard gathering sticks, hiking back to the chipper with one of two twigs in his hands, tosses them in, and goes back to wandering. The wood chipper runs all day and rarely does any actual chipping. All of that pales when the snow flies or the leaves fall. His use of the leaf blower is a source of depressing entertainment, if you are deaf. It's kind of hilarious to watch him blow leaves off of his driveway, into the wind where they blow right back as he creeps down his driveway at a pace that would frustrate snails. You just know this guy pisses into the wind, too. Likewise, after he takes 2 hours to plow the snow from his driveway, he whips out the leaf blower and tries to blow the snow dust from his driveway, turning a 20 minute job into nearly an all-day affair. 

Typical of that crowd of folks, he's convinced the rest of the country is "lazy, entitled, and resentful of white people." Ok, he's probably right about the last point. Hell, even I don't like white people much and I am one. 

After going over this sad, degrading history, I have decided that we need a new national anthem and this is the song I recommend. (20 years ago, it would have been Jame's Brown's "Living in America.". Those days are long gone. Today, you'd have to be desperate at the level of those who are willing to risk Trump's immigrant concentration camps to "eat your heart out" to become an American.) We've become the sort of international laughing stock that the wingnuts used to claim we were during the Obama years; when US perceptions in the Rest of the World was about as good as it has ever been. Today, that perception is dropping out of sight, to the point that our chimp President was laughed at while addressing the United Nations.