Why Is Fascism Popular?

 It seems counterintuitive to think a political/economic system that has failed so spectacularly and consistently over at least 1,000 years (totalitarian dictatorships) is making a comeback.  But it is, apparently.  Even Google’s right-wing PC AI Overview says, “Based on analyses from historians, political scientists, and global observers, there is a widely held consensus that far-right, authoritarian, and neo-fascist movements are on the rise globally. While often described as a ‘new’ or ‘reconfigured’ form of fascism rather than a direct replication of 1930s Europe, these movements are expanding by challenging democratic institutions and exploiting social, economic, and crises.”  Just like 1930s Europe.  When you ask “Why?” the AI answer is predictable, “The rise of these movements is linked to economic anxieties, crises of capitalism, fear of migration, and the ‘great replacement’ theory—a belief in a plot to replace native populations.”  Again, just like 1930s Europe.  And that answer is about as shallow as I’d expect from an “artificial intelligence” created by Tech Bros and other social misfits and Trumpstein perverts.  That is certainly the motivation being bought and sold by Trump, the rePutin-lickin’ Party, the Heritage Foundation, soulless goobers like Turning Point USA, and everyone else who is trying to gather fame, profit, and power from fascism.  But it’s bullshit.

The rise in fascism is directly related to the fact that the dullest are breeding like caged rats.  Take for example, my half-witted, cowardly MAGAot and devoted rePutin-lickin’ US Representative Brad Finstad, who likely couldn’t name more than 3 of his seven offspring at any given time.  Putting it politically correctly, “there has been a documented negative correlation between educational attainment (a proxy for cognitive ability) and fertility.”  Putting it less politically correctly and more scientifically, “researchers observed IQ drops occurring within actual families, between brothers and sons – meaning the effect likely isn't due to shifting demographic factors as some have suggested, such as the dysgenic accumulation of disadvantageous genes across areas of society.”  (Could you find a more opaque way to say that stupid people are reproducing?)  As a species, we’re getting dumber and what was once assumed to be a constantly improving species intelligence peaked in the 1970s and has declined ever since.

The most obvious fan of fascism is the group of deadbeat under-achievers who are being “left behind” (aka “replaced”) by practically every aspect of modern life: mostly useless men.  The world is full of them.  In the US, we have our incels, Proud Boys, video-gaming basement dwellers, and the “Trump puppies.”  In Japan, they are called “Hikikomori” (parasite singles) or “Soshoku-danshi” (herbivore men), in China they’re “Tang ping” (lying flat) and “Bai Lan” , in the U.K. it’s  “NEET” (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), in Italy it’s “Bamboccioni” (big babies), in Spain they are “Ni-ni” (neither studies nor works), South Korea has their “Sampo generation” (giving up on courtship, marriage, and children), and on it goes.  Every first world country and, probably everyone else, has the same problem: too many unintelligent, unmotivated, useless males.  There are lots of equally useless women, too, but unless they are Putin-lickin Trumpers (in the US, anyway) they aren’t nearly as violent or dangerous. 

I suspect excess males has always been a problem for humanity, maybe all mammals.  In 2016, researchers published their findings of a large battlefield in the Tollense Valley, in northern Germany.  This discovery uncovered the remains of a massive Bronze Age battle, occurring around 1250 BCE. The remains of thousands of warriors and their weapons were uncovered indicating a brutal war that was, possibly, conducted with warriors from hundreds of miles away from the battlefield.  The world human population in 1250 BCE was about 50 million and European population was probably around 2 million, so tossing away tens of thousands of relatively fit young males at that time was an obvious statement of excess.  In 1920, the world population was about 1.8 to 1.9 billion people and WWI killed off 9 to 11 million soldiers (out of 60 million, mostly men, mobilized) and 15 to 20 million total human beings trimmed from the population.  WWII was even more effective at excess male trimming, killing off 21 to 25 million military personnel (overwhelmingly male) plus 38 to 55 million civilian deaths out of a world population of 2.3 to 2.4 billion people.  Humans haven’t quit murdering each other for fun and profit, generally accepted mortality numbers (due to a variety of statistical issues) indicates that between 1945 to 2000, about 231 million people died in various conflicts. Mostly, thanks to religion and politics, since 1989 over 3.9 million people have died in local wars.  That, clearly, isn’t enough because world population is projected to reach 8.3 billion by the middle of this year (2026), with 50.26% of the global population (4.17 billion) male. 

Historically and theoretically, there is (supposedly) a genetic advantage to a 1:1 male-to-female population distribution.  That may be true with natural animals, but humans stopped being natural at least 200 years ago.  A UN study, in 2025, advised women to “be cautious in their attitude towards men,” because out of 4.14 billion men:

• -       About 1.2 billion are already married
• -       94% of the world’s 11 million prison population are male
• -       1 in 8, or a half-billion, males suffer from mental health problems
• -       Another half billion are disabled from injuries and and various illnesses.

Leaving about 2 billion men available for marriage and in that group:

• -       56% are unemployed
• -       4% of them are gay
• -       1% are Catholic priests.
• -       10% are parents or close relatives
• -       30% over 65 years old.

The 56% “unemployed” are the obvious “excess male population who would normally be chewed up and spit out of the gene pool in combat.  The fact that many obviously-excess males are really into violent video games and, when they cosplay as actual warriors, they suck at it, Proud Boys or ICE-gangser-style, proves the “excess” point.  These guys, however, are strongly drawn to a fascist, male-centric culture that does not focus on intelligence, skill and education, or even utility.  Ideally, they think the perfect society would be a nation of Donny Trump clones where stupidity, incompetence, and arrogance are rewarded lavishly. 

 

I don’t know if there has ever been a better example of useless, excess males demonstrating their total lack of value than Alex Pretti’s execution in the streets of Minneapolis.  Eight cowardly, masked, heavily armed, randomly-uniformed, gangsters rampaging through the city’s streets, terrorizing and brutalizing everyone in sight, and, finally, converging on an obviously decent citizen, beating him mercilessly, and executing him with 9 close range shots to the head and body.  These faux-law enforcement cosplayers reenacted every biker gangbanger stereotype Hollywood ever portrayed and rePutin-lickin’ Trumpers somehow saw “law enforcement officers putting their lives at risk protecting the public[1]” from that same picture. 

The argument for the continued existence of drone-quality men used to be that “we need people for all kinds of jobs, and intelligence is not everything.”   It is absolutely true that “kindness, patience, sensitivity, and trustworthiness are important — things that are not necessarily linked to intelligence,” but just being dumb, unskilled, manual labor is less useful every year.  It won’t be long before it’s totally worthless as automation and robots take over the stupid stuff and it’s pretty obvious that excess males have already been “replaced” by useful people, technology, and automation.  A world overstocked with 2+ billion excess men is going to be a very dangerous, precarious place unless something can be done with (or to) that population. 

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[1] An exact quote from at least three Minnesota US Representatives the day of Pretti’s murder.

“You need to have an open mind!”

I bumped into a local acquaintance at the Farmer’s Market this weekend. His latest frenzy (he’s gone through several dozen in the 8 years I’ve known him) is AI terror. Technophobia is not as new thing. Old people and uneducated people and unskilled people have been afraid of “progress” almost as long as we’ve been banging the rocks together. After he failed to create any sort of panic in his audience (me), he quickly walked away, shouting over his shoulder, “Tom, you need to have an open mind.”

There are “open minds” and there are open minds. Being open to emotional content is the path to becoming a mindless cult member. At this point in my life, I may not be able to take much of any even slightly emotional argument seriously. That “lack of charisma” problem that many Democratic candidates are curse with is nothing more than a refusal to resort to appealing to their listeners’ amygdala and aiming, instead, for their frontal cortex. One of Richard Nixon’s media advisors, Roger Ailes, wrote “Voters are basically lazy. Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.” Ailes described exactly the tactics he’d use in running Fox News a couple of decades later. Screw reason, poke ‘em in the emotions and they’ll never even think about thinking for themselves. Or, as Rick Santorum once blatantly honestly said, "We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." Nope, but they can count on most of the characters on the below-average side of the IQ curve and that will consistently be half of any population.

I have read You Are Not So Smart and listened to the audiobook and Podcast so often that I bought both versions of the book, along with You Are Now Less Dumb. I usually read a book once a decade and my library resources are more than adequate for my purposes, but not when it comes to how badly our brains work, especially under emotional impulse. When I was a young man, I fell victim to practically every sucker-the-rube scam known to humans, but I’ve tried to make a personal policy out of “Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me.” I’ve been burned more than a few times failing to heed that advice, but I’ve avoided disaster for most of my life believing that when it comes to con artists “forgiveness is for suckers.” I didn’t call my motorcycle column and blog “Geezer with A Grudge” for nothing.

An “open mind” is the kind of mindset that allowed Hitler to con all of the British politicians who met him into believing he was benign, in fact the ONLY important British leader who distrusted Hitler was Winston Churchill, who was also the only one who didn’t speak face-to-face with the Nazi bastard. Likewise, I prefer to obtain my own information on important subjects through READING about and studying those topics. I don’t know a lot of stuff, but the stuff I do know is regularly and largely misrepresented in the media, YouTube (especially), advertising, and in most person-to-person “communications.” That means I don’t listen to sales routines over the phone or in person; “Just give me the literature and I’ll get back to you if I’m interested” is usually enough to kill a sales pitch in the bud. I’m not real bright and it takes me time to absorb the information that usually has to be extracted from sales literature with as much effort as taking a college physics or chemistry exam. They don’t make information easy or even available, more often than not.

I’m a big believer and observe in track records, too. If you’ve been wrong almost always (Talkin’ to you Republicans.) and don’t show any evidence that you realize you were regularly on the wrong side of reality, history, morality, and decent behavior (Still talkin’ to you Republicans.) I have no interest in your opinions and doubt your ability to acquire and assemble facts that are coherent or even honest.

Republicans–The Cult of the Unremarkable Boys

In an excellent Atlantic Magazine article titled “The Narcissism of the Angry Young Men," lays out a pretty good description of the kind of sour-grapes losers who have been overpopulating the planet and coalesced around the Republican Party since Goldwater was electorally slaughtered by L.B.J. The Karl Roves, Fox Views talking-heads, Dick Cheneys, Rush Limbaughs, Jerry Falwells, Jack Kemps, and Oliver Norths grew up to become the spoiled boys’ elder-faux-statesmen. Those angry old men spawned the current crop of non-achieving boys who chant “you won’t replace us” at least 25 years after their ilk was replaced by everything from educated working women and immigrants to robots to ditch-digging and farm equipment. There has never been much of a need for excess quantities of Y-chromosomes but the over-populated, high-technological world of today has less need of cannon fodder than ever before in human history. And cannon fodder is all this kind of male (and some females and female impersonators, Marjorie Taylor Greene for example) are capable of being at the "best." Anyone dumb enough to think a mask is supposed to be worn like a gag is clearly on the far left side of the IQ distribution curve.

If these uneducated, unskilled goobers aren’t being mindlessly thrown at an opposing hoard of equally useless characters they are causing destruction, instability, and pointless violence against people who do have a purpose. Of course, they don’t need and shouldn’t have anything more dangerous than sharp weapons and a flag to wave as they mow each other down. This pack of mommas’-basement-dwelling goobers are littering up the landscape and causing infinitely more trouble than they could possibly be worth.

Sadly for the country and, likely, the world, these spoiled children found their leader in an equally childish Toddler-in-Chief Trump and he has become the role model for losers, whiners, failures, and angry children everywhere. It’s hard to see a way back from this over-population derivative without some serious assistance from nature or an engineered pandemic and the goober-resistance to medical and scientific advice. Their infestation is beyond politics and rational behavior is just wishful thinking.

Going Outdoors

A few day ago I disposed of some of my 50-year-old camping gear (all still in excellent condition, if well-worn) as a gift to a friend. While we were sorting through the gear he asked, “When did you start camping?”

The answer depends on what you call “camping.”

His definition was “Sleeping outside, overnight, in a tent or on the ground.”

That would be my answer, too, but that puts my solo camping age at about 13. My parents were fairly fundamentalist Methodists and insisted that their motley hoard of kids and step-kids to go church every Sunday for a minimum of 3 painful, pointless, irrational hours. I was functionally an atheist from about 9 on, after my mother died painfully and terribly from liver cancer at 34. I particularly disliked my parents’ church because the members were absolutely cynical about the contradiction between the “money-changers in the temple” and the cars, appliances, houses, and other crap that was being bought-and-sold before,during, and after the services. Kansas Christians are, at best, a confusing lot.

Not long after my family moved to a new development in the north end of town (the far north at the time), I discovered that the two “adults” in our family were what I would later learn are “classic Republicans.” They had, literally, no sense of proportion; especially when it came to punishment. From being beaten to being grounded to losing various privileges (of which there were few-to-none), the punishment was pretty much uniform relative to the crime. Leave a sock on the laundry room floor, get smacked, screamed at, and banished to your room. Skip school for a day, get smacked, screamed at, and banished to your room. Run away to Kansas City for a long weekend to watch jazz bands on 13th Street until the cops caught me, called my parents, and put me on a bus back home,get smacked, screamed at, and banished to my room. I learned fairly early, might as well go big if I’m going at all.

There were a collection of the remnants of abandoned and demolished buildings, from the Saint Mary of the Plains College that was destroyed by a tornado in 1942, across the highway from our development. One side of the highway was a bunch of middle class houses and the other was a field with some scrubby cottonwoods and lots of weeds and a scattering of exposed basements from whatever building was there before a tornado ripped it down to ground level. Once I discovered those hiding places, it was only a matter of time before I decided to risk the uniform-punishment-treatment for a peaceful evening and a day without religious nonsense. My room was in the basement and I could easily scramble out my bedroom window late Saturday night, shut the window from the outside, sneak into the garage and snag my Boy Scout sleeping bag, my binoculars, a flashlight, and a canvas tarp/ground cloth, and run down the street and across the highway where I hopped the fence and headed for one of the basements that I’d previously made ready for habitation. Earlier in the week, I’d scavenged a short wooden ladder and an end table from a neighbor’s trash and a bunch of candles from our garage and had set out a pile of comic books for entertainment.

I’d spend the night reading comics until I fell asleep in my bag. The sun or cold would wake me up in the morning and I’d watch the street in front of our house until the family station wagon rolled out of the driveway and headed south to church. After a safe margin of time, I’d sneak back home, put away my gear, have breakfast, mess around for a couple of hours, and go to bed and pretend to be asleep when the crowd came home. When one of the “adults” wandered down to look in my room, I’d get smacked, screamed at, and banished to my room. Sometimes there would be an additional chore added to my long list of tasks. No matter what the punishment, it was never as bad as going to church would have been. Over the years it turned into a game, but I could usually outwait my father; and my step-mother didn’t really care if I ever came back. Eventually, they gave up, allowing me to stay home if I cooked Sunday dinner; usually fried chicken.

The summer I turned 15, I had found a farm job that gave me a whole summer’s cover and a place to stay for the first few weeks of spring. I’d be at the farm for winter wheat harvest and spring planting and guys from the band I was in could come by around mid-May and pick me up for the summer’s tour. During my senior high school year, I stayed in a collection of places from my step-grandparents’ basement to the 20’ trailer I rented when I was working road construction, to a lean-to I built about 5 miles west of Dodge on the Arkansas River. Being underage, I was occasionally hauled back to my father’s home by the cops, but I wandered off fairly quickly and found a new place to hide out during the brief hours the cops would bother looking for me. After my senior year, everyone quit worrying about me and I was on my own from then on.

I Get It, but That Won’t Help You

One of the many boring things I told students in my electronics and mechanical repair classes was “If you want to be any good at troubleshooting and repair work, you have to get used to being wrong; a lot.” Of course, like students everywhere and always they thought I was joking. I wasn’t and as a result I expect fewer than 0.1% of those young (and some not-so-young) people spent more than a couple of hobby years earning little-to-no-money in the business I was supposed to be helping them learn. Being wrong is a pain-in-the-ass and it’s the reason that so many shade tree mechanics are awful and destructive and that many commercial products are lemons. The predictable and repeatable result is what happens when the people involved in the repair or design of a product are trapped in the belief that they are “not like everyone else” and won’t make the foolish mistakes that have trapped humans into making bad decisions, dangerous or undependable products, and following that with cover-ups that just make it all worse. Face it, you will fuck up and when you do the best thing you can do is admit it and move on to fixing the mess you made. The longer you take to do that, the worse the mess will be. History is littered with ruined reputations, notorious products that have disappointed or maimed or killed consumers, high flying companies that went down in flames, and governments and nations that took major wrong turns and kept going in the wrong direction until they became examples of how not to govern and notes in history books.

Lots of us have people in our lives who are not really in our lives today because those people joined the Trump Cult and can’t and won’t get out. Many of those people are still so cultified that they believe Trump not only won an election that he lost, for the 2nd time,by millions of votes, but they even wish his lame, failed attempt to destroy the already weak link to democracy our ancient and obsolete republic constitution cobbled together had succeeded. Chaos, in their cult-minds, is better than giving up on the weird dream that Trump is “the fearless leader” he clearly is not. The problem isn’t that they are stupid, although they clearly aren’t as smart as they imagine. The problem is that they have lived lives where it has been easy to avoid admitting they were wrong often enough to be good at it.

In his Atlantic Magazine article, What Are Trump Supporters So Afraid Of? - The Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes, “We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.” The wronger these people become, our once-friends and neighbors and family, the more entrenched they become in their delusion and avoidance. Nichols makes a terrific statement about how to know when you are really wrong in his article, too: “No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view. The snarling threat of violence never comes from people who calmly believe they are in the right. It is always the instant resort of the bully who feels the hot flush of shame rising in the cheeks and the cold rock of fear dropping in the pit of the stomach.”

That links to something I have witnessed and believed about most people who profess to be “Christians” for the last 60-some years. When my mother died at 34, when I was 9, I began questioning the “God’s wisdom and mysterious ways” bullshit. The more questions I asked, the more violent the responses became. My father, who was a relatively peaceful man, did what Christians did for several centuries to Native Americans, he tried to beat the doubt out of me. Or, as Captain Richard Henry Pratt's said in a 1892 speech to the National Conference of Charities and Correction: ‘Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.’" We used the same “logic” in our terrorist approach to Vietnam and 30 years later in Iraq. “If you don’t admit that we’re right, we’ll bomb you into the stone age.” When that approach is the only option, you can always assume whoever is making the argument is not only wrong, but they know they are wrong and can’t admit it.

Christians have never dealt well with doubters. Many Christians are so insecure in their slight grip on any part of the New Testament that they have hung, burned at the stake, drowned, starved, torn apart limb-from-limb, castrated, tortured, and banished doubters for at least 2,000 years. Of course the Old Testament pretty much gives “Christians” a clear path to any mutant, deviant, perverted violence that is at hand. The problem is, there weren’t any Christians before Christ, which points out a flaw that will regularly inspire a violent response. Even as a 10-year-old kid, it was obvious to me that “No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view.” And so, I adopted a life-long perspective that no one actually believes this shit and their violent reactions to doubt proves it. That goes for Mormons, Muslims, Myanmar’s violent Buddhists, and every other cult that uses violence to silence doubt.

Which brings us all back to where we started. If the problem is that humans are often incapable of admitting they are wrong, often until they are forced over some kind of cliff of no return, what are we in store for in the (hopefully) aftermath of the Trump disaster? While many in the impatient and often childish Left are chanting “lock him up” and living in the delusion that a quick trial and conviction of the head fascist-of-the-moment will put an end to the latest awful period of American (USofA) history, the slow, tedious, detailed, and legal path the Senate’s January 6th committee is taking the right path: detailing the activities of the people involved in the attempt to overthrow our elected government and send the United States of America into a spiraling decent into lawlessness, chaos, and very likely dissolution. In other words, exactly the path Putin and his Russian “friends” have been planning for the United States since the 1950s. Giving those stubborn, intuitive (as opposed to intellectual and reflective) folks the time to stare into mirrors until they slowly build some kind of new story that clears them of responsibility for what they have done and what they want to do is the only path that has a chance in hell of working.

Woe Is Rural America (and it’s well-deserved)

“Greater Minnesota” is just a politically correct phrase for “rural Minnesota,” which is everywhere in the state except Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester, and . . . that’s about it. Duluth is a wannabe city, but that northern industrial area is just a black hole for development tax dollars with little-to-no possible return. St. Cloud is even less likely to stage any sort of economic comeback. Rural everywhere has suffered a brain and skills drain since the turn of the last century. “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm” was a popular song in 1919 and popular music has never been great at spotting trends early. Back in the 60s, Larry McMurtry explained what had happened to rural Texas with “The kids who stayed in the country tended to be dull, lazy, cautious, or all three; those with brains, zip, and daring were soon off to Dallas or Houston.”

Red Wing and Goodhue County, for example, has suffered a steadily declining population since 2000 and regular property tax increases that make the area less and less attractive to anyone with the math skills to know what will happen to residential property taxes when Xcel closes the nuclear plans in the next decade. $15/hour or about $30,000/year is not a living wage in a town where even a serious fixer-upper costs more than $150,000. Area property values have increased by 37% in the last decade and wages by less than 3%. The city’s “average commute time” is 19.8 minutes, which means a substantial number of the area’s workforce is working a good distance from the city (mostly in the Twin Cities). Almost 14% of the city’s residents live in poverty, with women between 55 and 64 the largest demographic in that group. One quarter of the people employed in the area are over-65. The average resident’s age is 42.7 years, 6 years older than Minnesota’s average, and 41% of the City’s residents are past retirement age.

So, filling those local jobs means competing with employers from outside of the area with wages, benefits, decent management, and advancement opportunities. And that is for a rural city only 50 miles from the serious competition. Cities and businesses further from the state’s economic hub have to be shedding young talent like my sheepdog loses her winter undercoat when spring hits. Red Wing is pretending/attempting to shift to a more tourist-friendly destination, but noise and air pollution and a lack of recreational resources (other than the river) and a serious lack of city development talent has turned that effort into pointless and ineffective construction and economic flailing and rapidly growing property taxes. A short look at the rural area’s economic and demographic situation would make any reasonable person suspect it is not sustainable. The city has at least a half-dozen massive development failures in its recent history, a downtown that is being rapidly abandoned by businesses and customers, an excess of empty commercial buildings and, even, more than a few empty housing units, a decent infrastructure but large and expensive municipal and county services, and an aging population that is less able to finance the “if you build it they will come” city government’s delusional attitude.

An unrealistic attitude is a rural problem, too. Much of rural American believes it is full of strong, independent individuals who are more able to take care of themselves than “city folks.” That couldn’t be much further from the truth. Rural areas and states receive an outsized investment relative to their contributions to the GNP and tax base. Rural areas need cities, but cities are steadily less dependent on the goods and services produced by rural areas; to the point that this has become a loud “taxation without representation” issue for cities that have had their education systems, infrastructure, and services scavenged for the benefit of declining rural areas. Rural areas, mostly, imagine themselves to be indispensable and their anger and outrage in the face of facts drives them to the Fox and Republican propaganda machines, which isolates them even more.

There is a lot of data supporting the argument that the keys to economic success are tightly linked to diversity, inclusion, and openness. It is incredibly rare to find any small town that exemplifies any of those attributes. 50 years ago, Mr. McMurtry also had a pretty strong and accurate opinion of the kind of people who live in outstate “cities” and rural areas, “Lubbock, Amarillo, and Wichita Falls are the three principal cities of the Texas plain—cities that I find uniformly graceless and unattractive. In summer they are dry and hot, in winter cold, dusty, and windswept; the population is rigidly conformist on the surface and seethes underneath with imperfectly suppressed malice." The vaccine paranoia, anger and resentment, and self-destructive “rebellion” against science is a great example of that “imperfectly suppressed malice.” And an obvious result is the mass exodus from those areas by healthcare professionals. “Toxic individualism” is the media’s phrase for people who grossly over-estimate their own intelligence, knowledge and capabilities, and distrust anyone smarter than themselves; which is often practically everyone outside of their narrow and sheltered society. Attracting talented young people, or retaining them, into that environment is an impossible task.

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.

The United States Is A Ponzi Scheme

Ponzi Scheme: a usually-illegal operation in which participants pay to join and profit mainly from payments made by subsequent participants. 

Humans have evolved to believe in one fallacy over all of the others: “If it seems too good to be true, it must be the truest thing of all.” As a species, once we humans have achieved some level of comfort we appear to become convinced that we have done something to deserve that comfort for the rest of our lives. That’s not just a problem in the USA, but everywhere there are people with “1st world problems.” Here in the USA we have taken that quality to extremes. 

Republicans harp at “entitlements” without bothering to look up the word to see what it actually means. They, of course, object to the working class entitlements like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, welfare, and anything that isn’t an immediate transfer of funds into the paws of our 1% and, even, the Russian 1%. They do not object to the corporate welfare and idle rich entitlements. Obviously, if you are rich you deserve to be so. God said so; Jesus, not so much. I, however, object to all entitlements that are unfunded. 

Take Social Security, for example. Washington D.C.’s Urban Institute, a non-partisan research institute found that “a two-earner couple receiving an average wage — $44,600 per spouse in 2012 dollars — and turning 65 in 2010 would have paid $722,000 into Social Security and Medicare and can be expected to take out $966,000 in benefits. So, this couple will be paid about one-third more in benefits than they paid in taxes.” That’s not an “unrealistic return on investment” over a half-century of work and interest accruement. 

My parents’ generation, the so-called “Greatest Generation,” really kicked Social Security in the teeth by voting themselves solvent after a lifetime of insane military spending and general economic foolishness. The Urban Institute found, “If a similar couple had retired in 1980, they would have gotten back almost three times what they put in. And if they had retired in 1960, they would have gotten back more than eight times what they paid in. The bigger discrepancies common decades ago can be traced in part to the fact that some of these individuals’ working lives came before Social Security taxes were collected beginning in 1937.” The reason we’re expecting Social Security to become insolvent any minute now is because the Greatest and Silent Generations paid themselves overtime salaries on part-time work. Of course, the other reason is that Republican Presidents since Nixon have raided the so-called Social Security “lock box” for every military boondoggle imaginable and if they couldn’t outright steal that money, they simply spent money that didn’t exist and attached the bills to the Social Security IOUs. Trump is doing that with his wall boondoggle. Best case, “Come 2034, so say the system’s trustees in their 2015 report, the trust fund will be exhausted and, absent a law change, they will be able to disburse only 75% of promised benefits.” Worst case, the whole US economic house of cards will collapse on itself and Social Security insolvency will be the least of our concerns. It has happened, often, in the country’s speckled history and is more likely to happen again than not. 

The two biggest money-sinks outside of actual earned, useful, and necessary “entitlements” are our grossly racist and unjust prison system and the military. People are making money out of the slave labor harvested in the prison system, but those people aren’t “the people.” The more than 2 million people in US prisons are generating a profit, but not for the public or government forced to live with the world’s most incarcerated public on the planet. The corporations harvesting slave labor, charging exorbitant prices for “services,” and providing labor to the for-profit and government administered prisons are one of the largest lobbies in a nation of monster lobbies. Just the prison phone services make $1.2 billion per year and they doing such a terrible job that PharmaBro Martin Shkreli is still running his old drug company from prison and Tweeting as if he were an actual human being not doing time for felonies far worse than many people doing far more time than this “white collar criminal.” The collection of corporate-welfare queens in the prison system run from commissary companies racking up $1.6 billion to the $3 billion for-profit bail system to the privately-held for-profit prisons that are not adequately monitored and whose income isn’t even known because they don’t have to disclose that information to the people, taxpayers, who are paying the tab. 

The War on Drugs is another corporate-welfare entitlement that involves local, state, and federal “law enforcement,” the for-profit prison system, a collection of para-military sub-contractors, drug enforcement equipment and weapons providers, and a variety of con artists who make buckets of money convincing the public that prohibition will actually work “this time.” As long as there are billions of dollars to be made selling illegal drugs, someone is going to be getting that money. The solution is to cut the legs out from under that profit motive by legalizing drugs, emphasizing education and providing safe and economical use for the small percentage of addicted users, and whatever is left to be described as “illegal” penalize at the source. 

Finally, the biggest cause of the nation’s insolvency is the vast and uncontrolled war spending. Like the drug business, war materials are a source of easy money with practically no quality requirements or practical purpose. The military-industrial complex has had exactly the kind of ride as the dope peddlers: low cost and outrageous profit margins. Worse, the Pentagon has no interest in making the slightest effort at controlling costs or making sure the public gets something for its money. The country has flushed somewhere between $5T and $15T down the post-9/11 war rabbit hole. The Pentagon, through incompetence, corruption, and laziness “misplaced” more than a few trillion dollars (total amount unknown); somewhere between $3 and $9T. Our current national debt is about $22T and the country hasn’t made a serious attempt at repaying any of that debt since Nixon started cutting taxes in 1971, but we really kicked the debt into overtime during Reagan’s fiscally irresponsible regime. Reagan paid lip service to shoring up the Social Security fund with his 1983 “reform act” (never believe any Republican tax modification is a “reform”), but he followed that up with massive deficit spending and liberal use of federal funds for a variety of money-wasting military projects. 

Obviously, the insane pensions paid out to military lifers—especially the officer classes—are just more of the same sorts of boondoggles taxpayers should not be tolerating. A grade-10 general makes $19,762.50 per month and will receive as much as 100% of that salary after 40 years of “service.” Considering the miserable job the military has done both protecting the country and being responsible with taxpayers’ money, I think they ought to be indentured servants after a few decades of leeching off of the public tit. When we say “thank you for your service” to these characters, we should be rubbing our sore assholes and walking bow-legged at the same time. Likewise, the variety of “injuries” ex-military people use to justify disability claims is amazing. Having taught at a college that actively recruited veterans with “disability college funding,” I’ve seen some pretty comical characters burning taxpayer money while avoiding working for a living. Worse, I’ve heard some of the strangest claims from veterans of my generation and, based on that, I can only hope Trump does succeed in privatizing the VA so that it can quickly bankrupt and be abolished. 

If we—meaning my generation the “Boomers”—don’t help solve these problems, our kids will solve them at our expense. Between the X-Gens and the Millennials, we are finally outvoted, demographically if not practically. In 2019, Millennials will outnumber Boomers. They could elect representatives whose only platform is balancing the budget by any means possible, including putting Social Security on pause until it is solvent. I cannot think of a good argument against that, in fact. My generation has been financially irresponsible . . . forever, since early adulthood. Today, half of the country’s bankruptcies are over-50. “Seniors are going into retirement still carrying debt, including mortgages, credit card debt and student loan debt. They are depleting their savings and retirement accounts just to make ends meet.” 

One of my many complaints about news reporting leading up to the Great Recession was all of babble about “more people than ever own homes,” when what they should have said was “more people than ever are in debt for home purchases”; two distinctly different things. Almost everyone I know in my generation has some to a lot of house debt and one of the most basic rules I know of is “you can’t retire until you own your own home.” “Own” your own home, not live in a property that is owned by a bank. If you not only don’t own your home, but you don’t own your car, recreational vehicles and/or boats, haven’t paid off your credit cards or, even, college debt, you not only are not ready to retire you have also demonstrated an inability to manage money like an adult. Our kids should take that information for what it is and stop listening to Boomers as if they were full-developed, educated adults. As the third generation of Ponzi Scheme suckers Boomers are not totally to blame for the economic mess the country is in, but we are likely to be the ones to take the fall for it. Based on the evidence, we won’t deserve much sympathy.

How Do You Resolve This?

Almost all of my life, Republican presidents have made incredible messes that they left for Democrats to clean up. The worst were Nixon, Reagan, Bush I & II, and, now, Trump. Nixon took a failing war and doubled-down on it along with making the USA a debtor nation for the first time in the country’s history. Nixon left the country divided, distrustful, more racist and more unjust than it was before he took office, and broke. Reagan was a knee-jerk reaction to a dose of reality President Carter administered to the nation and he set the country back at least two generations on so many levels it would take a book (The book I recommend is The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America by William Kleinknecht.) to detail all of his betrayals, corruption, and incompetence. Reagan tossed so many trillions into the military-industrial toilet that he made the national debt an international affair in 1983. Bush I just continued the stupid policies of his predecessor, including the amazing cast of nitwits who surrounded Reagan. There was a reason Clinton’s “it’s about the economy, stupid” resonated so soundly. Unfortunately, stupid has been breeding like rats since 1992 and they can’t even spell “economy” let alone comprehend any aspect of economics.

The only saving grace regarding that trio of idiots and traitors was that my generation was not responsible for their existence and power. Bush II changed all of that. He was the worst of my generation. Every step of his life was a train wreak: personally, ethically, and intellectually. He brought Reagan’s pack of vicious idiots back to Washington, bumbled the Katrina response, fumbled the country into two endless, multi-trillion dollar wars, and deregulated the banksters until they crashed the world’s economy. Now Trump, another of the worst from my generation, is dragging the country closer to fascism every day. He has made the country a laughing stock, which could be a good thing, and alerted our allies to how divided, incompetent, and alienated the American public has become. Trump is a waving flag telling the world, “Americans are fools, we are arrogant and incompetent, we are self-absorbed, and we are unstable and dangerous.”

In 2016, I ran for local political office; for city council. There were several excellent people running for those offices (and a couple of not-so-excellent faux-conservative wannabes), including two young Red Wing citizens with big ideas about how to move Red Wing into the 21st Century. At the national level, the election seemed surreal, with neither candidate attracting much positive attention. Our US Representative race was between a nitwit hate radio Republican, Jason Lewis, and a Democrat, a woman, who had a long history of public service and competence. While Minnesota voted for Clinton, the outstate idiots in the state went Republican for practically every office. My country and hometown voted for Trump and Jason Lewis. To that point, I had no idea where I had moved, or who my neighbors were.

I lost my election, but because I spent the last two months of the campaign being far more involved in my wife’s cancer treatment than the election results I had almost no emotional connection to that “loss.” As the years have moved us further into Trump’s world of fools and traitors, I am even less attached to or interested in what happens in Red Wing and Goodhue County or even Minnesota. That is not natural for me. I have been politically active and interested since the 1960’s. Some part of me still wants to care, if just out of habit, but I mostly don’t. For the 18 years we lived in Little Canada, Ramsey County, Minnesota were considered our house and home to be the same entity. In fact, my wife and I are very fond of our house, but we’re ambiguous about our Red Wing, Goodhue County, Minnesota home. We are constantly considering flipping the place and heading west toward civilization; if we could identify an actual civilization in this declining empire.

One of my fellow failed 2016 candidates packed up his family, his businesses, and himself and left town a year after the election. He might not publically admit that the reason he left was that he felt his Red Wing neighbors were dangerously ignorant and vicious people, but that is essentially what he admitted to me. If I were in his position, I would do the same thing. If I had young children, I would not want them anywhere near neo-Nazi Trump voters. Our old home country and city overwhelmingly voted for Democrat candidates, including Clinton. We felt like we had jumped away from the table and into the stove. The majority of our old neighbors saw through Trump and Lewis as easily as though those two con artists were fine crystal. Our new neighbors fell for the con and carefully took aim and shot off their own feet and the feet of their children.

A candidate is supposed to represent all of the people in his district and the country. Republicans don’t believe this and, like Jason Lewis, they only speak to and for “their kind,” but Democrats and any elected official of good conscience have always given voice to the concept of trying to work for everyone; even if they failed or were disingenuous. To this point in my life, that would have been my intention also, but no more. Now, after Trump and Lewis, I am clinging to the barest capacity to care what happens to Trump voters. Because of that, I don’t have the slightest inclination to submit myself to either a political campaign or the misery of weekly city council meetings if I were to “win” an election in this community. This is the time in my life where I could apply what’s left of my energy and talents to working for my country and community. I just wish I had one of those that I believed in enough to make that effort seem worthwhile.

Free At Last

Listening to comedian Rory Scovel on the January 20th Live from Here show, I realized that he’s right: the freakin’ world is gonna end with Trump in charge . . . and that is, weirdly, a good thing. During the show, John Prine even did a song with a lyric that emphasized that thought. They’re both right, we’re free, we’re finally free. Nothing matters any more. Everyone is going to die at pretty much the same time.

The religious right made it clear to anyone who knows anything about traditional Christian theology that the only remaining Christian “value” is the Supreme Court interpretation of the first amendment that exempts “churches” from corporate or personal income tax. That’s it, for them. End of moral discussion. Nothing else matters. Yeah, they babble about “right to life” in their 13th century hustle to get women back into the kitchen and delivery rooms, but that yak has been going on since the first European immigrant wet-backed into “New England.” The right to an abortion is one of the first marketing ploys the "New World” promoters used to con women into risking the wilderness. Face it, Republicans don’t care about any lives but their own and the Koch brothers’.

For decades those two groups, Republicans and faux-Christian evangelicals, have held the high ground in the cultural war’s labeling and marketing game; with phrases like “family values,” “Christian values,” “American (‘merican) Values,” “traditional values,” and so on. Now, thanks to Donald John Trump, those days are long over for several reasons. The first would be that the evangelicals and the uneducated and the self-appointed moral guardians of “conservative values” elected Donald John Trump; a vulgar, hedonistic adulterer, a sexual and economic predator, self-aggrandizing narcissist, a child-molesting, serial bankruptcy con artist, and all around near-perfect anti-Christ. If they can vote for him, nothing they’ve ever said about morality has meant squat.

Guys like me, who used to think it was polite to save “special” words for the garage and basement, have been cut loose. George Carlin would be amazed. All seven of his “words you can’t say on television” are now on television almost every night. Just from the language Donny John has let loose on the public, all bets are off. “Fucking,” “motherfucking,” “fuck,” “shit,” “shithole,” “shithouse,” “pussy,” “son of a bitch,” “bullshit,” and pretty much any other collection of words that used to be considered obscene and unfit for public use are now spouting from the President’s tiny pursed mouth. Boorish and bigoted behavior is now the model we’re showing to the world from the White House, But if you think Trump’s language is mean and obscene, you ought to hear what his minions are saying.

The only words Donald John Trump seems to think we all need to avoid are “vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based, and science-based.” Who knew what “obscenity would be in 2018? George Orwell would be writing a whole new 1984 if he’d lived to see Trump’s America.

But the real gate-buster is the fact that, not only are we all likely to die while Donny John is President, but that we are all going to die at very nearly the exact same time! Think about how liberating that knowledge is. One of the disgusting values most liberals hold dear is “What kind of world are we leaving for our children and grand-children?” Republicans, pseudo-conservatives, and fundamentalists of all stripes and denominations never worry about the future: they either don’t care or they and their death cults sincerely hope that we’ll all die soon. Well, we’re leaving those kids absolutely nothing, which means we don’t have to worry about their struggle and suffering from the mess we’re going to leave them. We won’t be there to slut-shame and they won’t be there to do the slut-shaming. We’ll all be dead!

Isn’t that awesome? Seriously.

I’m not kidding.

We’ll all be dead, every one of us within a few seconds of every other: barely time for the last ones left on the planet to say, “Oh, shit!” And we’ll all be dead and gone and, afterwards, there might not be much left of the whole planet’s ability to support life.  At the literal least, when Donny John is done, it will be at least 100-200 million years before the alligators, crocodiles, rats, cockroaches, bottom-of-the-ocean amphipods and echinoderms and foraminiferans, and/or houseflies evolve into something capable of being pissed off at us for blowing up the world. 

How is that not liberating?

We might as well legalize practically everything that isn’t directly and intentionally murderous: only because we don’t want to short anyone out of their 1-3 years max life-expectancy. Drugs, all of them, all of the recreational ones, anyway, get legalized. Screw waiting for lazy, incompetent Republican congresscritters to get around to shutting the door on the DEA. This is a states’ rights issue. Just legalize anything that can get us high and make federal law enforcement stay in Washington, D.C. (where weed is already legal). We’re good with the totally bonkers right-to-lifers; everyone dumb enough to get pregnant gets to be a mom just in time for both mom and the kid(s) to be blown to bits! What’s the worst thing that can happen to new moms? 1-2 years max and your troubles are over. Of course, drug manufacturers get to sell their latest male and female sterilization and birth control drugs without any sort of FDA approval process. Over-the-counter, for crap’s sake. Who wants to be pregnant or a new dad if the odds are lousy that the kid will even live long enough to be born?

Nothing you can say, nothing you can do (excepting the murderous boundary), no words are obscene, no sexual behavior, and no financial crime matters. Because we’re all going to be dead in the same moment. And it’s going to be soon!

Obviously, if someone doesn’t want to wait for Trump to poke his “really big red button” with his tiny little fingers, they should have all the resources necessary to take an early exit. Pfizer and the companies that make sodium thiopental should get to be as rich as they can be in the 1-3 years they have to sell death-row drugs to the general public. When someone does manage to off themselves, relatively painlessly, we’ll be done with dreary, teary funeral ceremonies. We should celebrate that kind of skill and research. Most likely, we’re all going to fry in a blast of several-thousand degree evaporated atmosphere and radiation. Who knows? Trump’s apocalypse might be incredibly painful and the successful suicide will seem like the smart choice. We should all be jealous, rather than selfishly-sad. Every death will be cause for one of those drunken Irish wakes where at least another half-dozen mourners get killed on the way home from the party. Life will be like non-stop frat parties, which we’d think was irresponsible and shortsighted if we thought there was going to be any sort of future to worry about.

So, I say it’s time to celebrate the Age of Trump. We’re all going to be guilt-free and that’s no easy thing these days. In fact, if Trump doesn’t kill us all, the smart move will be to follow Trump with President Rock or Nugent. On their first day in office, either one of those two drunken nitwits would stumble into the Oval Office and fall on Trump’s “big red button.” Otherwise, our kids and grand-kids are really going to hate us for the mess we’ve left them and we’ll probably live long enough to hear about it.

When Nothing Means Anything

It struck me, last night about 3AM, that the Age of Trump has proved something many of us hoped wasn’t true: that nothing means anything. Religion, decency, justice, honesty, fairness, truth, reason, and many of the institutions and people who represent those institutions have all been shown to be hollow and insignificant, thanks to the election and support of Donald Trump. There are all kinds of ways to take this sea change: ranging from fighting to restore America’s values to assuming that is a lost cause and going full nihilist. At 70, the fight is pretty much out of me, but I have to hope younger, better people decide there is some point in restoring moral values to our government and country. Otherwise, the American experiment is finished and it was a failure. Best case, the country collapses into disarray and becomes irrelevant. Worst case, we destroy life on this planet in an effort to prove one of the many insane religious scenarios that pollute our national discourse.

Trump’s assault on decency began the moment he entered public life, back in the 70’s. The Republican campaign against all of the values that Trump’s existence opposes has been going on a lot longer than my 70 years. Since the moment Teddy Roosevelt left office, Republicans have been scraping the bottom of the ruling class barrel for candidates and talking heads to lead their class war against working people and the poor. Starting with Taft and accelerating that movement with Reagan, Republicans have lowered the bar for what passes as “leadership” to the point where we now suffer Donald Trump. Personally, I don’t see much improvement in our future, but I tend to see the glass as half or completely full of sewage.

Religion, in America, has taken a radical turn to the right, which is not only traditional for religion (redundant, I know) but reason to doubt the sanity of anyone who still calls themselves a “Christian.” The difference between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity is the carpenter-turn-minister character: Jesus. Without Jesus, fundamental Christians are just Jews who hate Jews; unless the Jews are at war with the Muslims. Without Jesus, there is no charity, no humility, no generosity, and plenty of tolerance for hate, war, greed, and prejudice. Without the moderating words attributed to Jesus, Christians are unbounded by any rules other than to pretend to believe in their gods. A rational look at the lifestyles of the evangelicals and televangelists would convince any sentient person that the purpose of religion is to make a very small number of hyper-corrupt people very, very rich. Those people, not surprisingly, are totally behind Donald Trump and his obscene administration. The only interest they have in government is protecting their tax-exemption and Donald has no intention of betraying their trust; unless they actually begin to act like Christians. Not likely, though. Is it?

The country’s frayed and decaying justice system is taking a beating these days, too. Trump is praising cops who violate laws and act like the Gestapo he desperately needs to “reform” this country into the fascist model he imagines will make him fearless leader. Trump and the Republican congress are appointing judges who will set back civil rights, election integrity, and Sessions is reversing every half-progressive order Obama’s Justice Department issued.

There should be some kind of freedom in knowing that nothing matters. It doesn’t feel free, though. It feels lawless, dangerous, and unpredictable.

Out of Patience

[Interestingly, after 25 years of telling essentially the same story, some wingnut snowflake "flagged" this rant as violating some Blogger nebulous "community standard."  I'm supposed to magically know what offended the fascist snowflake, but I am clueless. I this this might be the motivation I need to move my last blog from Google to Wordpress.]

When I was a kid, in the 50’s, Eisenhower was President and Nixon was Vice-President (heavy on the “vice”). For a brief moment, John Kennedy was elected president in 1960, when I was twelve and assassinated when I was fifteen. A marginal Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, followed that until he was chased from office (by actual Democrats) over his expansion of the Vietnam War. Nixon and his band of merry assholes and war criminals followed. After six and a half years and even more expansion of the war, Republicans stuck the country with Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller after Nixon and his VP, Spiro Agnew, were chased from office for corruption and various crimes against the nation. Ford was the 1974 version of Paul Ryan, with about the same lack of patriotism, with the same collection of corrupt corporate and 1% owners, and the same disdain for justice and honor that has been typical of Republicans for my whole lifetime.

For an incredibly brief 4 years, a competent businessman, experienced engineer, a reasonable politician, and decent person, Jimmy Carter, was president. Carter made the politically fatal mistake of attempting to explain the situation Americans had placed themselves in with those years of  expansionist war, Republican, and near-Republican misnamangement (Remember the “malaise speech?”). Reminiscent of the more recent words of Bernie Sanders, Carter told us, "In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns." He called American lack of faith in the country’s future, “a crisis of confidence.” The truth may set you free, but in Carter’s case it cost him the 1980 election to a Republican con man and a collection of right wing crooks and traitors who haven’t yet left the stage. Carter was right, though, the post-Reagan USA became one “defined by . . . what one owns.”

So, with our heads in the sand or up our asses we elected Ronald Reagan, followed by George Bush Sr., and the country drove itself off a cliff of international debt and some kind of weird celebration of anti-intellectualism and greed that resulted in a habitual deficit spending and a vicious love of imperialism and militarism. Twelve years of regressive, corrupt, and incompetent Hollywood executive and mediocracy—inspired congressional idiocy followed. Somehow, brainless and lazy Americans decided to convey political sainthood on Reagan instead of admitting that they’d been conned and the country had been robbed by the B-movie actor and failed California politician.

Bill Clinton could have been a Democrat, but he chose to be an “Eisenhower Republican” and he only moderated the government’s incompetence during his eight years in office. Even Republicans don’t like Republicans pretending to be Democrats and the last four years of Clinton’s administration was taken up with “did he or didn’t he” bullshit about Clinton’s blowjobs. Republicans tried to conjure up real impeachable crimes, but being Republicans their success was limited by their lack of competence and their own massive corruption issues. Clinton might have been an easy target if Republicans still had an intellectual base, but by 1992 every intelligent Republican had left the building and their space was filled by the uneducated, racist, tools of the Koch brothers we suffer today.

Then eight years of G.W. Bush and a bunch of Reagan and Nixon cronies finally led us to the Great Recession. Obviously, the Party of Borrow and Spend borrowed and spent to the tune of increasing the deficit every year while the 1%, the conservative media talking heads, and the Marching Morons pretended that was a rational alternative to Democratic “tax and spend” policies that at least attempt to pay for their policies. 2008 through 2010 were budget years where the federal government attempted to spend its way out of what looked like the Second Great Depression. I guess it sort of worked, but prosecuting the financial criminals, recovering their booty to repay the trillions they cost the country and world, and taxing the 1% would have worked far better. Barak Obama was more of a Democrat than the Clintons, but not enough more to convince the Marching Morons that democracy is better than idiocy or mediocrity.

Trump, of course, will be the worst of Reagan and the Bush’s combined. He had no skill as a “businessman” and his mental instability has led to a collection of right wing idiots in the executive branch who are guaranteed to make life miserable for working people. The best we can hope for now is that Republicans and the inbred 1% will be stupid enough to crash the country and the resulting chaos will break up the oversized and overarmed US military and not cause the insane religious right, who now dominate US politics, to fire off their own perverted version of Armageddon. Today, the world’s most pressing problem is surviving the end of the empire known as the United States of America.

So, I went through the Vietnam War years, watching my friends die, be mentally or physically disabled, and being alienated from my family and community because I wouldn’t “get onboard” with an immoral war. Again, I was on the opposite side of the majority during Reagan and Bush I’s reign of world terror and imperialism and again with Bush II. After spending most of my 69 years suffering with the incompetence of Republicans and the stupidity of Republican voters, I’m tired of it. I have no more energy or motivation to put up with 4 or 8 years of a pack of Trump morons than I have with chemotherapy and a long “fight” with cancer. In fact, the moral character of my country feels disgustingly like a cancer infection/infestation.

Un-Fixable

The angry white voters who claimed Democrats and liberals have abandoned them are probably right. The only thing that could save the jobs these people imagine they are entitled to have would be education and education is the one bit of reality that poor, pseudo-conservative white people resent the most. Back in 2008 Barak Obama made his infamous statement about the disenfranchised white voters, "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." He wasn’t wrong and he is just as right today, except that you’ll have to add meth and oxy to the things they are clinging to. Those three hallmarks of the unemployable are still going strong and Donald Trump is reaping the rewards of stoking those brain-dead fires.

The real problem liberals and progressives have yet to face is that the core problems of the welfare states are un-fixable. Here are some facts that prove my point, “32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.” Those statistics have not changed, for the better, in a decade and we can count on them getting much worse over the next four to eight years. Over the last ten years, at least 25% of the US population did not read a book in part or whole in the previous year. Trump and Republicans may “love the uneducated,” but society and our democracy can not afford them. The purpose in creating a public education system was to prevent idiotic catastrophes like Donald Trump and the “modern” Republican Party from destroying the nation.

And that’s where the problem lies today. Substantial portions of the nation are never going to change, except for the worse. Places like most of the Southeast and Midwest have chased out the smart kids and encouraged the dumb ones to stay and reproduce and, culturally, the places and people have become intolerant, uneducated, unemployable, and proud of all of those “qualities.” When I was young, alcohol was the primary self-medication drug of choice for the losers who couldn’t escape. Today, there are far more effective drugs for that purpose. I came from one of those parts of the country and, like most of my high school graduating class who went on to obtain an education and some sort of career, I got the “hell out of Dodge” as soon as possible and stayed away. There is nothing that would ever induce me to move back to Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, or any of the states similar or worse than where I came from. Minnesota is as red a state as I can tolerate and away from the Twin Cities it’s a good bit redder (and dumber) than I like.

And I’m not alone. Reams of newspaper and books have been written about the exodus of talent and creativity from “the heartland.” Lots of people have wrung their hands over the fact that those desperate and depressed Trump voters are stuck in an endless cycle of poverty, ignorance, and drug addiction. Unless some miracle of disease and death suddenly purges those places of their populations, it’s only going to get worse.

Growing up in western Kansas, a high school teacher’s son and surrounded by “educators,” I was consistently unimpressed by what passed for education in my 1950’s K-12 experience. I, immediately, enrolled in the local community college where that experience only got worse. After losing my college savings to a scam Texas for-profit “computer school,” I stumbled on to a downtown Dallas community college and discovered that there are actually people who have a talent for teaching who are attracted to institutions that are committed to education. After a few years of suffering the more familiar uninspired “higher education” in western Texas and Nebraska, I moved to southern California. I was lucky to be in California in the 1980’s, before Reagan’s Prop 13 damage began to wreak that state’s once-great education system and make it unavailable to working class people. Even more, I was lucky to be there while California was enjoying the only economic stability in the country so that I had the luxury of being the sole support of my family and going to school part-to-full time for 8 years. The point to take away for this essay is that out of 130 credit hours from three different California state institutions, I endured no more than 6 hours of mediocre classroom experience. California attracted high quality instructors and there was enough competition for positions and institutions that kept instruction quality at a level I’d never seen before or since.

The reverse is true for the red states. No one with skill, experience, or credentials wants to live in those depressed and depressing areas. The chances of attracting instructors of quality to the Southeast, the Midwest, or much of the Northeast are slim-to-none. Even if the nation were to apply Peace Corps tactics to enticing teachers to work in the depressed areas as a way to pay off college debt, the end result will be that those few quality teachers will identify the few quality students and encourage them to get out before their hometown destroys their life. Clearly, plenty of that is going on now in most of these places, based on the fact that small towns are losing population and skills and can’t find any way to attract new blood. The brain-drain exodus from those places might actually accelerate if outside education resources were applied.

While it’s not true that intelligent people are no longer having children, it’s true that damn few smart people are staying “on the farm” or in small towns when opportunity, tolerance, entertainment, security, and quality of life are available just a short plane ride away. The Trump disaster is just an indication of elections to come, as impoverished states cling to their political power through a rigged system designed to protect the rich from democracy. Now, that system is protecting the rich and the stupid from reality and democracy. Either the Electoral College has to die or the nation will die from the damage done to democracy by that idiotic institution.