We can’t fix schools. We can’t help the jobless. We can’t do healthcare. But there’s still one thing that America can do well.
There’s Still One Thing That America Is Good at
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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This is an interesting genre of political cartoon (sic). What is laid out here shows that they made it practically impossible to come up with good satire, i.e. an alternate reality bleaker than the actual one that emphasizes a salient aspect through exaggeration.
I guess this retroactively justifies laying off all those cartoonists from newspapers (back in the day when there were still newspapers). One might as well have regular journalists report on the bleakness of it all.
Of course, they laid off most of those as well, but that’s ok since who wants to hear about things being bleak all the time? It’s hard to target advertising to a feeling of bleakness: The News Hour brought to you by Eli Lilly, Makers of Prozac?
The much-missed George Carlin (it’s a shame he missed Trump), said once something to the effect that God had to be a man because no woman could or would screw things up this badly (n.b., this was long before war criminal Hillary Clinton rigged the democratic primary and then showed exactly how inept she was by losing the general to Donald Trump, a man who couldn’t beat, um, Joe Biden.)*
Tallying up all the ways government, honest and for true, has dropped so many balls — they’ve dropped more balls than a roomful of year-old boys — I can’t dismiss it anymore as just ineptitude. Clearly, something is working to gum things up. Ted didn’t even get around to student loans.
I suspect that either the system has reached its Marxist telos — i.e., there’s so little left to steal from the worker that what’s being swiped now is causing the collapse in a manner similar to eating your seed corn — or, the Club of Rome and others were correct: the amount of debt has finally reached the tipping point in the world. So much is owed to so many and can never be repaid that it will cause the currencies to fail and plunge the world into a Dark Ages (and that those in charge know it and are cutting their loses in the same way that a boss getting ready to torch a business puts off repairs and upgrades to equipment.
*It’s still possible Trump will “beat” Biden, ironically, in much the same way that Hillary “beat” Sanders. By rigging things. Jan. 6 should be real interesting. Assuming we get to see the certification before Trump declares martial law and shuts off all the forms of mass media.
60 years…
One has to admire US persistence in trying to build up a perfect final solution to the climate crisis.
4 more years! 4 more years! … etc ??? DOOM!!!