When Empire’s Die
When empires begin to die, their public acts–in sharp contrast to the ponderous, stately sobriety of their behavior while ascendant–tend to be marked by queer and pathetic eruptions of idiocy, bathos, and mania.
Though it can’t be known when our last Imperial Clown will douse the last lights of The Exceptional Empire and drop the keys in the mailbox for the last failed bank–America is showing clear signs of approaching meltdown.
In Rome, one dingy Caesar burlesqued as a gladiator, then went on stage in drag to warble of nymphs and fauns, and made his horse a senator.
At Tsarist Russia’s end, the Imperials ran their bloody circus on the whims of a drunken, deranged sociopath repeatedly arrested for public indecency.
Hitler egomaniacally wasted his mighty wehrmacht against Russian winter, then as his Reich exploded and burnt around him, had his gofer shoot him.
The American Empire, enmeshed and floundering in a smothering net of contradictions, deceptions, and disastrous choices, is now playing out a pathetic absurdist farce before a fascinated and astonished world.
The essence of it is this. Due to prolonged betrayal of working people by the Democratic Party over many decades, the blatantly falsity and obvious deception it peddled so hard and so long to keep them in thrall have at last lost their grip. The result was loss of the Presidential election in 2016.
Stunned and unable to swallow the undeniable reason for it, the desperate party leadership concocted a preposterous, threadbare fantasy narrative to deny responsibility and direct shame, blame and disgrace away from itself.
The obvious best target was Trump, since so many good people detest him for so many good reasons. It would not suffice, though, to attack him as a legitimate opponent because that would mean the electorate, left to itself, had made this awful choice. Unthinkable, even for the half of it Hillary had deplored.
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