Our Civilization Deserves to Fail

You don’t wish the worst for people or nations that you care about. You don’t want your friend who’s driving drunk to crash his car. You don’t want your cousin who has unprotected sex with a prostitute to get a STD. You don’t want your kid who’s pointing a realistic- looking toy gun at a police officer to get shot. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

It’s bad when someone you care about plays those stupid games because it can wreck his life and the lives of the people around him. It’s worse when your country is involved because it can hurt all those same people and their children, along with everyone else in the nation.

That’s exactly the situation we’re in here in our country because the truth we all hate to talk about is that America DESERVES to fail.

I don’t want that to happen. After all, this is the greatest country ever on God’s green earth. We have the most incredible military, the most powerful economy and we’ve done so much for the world. Without us, the bad guys would have won WWI, WWII and the Cold War. We’ve been the indispensable nation.

Today, Americans would rather sit out a war, no matter how important, rather than see our soldiers die as they did during WWI. We weren’t able to deal with less than 4,000 deaths in Iraq while we lost more than 13 times that number in WWI. Our industrial production was the decisive factor in the Allied Victory in WWII. Just to give you one example, when the war started, we had 3,000 planes and by the time it was over, we had produced 300,000. Could we do that again? No. Just no. Do we still have the sort of leadership it took to win the Cold War? The jury is still out on that one, but I doubt it. If the Soviet Union was still around today, half our military secrets would be leaked to it through the New York Times while idiots would laud the leakers improving “transparency in government.” Even while Reagan was taking the steps that brought the Soviets down, Hollywood and the Democrat Party were fighting him every step of the way & we’ve gone even further backwards since then.

Along those same lines, Hoover Dam was built in five years. Today, there would be hashing things out with lawyers and environmental rights wackos for that long and it is doubtful that it could be built at all. Remember when we shocked the world by putting a man on the moon in 1969? Well today, we’re no longer capable of going to get the flag we left there. Instead, we’re obsessing over whether men with mental problems who believe they’re women should be treated like real women. There are more educated people than ever before, but fewer people who seem capable of thinking. We’ve gone so far backwards that as the great Thomas Sowell said, “The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”

So what are our politicians doing about these issues? Our country owes trillions of dollars it never intends to pay off; Social Security and Medicare are both in the red and unsustainable; our borders are unsecured; basket-case enemy nations have acquired nuclear weapons; thanks to Obama race relations are at their worst point since the sixties and more Americans hate each other over their political views than any time since the Civil War. So what’s Congress working on? Well, here’s the hot new topic that Congress seems to really care about…

A number of female House Democrats wore sleeveless clothing on Friday, tweeting in support of "Sleeveless Friday." The action was part of the push to modernize the House dress code. Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) said, "It's 2017, and women vote, hold office, + choose their own style. Time to update the House rules to reflect the times!"…Pingree's comments were aimed at Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who said he would work with the sergeant-at-arms to modernize the dress code that includes requiring men to wear a suit and tie in both the Speaker's lobby and House chamber.

This sort of trivia is now the rule, not the exception in politics. As America’s problems have gotten bigger and more intractable, our politicians have created phony problems to solve instead of dealing with real issues. They may not care if North Korea can hit America with a nuclear weapon or whether Social Security will still exist in its current form in a decade, but they can talk your ears off about the women’s dress code, civil war statues and the name of the Washington Redskins. Unfortunately, our Congress is a reflection of our culture which prizes celebrity, outrageous behavior, attention whoring and meaningless expressions of how much people claim to care above all other things. There was a time when being a jerk prone to emotional outbursts of nonsense was looked down upon, but today it means you get a reality show at best and a bigger Twitter following at worst.

There are still a lot of good people in this country, but as a nation, we’ve become complacent, decadent and jaded. We’re the trust fund kid living off the money great, great-grandad left us while the family business we don’t understand fails. What we have in America? It’s rare. Historically, there are not a lot of extremely prosperous, free nations that don’t have to fear invasion because of that powerful military. That means we are squandering an inheritance left to us by previous generations of Americans that we may never have again once it’s lost. We foolishly assume it will be this good forever even though we laugh at and impugn many of the ideas, attitudes and principles that were responsible for our success in the first place. America is not on track for a happy ending and as much as I hate to say it, we’re going to richly deserve the pain, misery and disaster our own actions are going to bring down on our heads one day.

Michael Vlahos, a rather squishy conservative historian from John Hopkins, said on the John Batchelor Show that America has lost its sense of purpose and its belief in itself as a world leader.

This, in turn, will lead to America abandoning its role as a defender of others, and eventually itself. He pointed out that there’s no reason to believe that the US will defend any of China’s neighbors from China’s desire to create a sphere of influence.

We’re too busy working so we can have a nice vacation or a new boat or an early retirement.

to which you can add blowing time and money travelling around the world for no purpose other than to say we did it, and to possess photographs of us grinning aside local landmarks...women seem particularly addicted to this foolishness...

>>to which you can add blowing time and money travelling around the world for no purpose other than to say we did it, and to possess photographs of us grinning aside local landmarks...women seem particularly addicted to this foolishness...

LOL! My wife always wants to take some major trip to Europe for just that reason. I tell her that it looks much better on TV than in real life.

“I suspect our lethargy is due to our never having faced any real collective adversity.”

I agree completely. Add to this a generation who thought they were doing a good thing by “letting their kids decide for themselves”, and an incredibly sly and patient communist enemy who, realizing there would be no military victory, was ingenious and patient enough to infiltrate and indoctrinate in all of our institutions, you have a “perfect storm” for the decimation of the best civilization ever known to Man.

Unfortunately, it's the only civilization we've got and a lot will go down with it if it fails.

What's missing from a lot of the discussion though, is an understanding of the connection between the good version of American civilization that people like and the bad version that they hate.

It's not like evil communist magicians killed the one and left the other in its place.

How did we get from one to the other? And was there anything in what was that gave us what we have now?

This kind of existential angst is misplaced. It was rife in the 1920s and 30s, but the country rallied to the challenges of the Great Depression and WW II. Similarly, during the Cold War and its episodic military crises and conflicts, civilian life was usually easy, undisciplined, and prosperous even as the USSR grew more menacing. Yet it was the Communist movement that collapsed, not the United States, which has gone from strength to strength.

Notably, the attractiveness of life in the West fatally undermined the authority of Communist regimes and helped to end the USSR and its empire more or less peacefully. Similarly, for Muslims, the freedom and prosperity of the United States and the West are a refutation of the harsh doctrines of Islam -- and for Islamists, they are a provocation.

Arguably, the US debt load is unsustainable on our present trajectory, but there is also reason to believe that a combination of higher economic growth and programmatic reforms could change that. Indeed, the greater challenge may be coping with impending technological and economic changes that will make for major changes in American life. What will we do with our time when the usual work week is three days and we can look forward to vigorous adult lifespans of 250 plus years?

We?

Our?

Leave me out of this argument.

I’ve been a Conservative Republican for 60 years.

Almost no policies I supported have ever became law.

And if they did become law, they were never seriously enforced.

Bottom Line - hard core American Conservatives have been a shrinking political minority since Teddy Roosevelt became president almost 120 years ago.

This is why CNN's blackmail saga is so important. Since Trump's election, the media has come to realize that not only do many Americans not like the media, but that Deplorables don't respond to their dog whistle of whatever ____ism they're pushing.

In the past the media and all statists could count on conservatives backing down and even apologizing when called names. Now, they face a revived America that won't back down when called names - and will go on the offensive.

If this pattern carries on, eventually the label of #FakeNews will be successfully hung around the necks of the media propagandists. The ballast people will catch on and then the media's influence will wane. It won't end, it just won't work as well as it did for 70 years.

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