[InABunkerUnderSF]

Well done.

The Roman Empire subsisted for four centuries on bread and circuses. It looks like our leaders are following their model.

America seems to have peaked some time between 1965 when Johnson debased the coinage and sought to make government dependents of the poor, and 1970 when Nixon canceled the Apollo program and adopted a strategy of deceit and defeat in Indochina.

Leaders since then have tried, sometimes heroically, to arrest the decline but the institutional rot has set in and I can find no historical precedent for reversing the trend.

[joanie-f]

Leaders since then have tried, sometimes heroically, to arrest the decline but the institutional rot has set in and I can find no historical precedent for reversing the trend.

I suspect you're familiar with the eighteenth-century historian, Alexander Tytler's, description of the inevitable, self-destructive cyle of all the world's democracies (not that we are one, mind you, but we're close enough):

From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.

As I see it, we're sitting at the penultimate stage. And, as you say, it's the historical inevitability of it all that's so maddening.

~ joanie