Can It Be Fixed?

Just how corroded is this country?

Last night I started working on a spreadsheet to demonstrate how easily someone like the Space Nazi could buy off this country. But it’s been a while since I put together a complicated spreadsheet and this one is complicated. I will finish it, maybe even today and when I do, I’ll write up my results and you’ll see them here. But after I gave up on it and went to bed, I started thinking about how damaged this country has been from Republican actions over the last 45 years, starting with Reagan or, really, starting with Nixon. And that thought stuck with me all through the night, until I woke up this morning comparing the sad remains of the United States of America to my history of abandoned cars because of rust damage from living in the Midwest.

If you’ve never lived in one of the rust belt states you might not have any idea how unrecoverable a car can become in a surprisingly short period of time. A friend of mine, who is a wonderful mechanic in Truth or Consequences NM always remarks on how much rust damage there is to my vehicles, even to the cars that I think are holding up pretty well. If you live in a Rust Belt state and you drive older vehicles, no matter how much work you put into a vehicle trying to keep it alive, sooner or later you’re gonna have to put it down because of rust. 20 some years ago I bought a late 90sFord Taurus station wagon for my wife as a surprise gift. She loved that car and took care of it as well as she'd ever taken care of a mechanical device. Like all Ford Taurus’es, eventually her station wagon needed major transmission work at about 160,000 miles. She really wanted to have the work done, it would have been about $3000 for the repairs. But the back hatch was rusted all along the bottom, the front and rear wheel wells were rusted out, there was major corrosion every place the body attached to the frame, and I made the decision for her to have the car scrapped.

In my 60 years as a car owner, I’ve had to make this decision around two dozen times. Between 1970 and the early 80s, I think I owned at least a half dozen Volkswagen Beetles and I was pretty good at keeping them mechanically maintained. But I lived in Kansas, northwest Texas, and Nebraska during those years and almost all of my driving was through heavily salted roads. I had to make the same decision that we made with that Taurus with every one of those vehicles. Because I’m an audio guy, I often had installed stereo systems in my cars that ended up being worth more than the car and I always removed those stereo systems before scrapping the car. During our lean years, that sound system might have moved from one car to another three or 4 times before it ended up being obsolete. In fact, I have the sound system from my last Ford Escort in one of my garages as the sound system for that work area. That car was also scrapped because of rust.

And now we are at a similar point with the frayed, beat-up, corroded and likely unrepairable remains of the United States of America. Just from my spreadsheet work last night on figuring out how easily Elon Musk could buy the entire Republican Party with his spare change, I have come to the conclusion that this vehicle/Constitution is not repairable. It is too corroded from within and without. We can fight to try to hang on to the good parts, but with 76 million Americans being foolish enough to take careful aim at their own feet and empty their weapons the fight is pretty hopeless.  As reported by Forbes Magazine and confirmed by several sources, “the wealth owned by the top 1% of Americans as of the fourth quarter of 2022, according to the Federal Reserve, was $43.45 trillion, compared to $4.16 trillion by the bottom 50% of the Americans during the same period. (Forbes reported in 2021 that the top 1% that year comprised about 1.3 million households making more than $500,000 per year.) Within that that top category, the top 0.01% alone controlled $17.6 trillion in the last quarter of 2022.” Lucky for the “top 1%” literacy and numeracy in the majority of American adults is practically 3^rd world (Trump’s “shithole countries”) levels.

The men who founded this nation knew these problems are likely insolvable. They warned against inherited wealth, wealth so great that it would overwhelm the power and contributions of the general population, an uneducated general population, and many of the faults we currently find ourselves mired in. Those same men were also mostly wealthy slave owners and they were afraid that democracy was an unwise (for their wealth and power) experiment. So, they built a “republic” that kept power in the hands of the idle rich and working people have been struggling to wrestle a democracy from a poorly designed republic ever since. Today that struggle is over and oligarchy has won, more than enough American citizens are so easily misdirected and uneducated that they willingly submit themselves to servitude. What happens next will be an example to the world and very well could spell the end for what remains of human civilization. The first week of the new Republican Administration indicates, to me, that this vehicle is rusted beyond repair and will either have to be abandoned or will end up stuck on the side of the road leaving its passengers stranded.