America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between - Oscar Wilde

It's so sad, and I'm getting the idea that we're just far enough along toward globalization that when this intellectual vacuum finally falls into our next impending "Dark Age", that it will be planetary in scope. The original Dark Ages started somewhere shortly before the year 500 A.D. and lasted at least through 1000 A.D. Here we stand again, with religious zealots and ideologues who are willing to smear or even kill the dirty elitist educated liberals like me.


We celebrate the mediocre and look to blame others for anything that we don't like or understand. I routinely hear asinine shit like this country is a "Christian Nation". What- like Vatican City? This is bullshit on every level. First, this is not a religious nation (also called a THEOcracy, as opposed to a representative DEMOcracy). Second, I can count on one hand the number of actual Christians I've ever met. The rest of you poseurs have all the credibility to that title as I have to "skinniest porn star".

Besides, I know the real story- there IS a religion here, but it's shallow and cancerous. It's the love of money, and it's omnipresent, and is the real undercurrent of everything that happens here.


So this time around, we'll probably fall faster into a global dark age, and if we're really lucky maybe we can throw in a pandemic of some sort for good measure. A nice bug that makes Ebola look like a slacker. It'll be fine though, because the television will tell you all that Barack Obama and Osama Bin Laden are brothers, gay lovers, voodoo practitioners, illegal whalers, and baby killers, and that they caused all of the pain you feel. Then you'll vote for some purely evil and corrupt bastard with good hair and photogenic features who will find a way to remove any rights that you have left and enslave your children. And you'll dutifully raise your malnourished children on foods that come from a lab, and they will be taught to believe in an angry all-powerful man who lives in the clouds, who will punish them forever unless they do what they're told.
Then they can go to war and die pointlessly in a battle against the other little children who believe the angry cloud-man's name is different. Lather, rinse, repeat.


I'm not invested in this. I was going to say "anymore" there, but in retrospect, it occurred to me that I've never really been a part of this place. I'm like a natural resident alien. I'm convinced that at some point in (hopefully) my lifetime, and surely the lifetimes of my kids, that we're going to have to emigrate somewhere. I'm trying to make time to get back to where I was in my command of German, although I don't suppose the Germans will want me/us. I'd like to go to somewhere in northern Europe before the walls go up here, but I can't imagine many nations would want to receive Americans. Maybe I can get asylum somewhere, based on the hostile environment for liberals here. I mean, if Jesus Christ were to turn up here today, he'd get his ass handed to him, and be tied to a fencepost and left to die in a snowstorm (a la Matthew Sheppard) I have no compunction in telling you that if I had an opportunity to sell this place out, in order to get out and be free of this lunacy, I'd sell this culture down the river in a New York Minute.

One Nation Under God.

Uh huh.