In the garden of dead dreams

In a nation of good Germans, where dreams are small and pitiful things, dreams of getting a raise at work, dreams of being able to afford the mortgage on your home, dreams that some day, somehow, you might manage to pay off the tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt that you owe, what then is the destination? As waves of ignorance sweep across the land it is clear that the dream that was America is gone, dead, not to come back within our lifetimes. Even 20 years ago during Ronald Reagan's presidency the notion that Americans would be torturing, "rendering", jailing without trial, spying on everybody's phone calls, all those things that are now considered "normal", back twenty years ago would have been met with appalled stares of disgust. America today is the late Soviet Union, adrift from its intellectual underpinnings, with a decaying infrastructure and alarmingly corrupt government conspiring together to destroy the economy.

Things will get worse. A lot worse. It will be a replay of the late 1920's in Germany, with soup lines stretching around the block as surplus food is sold off overseas, it will be foreign landlords who own our former homes dictating the terms of our existence and foreign lenders who own all our assets controlling our economy, it will be increasingly venal and vicious leaders unleashing hoards of brownshirts such as the "Gathering of Eagles" to maintain their rule. There is no upside in sight. We've eaten our seed corn, the infrastructure of roads and schools and public utilities that were once the envy of the world are crumbling into ruin, we are late Rome where the politicians squabble over the Imperial Throne in Rome as the once-mighty legions crumble under the weight of endless foreign wars and provinces secede in all but name, until there is a Berlin moment as Hitler in his bunker issues orders to non-existent armies as the Red Army closes in.

Will President Hillary Clinton stop all this? In the end, no. She is a competent woman and will slow it down for a while, but like the late Roman Empire, things have gone past the point of no return. The only question in my mind is how long it's going to take for the final fall... and whether it will take down the rest of the world with it. Perhaps I should start learning the words to "Oh Canada!" and put in my application for immigration before the borders close... but will Canada get sucked down into the abyss too as the Empire collapses into an orgy of violence and hate? Most Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S. border. Is that far enough?

-- Badtux the Depressed Penguin