Rise and fall of the American Empire

I had a teacher my Freshman year of high school who was by most accounts a pompous ass. Most of what he taught us was far to simplified or taken out of context or just plain wrong, but he taught it like it was goddamn scripture and his tests were basically a complete mind dump of all the buzzwords and strange stories he told us. Some of the shit he told us has really stuck with me over the last half-decade and especially in the past several months I have been thinking about one of his lessons in particular. The man loved to talk about what he called the Greek cycle of government and the lesson went a little something like this. Governments cycle through good and bad turns helmed by different numbers of people: Tyranny was good government by one man (I shit you not, this was one of the more counter-common-sensical things he told us), the tyrant was a "Poor boy made good" but after a few generations of power, tyranny would descend into Monarchy, bad government by one. This would be followed by oligarchy or good government by the few who were the "best and the brightest" but, of course this would inevitably be followed by aristocracy - bad government by the few, for those of you following along at home - and then there would be another regime change to Democracy: good government by the many! And this, of course, lapses into Anarchy, bad government by the many, from which there must arise another poor boy made good, a Tyrant, to begin the cycle all over again. If that all sound like nonsense to you, try to think about it without attributing any prejudice to the nomenclature that he used and it may sound more reasonable.

In any case, in light of recent events, political goings on, etc. It occurs to me that the American Democracy has long since collapsed into anarchy (again please read the word by his definition and not the common meaning). I could give so many examples of bad government in the past several decades but really, we've pretty much heard them all if you ever listen to any dissenting voices (Stewart, Colbert, Olbermann, etc.) in the media. And if you haven't then you probably don't care. The one example I will give, however, comes from a documentary I saw recently called "Maxed Out!" about the credit industry in the US. It outlines how the credit industry preys on the weak and feeble minded, uses intimidation and unfair business practices to collect debt, and manages to thwart any legal regulation by weaseling it's way, like so many other industries, into the very legal system that is the only thing that has the strength to oppose it. The movie specifically talks about how the President appointed a former high-level executive of one of the worst offenders among this industry to be the "Credit Czar" to investigate his own business practices. Furthermore, the film discusses how the credit industry lobbyists wrote the bulk of the recent bankruptcy reform bill that made it harder for individuals to shake off their harassing creditors in order to start fresh.

What I mean to illustrate by this example is that corruption has become the norm in our government. Politicians are so deeply in bed with different businesses and special interest groups that they have completely lost sight of what they were elected to do. They are supposed to defend the people of the United States of America from other institutions, both foreign and domestic, that try to take advantage of us. Instead they spend their time accepting yachts and free meals from lobbyists and investigating steroid use in professional baseball. Real fucking great use of the taxpayers' time and money. Meanwhile we are mired in two different wars against some bat-shit crazies in the middle east, one of which we were deceived into believing was worthwhile, the cover-up for which leads to ever greater depths of post-modern surreality as the Shrub administration lies, denies things it has said in public and on camera, uses the co-opted and complacent Fourth Estate to spew fear-mongering bullshit into American homes, and, the Coup-de-grace, commuting the sentence of the one administration official who was held accountable for his actions by the branch of government that is supposed to help keep the executive in check.

In my mind, it is undeniable that we have bad government by the many: congress, the executive, and industry in bed together with the bat-shit crazies of our own country (Don't believe me? Watch the republican debates from a month ago, the one where they are asked whether they believe the earth was created in six days 6000 years ago and all the assholes raise their hands.).

(DISCLAIMER: From here on out, the following is mere conjecture and prediction by the author, based on an admittedly amateur understanding of history and political "science." It should in no way be construed as advocating sedition or violence.)


This brings to mind another one of my dear teacher's lessons from freshman year of high school. The man gave us his theory of revolution. He said that a true revolution is a complete overhaul of the institutions that compose society. Furthermore there were three steps in the process of revolution. The first was Middle Class Alienation, the middle class gets pissed off with the ruling group because, dammit, things should be better than they are. Second comes Radical Seizure in which the middle class stirs the working class into overthrowing the old regime. Finally there is the Thermidorian reaction which as Lenin (I think) said "the revolution devours its children. The middle class bump off the lower class and keep the power for themselves.

What I see today is a branching of two opposing possibilities for the future. Either the American public will continue to accept the corruption, the vile and hateful lies of it's government, and the continued collapse of justice and common decency and sense among the ruling elite or it will finally snap back to it's senses and unburden itself from the bad government under which it finds it self. By all means the middle class ought to be fucking alienated by now. The wealth gap continues to grow as the last American industrial jobs are sent overseas, middle-class tech jobs are outsourced to India, and the average American male of 30 today makes less, when adjusted for inflation than his father did decades ago. The economy continues to be desolate for the vast majority of Americans despite how the government would like to suggest that since the Stock Market is thriving, the economy must be good.

So what is it going to be? Complacency or revolution? I guess only time will tell.