A Humble Opinion

After deliberate, thoughtful contemplation, it's appropriate to apportion responsibility for the current, dispiriting state of the Union. The culprits encompasses a coalition of breadth, yet they have a shared feature. The most influential of these factions have operated in the United States before its inception, practicing dishonesty in the pursuit of public adulation, even before the Declaration of Independence. While the most famous agent died in 1910, these manipulators of public opinion function today under the benign names of The Late Show, SNL, and The Onion.

These organizations, and many more, trace a continuous line all the way back to Benjamin Franklin who said, “a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance,” implying one should never achieve perfection, because those around him would perceive the quality as elitism.  This same man, employing his ironical skill slandered the authority of the British government, and led many innocent victims to an early death between 1775 and 1783. Stephen Colbert, though a staunch defender of all things American on his prior show, has readily abandoned his true beliefs in an attempt to pander to the brainwashed mainstream audience. The Last Thing You'd Eat Alone on Bread has been in print since 1988, but extended its reach when it began publishing online in 1996, and released its first collection in 1999. SNL, conceived in 1975, excelled through the past four decades, until it became a totally one-sided, biased show – nothing funny at all, and promptly aired its last episode. These and many other actors have wrought catastrophic damage upon our political system through their use of satire.

It isn't entirely their responsibility: they couldn't have continued the enterprise if others hadn't begat the concept itself, preparing the collapse of the United States through hidden faults in the foundation of Western thought. One should begin by critiquing the famous dramatists of Ancient Greece. When Sophocles directed Oedipus to declare, “I speak as one who is a stranger to the story, a stranger to the crime” was the author not urging the overthrow of order? Those treacherous Athenians, cradle of civilization, poisoned the well of understanding at birth. Their contemporary, Socrates (and his pupil, poet, and publicist Plato), sabotaged knowledge by pretending to search for truth. Posing in ignorance to invite the ignorance of others, what a disastrous deed! The creation of a form of communication, intentionally dedicated to obfuscation, confusion, and falsehood, could only have been invented by minds too devious to defy reason, the creation of a mind which seeks to make the lesser the greater.

But today, having failed to outlaw or punish its practitioners, the leaders of the United States have determined naive youth should be taught underhanded irony. Worse, those they have chosen to for this endeavor are those least capable of fulfilling the basic requirements of employment: high school English teachers. In spite of the continual deflection of funds from education, into more proper avenues such as expensive unsuccessful technologies, or tax cuts for big business, teachers have failed to properly instruct students in the complexities of satire. Their failure is of their own making, and so widespread it must be intentional. Educators inability (or calculated negligence) to foster critical thinking in their pupils, is the source of a susceptible public eager to accept conspiracies as truth.

This is only a tenth of the trouble (not like that time in England where one guy proposed selling babies as food – they really had a problem, which as another proto-American said, “...They had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”), and the other problem is of direction. Not the up or down kind, nor right and left kind, or even east or west, but the who to trust kind. It used to be, back when America was great (but will be again soon), a citizen knew who could lead, but those days are gone. Citizens distrust institutions, as they should. The State, the Press, the Church(s), the Scientists, the People, the Spy Agencies, and the Universities, though undisputed at the dawn of creation, diminished themselves by each action they undertook. Right-seeing people saw institutions as self-serving and as deceitful as the satirists.

These same, hardworking, right-seeing, every-man millionaires understood the solution. Buy the institutions personally (or influence if direct purchase was impossible), and impose new programs to rescue each institutions reputation. When they had succeed in their acquisitions (from the previous affluent owners:and those before them, and before them, and before them), they found the institutions intent on developing their own direction. For those new owners who kept their stubborn, disobedient institutions (bought and paid for fairly), they found themselves suffering constant assault. Other well meaning citizens, hesitant to purchase institutions, found it easier to assail any who stood in their way of a reasonable, confined, self-interested life even though it might damage the cohesion of society itself. The plummeting prestige of these institutions can not be the fault of the wealthy who have spent millions asserting their rights to a lifestyle which benefits themselves over the mass of citizens.

Though one might consider the United States to be threatened by foreign enemies, and to fall to oversea swords, like golden Hellas, we are more like Roma. Like the Senators of Rome who allowed the transformation of the Roman Republic into an Empire, rather than risk their own lives, so the Senators again seem willing to deliver the mantle of government to someone of retrogressive sensibilities. Only ours is less qualified than Julius Caesar.

And so we are left to contemplate the greatest irony of all, a democracy unwilling to use any tools to rescue itself. A democracy that has abdicated belief in all authority, sending those who should speak to the gallows, to the guillotine, to the Inquisition, to the flame. A democracy where the people have chosen a man who howls false nothings into the face of ignorance and thunders, unironically, “I am the only one who can save you!”