Whenever the Subject of "When's It Gonna Change?..."

... comes up, even when I bring up the subject, myself, I come back to the history of fanaticism in this country (and don't you say we don't have any, `cause we damned sure do).

It was at the height of the Roaring Twenties, 1925, when everything was going great (or so we thought), that the Scopes Trial was in full bloom in that righteous state of Tennessee.

William Jennings Bryan, who knew better, or at least, should have, defended the right of the local population of Tennessee to remain utterly fucking ignorant, and to keep their children the same way, despite the fact that Tennessee wasn't exactly sharing in the wealth created by that stock market boom.

Same-same today. The simpletons in the red states keep voting in the right-wing crazies who then pass multitudinous laws benefitting the Wall Streeters, all the while promising to fix all those cultural ills they themselves used to whip up the True Believers with the eighth-grade educations to believe were the Great Evils of Our Modern Times.

It was, and is, politics by three-card Monte, and the rest of us in the educated part of the country have been hornswoggled into believing that we ought to respect the views of the dumb and dumber and leave well enough alone if they want to continue to elect flim-flam men who will then decide the future of the country on behalf of the fatcat rich and the overly comfortable, fleecing their flock, all the while promising they'll deliver the Promised Land to the faithfully ignorant and stupid.

This routine has persisted and prevailed for one reason, and one reason only: the less-educated Americans in this country are the most gullible people on the face of the earth. They will believe anything that even vaguely fits their prejudices and their hatreds. And I mean, anything.

There are two primary possibilities here to correct the problem. The first, which goes against every democratic principle in the country, is to simply take the government from the con men by whatever means necessary. That's unacceptable to all of us, even those who can see what's coming. The other alternative, by far the less attractive of the two, is to let things take their natural course. Unrestrained capitalism and war-enamored right-wingers bring the country to absolute dissolution, giving engraved invitations to the Four Horsemen--war, famine, pestilence and death--for Le Grande Corporateur Bouffe. Give away all the taxpayer resources of the country to corporations until they eat the entirety of the country from within and the social and economic fabric of the country dissolves, like so much chiffon in hydrochloric acid.

And, then, start over, in the same way the country did in 1933. That's the most difficult solution, but, it seems, the only one available. If democracy is to be preserved, that's the only option. Right now, the stupid think they are helping the country, where, in fact, they are hurting it and themselves. Nothing resembling common sense and rational dialogue is going to change their pea brains. They are going to have to suffer as they have never suffered in the past before they begin to grasp what they've done. I mean sell your sister to the devil for a slice of bread suffering. Turning your own mother out to do tricks to keep the electricity on for another week suffering. Sell your two-year-old to slave traders for a gallon of gas suffering.

In other words, soul-shattering self-interest may be the norm. When the pious and righteous have to sell their souls to stop the rumbling in their bellies, they'll get with the program, but not before then, and maybe not even then. They'll go on believing they're saving the country from the depths of perdition--and they'll go on voting for any sanctimonious shill that tells them they're blessed for believing his bullshit. They'll go on believing that the tv preachers are their modern-day saviors. Falwell, Robertson, Swaggart, Graham, Roberts, will continue to rake in the dough until there's no more dough to rake in because the television screens are blind because no one can afford the electricity to run them.

Stupid, willfully ignorant people will try to destroy this country, because someone they trust, for some ungodly, unexplainable reason, has told them to do the things which will destroy the country, because their egos are more important than their survival, because they so desperately want what they want, rather than be sensible.

The rest of us are along for the ride, and to be there to pick up the pieces after the stupid and willfully ignorant have eliminated themselves by their sheer inability to understand the nature of their own self-deception.

Or not. Maybe there's hope for the most helplessly fundamentalist and brain-dead of the society. Maybe they will, one day, understand the ways in which they have been deceived and will then help produce the society necessary for the survival of us all into the next century, will laugh at (and vote out) the politicians telling them that the survival of our society depends upon tax cuts for the rich, on Constitutional amendments preventing gay marriage or flag-burning, on making felons of and putting illegal immigrants in jail, will see through the militarism that spawns new wars against feeble opponents to no good end.


Nah. Not a chance. Stupid is as stupid does. Most of the right-wingers in this country would sell their children, female siblings and wives into white slavery before they'd admit they were wrong. And then they'd wonder what the fuck happened to their families.


The obligation of the smart and sensible is to survive the reign of the stupid and venal, for the benefit of us all. We are in the midst of the modern-day equivalent of the Dark Ages. With brain and heart and spirit, we will find our way to the Enlightenment, once again, and the stupid and thoughtless and irrational will be relegated to a corner of the political room where they belong, dunce caps firmly in place on their empty heads.

But, not before we all suffer for the fucking idiots' mistakes.