Titanic Post

Many of the ‘lefty blogs’ are gleefully predicting the eminent fall of The American Empire. (’Righty blogs,’ just as gleefully, point at moral decay.) The rise of corporatism, perpetual war, global warming, widespread corruption and degeneration of our most cherished institutions, the triumph of religion over reason*; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion with the state, and the introduction of torture as a means of gathering information, are just a few of the issues heralding a new Dark Age. I am using the Fall of the Roman Empire as a guide here.

However we shouldn’t despair, in three years, George, the boy emperor, who has done much for the Empire, will be out of a job. That is, if the Supreme Court doesn’t make it a lifetime position. Elections, which in the past was the only method the American people had to replace a ruler, can now be digitally manipulated to reach any outcome our Lords and Masters desire. So maybe it’s not a bad thing that Empires eventually fall under their own weight.

Jefferson prescribed regular revolutions to keep our nation healthy. Violent upheavals kept me healthy as a child when my mother gave me castor oil for an upset stomach. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the last verse of Selige Sehnsucht summarizes:

Und so lang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist du nur ein trueber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.

Ecstatic Longing roughly translated by me with apologies to Goethe:

As long as you don’t understand,
This: death and rebirth!
You are only a sorry guest
On this dark earth.

*The triumph of reason over religion wasn’t so great either.