The Insurmountable Climb

The following is the opening sentence from an extraordinarily intelligent critic who wrote a thoughtful and passionate response to my particular brand of political illness:

I would just like to correct the fact that I was not going to come back with we murder, cause mayhem etc. (which we do and have) but that there’s a big difference between the Soviet Union and Mao’s China and progressive tax policies in a democracy!

To which I replied:

I am more than willing to address everything you’ve proposed in short order, but this sentence is, in effect, the defining explanation of why it’s preposterous for me to waste my time and energies on caring about what happens to this country anymore.

This country was never designed — nor did it ever function as, up until the 17th Amendment disaster — as a democracy.

We are — were — a Democratic Constitutional REPUBLIC.  We created the most perfect form of self-governance the world has ever known: the democratic means to elect knowledgeable representatives who are bound by the chains of the Constitution.

We haven’t followed the supposed “Supreme Law of the Land” for so long that the standard joke from EVERY legal scholar who isn’t a part of the Big Lie is: “The reason laws don’t mean what they say is because there’s no one left who can read.”

And the Big Lie?

Our being a “democracy” — the most vile and disgusting form of oppression ever known because it depends solely on the whim of the ignorant masses to trample the unalienable human rights of individuals to serve an all-powerful collective for the benefit of those who did not or would not contribute to said collective — is the most often repeated Big Lie the world has ever known.  It’s reason we’re no longer good at what we once did better than any country to ever exist.

We are now content, and have been for some time, to punish the very notion of achievement for the sake of being able to claim “everyone is a winner.”

These days, there’s one reason and one reason alone for public education — this coming from a man whose ENTIRE FAMILY ON BOTH SIDES were in public education for over two generations — and that is to hand out “My child is on the ******* **** School Honor Roll” bumper stickers to EVERY SINGLE STUDENT AT THE BEGINNING OF EVERY SINGLE SCHOOL YEAR.

It’s not that I want thousands of Americans to show up on the Capitol’s steps wearing Guy Fawkes’ masks and garb next November 5th because I think it’s going to change anything, it’s just that I’ll know it’ll be the first time that many people with a fucking clue amassed to try since Lexington and Concord.