Tuesday’s handful of primary and special elections and their results have left me completely underwhelmed. The remainder of these ritualistic elections will continue through the summer across the country. They will prove to be completely useless and meaningless, except for political junkies and our 24/7 info-entertainment media.
Incumbents and Centrists were defeated by those farther to the left or right on the political spectrum or by those with limited Washington experience. Sex scandals continue to play a part as well. This charade continues as a direct reflection of the overall American electorate that is moving towards greater polarization and ignorance with each passing week.
Even what happens in November will not shift the sad trajectory of American political, economic and social history. Whether Republicans take back Congress, close the gap, or split with Democrats, perpetual stalemate and paralysis are the hallmarks of America today. Replacing Democrats with Republicans, no matter how far left or right, but still within the two major parties, is not unlike passengers rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It may look nice and feel better for a short time but these cosmetic personnel changes fail to address the overall trajectory of impending doom. The majority of Americans, along with our political, business and civic leaders are still in denial of reality. We are simply not prepared to make any meaningful changes or undertake any hard work and make sacrifices to alter the depressing trajectory of our country.
The second decade of the 21st Century might turn into the “who the hell cares” period in American and global history. It’s not that people have not gotten upset, thrown temper-tantrums, blown things up, marched, protested, and expressed in all types of anger, vitriol and outrage, and they continue to vent their frustrations and fears on all types of modern and old media and in all types of public and private forums. But after the dust quickly settles, everyone just goes home muttering that we really don’t give a f**k anymore because nothing ever really changes.
Since the 1970’s, the U.S. public and our leaders have endlessly complained about steadily falling standards, comparatively lower test results, and poor job preparedness of our public schools from Kindergarten through College. However, we have already brought up two generations of Americans within that perpetually crumbling system and we are working on producing a third who will possess the same overall abysmal educational attainment levels and ill preparation for life in the 21st Century. We’ve gotten to the point that we know that 10% of the kids will succeed no matter how bad the school is, about 20% of people will never make it through school or life, and the middle 70% will just muddle through.
Moreover, our economy is no longer able to produce enough jobs to employ everyone who finishes High School, Trade School, 4-year College, or even graduate studies – and once a person turns 50, they’re even more useless to the economy. Worst yet, there are hundreds of millions of poor yet well-educated, energized and young people around the globe who can perform the same manufacturing, service, and professional work as Americans but at less than 25% the cost to employers. Again, why bother fixing our broken educational system when the possibilities are so limited for its graduates? And we’re collectively all too dumb and lazy to create enough new possibilities to make a difference in our economy and society.
After three decades of conservatives dominating political and economic thought, America is a center-right nation. Bringing in a nominally liberal President and Congress two years ago amid the greatest economic collapse since the 1930’s, was not going to shift anything – yet alone make sufficiently positive changes in just 2 years. 53% of the electorate was temporarily just too scared to put in a grumpy old man who could die at any moment and be immediately followed by a completely ignorant, clueless and incompetent bimbo.
As we have progressively become dumber, we have naturally grown shorter attention spans – and all our new electronic gadgets and business marketing efforts merely feed our intrinsically shallow narcissism. We’ll probably elect this November more people who endlessly repeat the empty shibboleths of “lower taxes, cut government waste, less regulations, freedom, liberty” and “American exceptionalism.”
Very few in politics, business, academia, the right, the left or the middle can engage in any thoughtful discussion over any subject – even the topic of Miss USA can be politically polarized to complete stupidity – and the same holds true for immigration, healthcare, jobs, financial institutions, infrastructure, taxes, energy policy and the environment. President Obama, for all his intelligence and eloquence, is wholly incapable of communicating a new vision to the masses that might shift the paradigms of our bankrupt political, economic and social systems. He’s in office only because the alternative was really just too frightening – but not because Americans bought into the majority of his political and economic positions.
I have not posted for many weeks on TMV because the national discussion on so many topics has dropped to such base inanity, that I just don’t want to take part in this cacophony of stupidity. With the exception of TMV and a handful of other sites, most of our standard Media forums and Internet news and commentary sites have degenerated into worthless tabloids and one-sided rags. Life is just too short to waste time reading, writing or thinking about such pointless arguments. What’s even sadder is that the major issues facing our nation and globe back in 2000 are still the same being debated in 2010 – and they will all be the same in 2020.
Many Americans recoiled at the huge stimulus package of early 2009. They incorrectly thought that government should act as a household during bad economic times and simply cut back. Too many forget that is what we did in response to the 1929 crash and it took 10 years to dig us out of that deep hole of stupidity. Thanks to an overall lousy educational system, most Americans cannot tell good economic policy from bad – and it doesn’t help that the majority of our economic experts and Ivy League Elites can’t either.
A good Keynesian stimulus effort in bad economic times presupposes that government was not engaging in massive deficit spending during good economic times. An economy that has been based upon massive public and private debt financing for over 30 years needs more than a large spending increase to make a difference – and its effectiveness is also dependent upon where those new governmental spending efforts are directed. However, the period of 2006 through 2009 proved the utter failure of principally using a Monetarist approach to our economy by focusing only on controlling interest rates and money supply, and relying only upon tax cuts and related deregulatory policies to control and stimulate an economy. Trickle-down economic stimulus also was a fraud in that only hard work really trickled down but money and wealth flowed up even faster.
We collectively never bothered to realize that both liberal and conservative policies have been intellectually and factually exhausted and that we probably have to come up with a whole new way of arranging our public and private financial and political affairs. Again, the majority in the left, right and middle are simply too lazy and stupid to bother with the hard process of thinking up something new and worthwhile. Rather we just prefer to recycle discredited old ideas in the hope that mere hope will make them work. It does not help that those who politically control our government and economy have too much to lose if any changes are made in the status quo and that they cannot see beyond the next quarterly profit and loss report.
Great Empires do not fall because of outside forces. Rather they commit suicide from within. The U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of legal and illegal drugs. Even 90% of our paper money is laced with measurable traces of cocaine – the drug of choice for too many top traders and massive risk takers of our financial institutions during the past decade.
For those residents who do not participate in such drug activities directly, they’ll consume them indirectly because the unused stuff ends up in our nation’s water supply. Just as ancient Romans unwittingly poisoned their minds over many decades through lead poisoning from ubiquitous lead plumbing, Americans have been doing the same to their minds for the past 50 years. As the Roman Empire increasingly was unable to intellectually meet its internal and external challenges in any coherent fashion, it naturally collapsed. The U.S. is well on its way towards repeating history but with a new twist. History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.
I’m all for legalizing marijuana and other illegal drugs for the obviously simple economic and social reasons. Our war on drugs failed long ago but we’re still in denial. Unfortunately many law enforcement entities across the country are too financially hooked on Federal and State spending dedicated to this useless war. (The same holds true for our nation’s military industrial complex even after two failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) Prohibition of Alcohol in our Nation’s past didn’t work and encouraged the growth of all types of illegal businesses.
However, legalizing many more drugs will not bring about a new enlightenment among our citizens either but it may improve tax collection and redirect some wasteful government spending. It may help more people feel better, laugh and giggle more over almost anything, and generally make them care even less about things around them. It’s probably better to be stoned when a tornado hits your trailer than completely sober. The only intellectually provocative statements that may increase with legalization would be variations on “Like wow man, we need to go buy some more cookies.” At least the Elves and shareholders at Keebler Cookies would profit. More importantly, so many illegal and prescription drugs might not be flushed down into our water supplies because police and parental raids would cease. Then those who don’t partake in the Nation’s love affair with drugs could actually avoid ingesting them on a regular basis. That minority might not pick up the massive intellectual slack in the country, but they would at least have the choice.
It’s depressing to realize that within this decade, China will construct over 10,000 miles of new high speed rail lines and become the leading global manufacturer of solar panels and wind turbines while the U.S. cannot properly design or adequately fund to completion less than 100 miles of just one new rail line between Orlando and Tampa. Perhaps kicking everyone in the butt by cutting off all unemployment benefits might jolt our collective lazy mindset. Legalizing all those cheap drugs might make the rude awakening easier to take. Most Americans are not prepared to compete with each other or anyone else globally on anything more challenging than online poker.
Even our current domestic jihadists (all of whom have been citizens or immigrants with all their proper documentation) are getting too lazy and incompetent to make effective bombs. “I’m going to blow you up…sometime… when I get around to figuring how to do it… and after I take my anti-ADHD pills.” Those people who sneak across our borders to cook, clean, garden, pick crops, do hard construction work, and take care of our children and elderly are now set for deportation. The majority of America’s lazy loafers really get irritated when they are surrounded by people who work hard and are full of energy. “Why don’t you just sit around finishing another case of beer and think about doing something… tomorrow?”
Study after study indicates that the longer a family stays in the U.S., each successive generation falls to the same low attainment levels of the majority of Americans – a sort of collective and pervasive mediocrity that typifies American life. Want to cool off all the annoying energy, academic excellence and competitive spirit of all those Asians and others from developing countries? Then just look to the history of Asians in Hawaii. Their second generation kids are just as lazy, intellectually vapid and worthless contributors as any other proud Americans.
Reverse thinking might be the best answer to our growing lack of global competitiveness. Perhaps we should let all those foreigners across our borders – and all their competitive advantages will disappear completely within one generation. If everyone in the planet moved to the U.S., our population density per mile (kilometer) might only be that of England or the Netherlands which would really be tolerable. (There’s a ton of empty developable space in Arizona.) Free trade should not just be designed to benefit greedy businesses by controlling the one-way movements of goods, services and profits. It should also apply to people and encourage the pervasive human qualities of stupidity and laziness.
Marc Pascal – happily ranting from Phoenix, AZ. And if anyone asks to see them, I always carry my papers.