The Gears

Old Ben said if you give up liberty for security, you're screwed--
well, he didn't say it quite like that, he lived in a more refined age.

Ours is one of self-appointed Messiahs who preach the doctrine of the dollar supported by the Christian God against all enemies, foreign & domestic--the president of course being all three is particularly demonized--

not to put too great a spin upon it--the Republic has always been fractious, splintered, divided & savage but the electronic media in league with a primitive ideology is a dangerous new brew for the production of demagogues; once the seed is planted in the mind of the gullible it is hard to remove. Thankfully, most of those subverted are aged and apt to pass away in the next 20 years or so, we are left to ponder on just much more power the oligarchs can accrue to themselves and how much the next generation will become accustomened to their rule in that span.

One must bear in mind that the State has been elitist since its inception--the plebs have made inroads here and there but the basics remain in place. Underneath the noise is an erosion of this aristocracy in the face of a new multiculturalism that is driving the Messiahs to ever greater dementia & frustration. The most visible manifestation of that change is the Man in the white house--it should be noted that they have come to tolerate women as long as they maintain the status quo, that is, Eve as helpmate to Adam--(Bachman-Palin Syndrome)but those that step out of it and claim equality or God forbid primacy are to be assumed to be agents of the Devil, the Clinton-Pelosi syndrome.

Caesar was killed not because he was a tyrant (that question is not answered by History) but rather because he threatened the wealth of the oligarchs--as was true of the Gracchi--rarely are the oligarchs themselves dispatched, but it has occurred generally under the guise of a "new" government as in Britain & France--the elite prefer assassination it seems for shall we say continuity,--the Kennedys, Martin Luther King. Just as an aside consider why would a communist murder John Kennedy, a liberal democrat with an ambitious program for social reform that moved the country towards equality--that he did I have no doubt, but the motivation seems skewed to me. Maybe the textbooks in Texas could enlighten me as to how that all worked out.

I am hopeful we will stumble on for another hundred years or so, until the factions becomes so polarised they can no longer be kept from each other's throats, the institutions break down by even more glaring incompetence than we see now, and the system of checks & balances erode to the point that we acquiesce to the first Man in Rome--someone like Boehner who waits quietly for the opening, the crack in the facade.

Might be worth remembering he will step forward to "save the Republic," not just fix it.