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Our happy regressive friends do the same thing, of course. Except when they don't. They reject evolution in favor of a 6,000 year-old Earth. Though I notice that they're quite content to queue up for radiation therapy when they're sick with cancer, even while rejecting the veracity of radio-carbon dating of ancient fossils. Hmmm. Go figure. They mostly have reconciled themselves nowadays to a heliocentric solar system, though they did imprison Galileo for telling a but too much truth on that one. Given the recent tenor of the religious right in America, I'm waiting for even this bit to get tossed out with evolution, any day now. You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. Mark my words. The Earth will return to the center of the universe, just like the good book says.
Meanwhile, the same people who would happily burst through the doors of the National Archives, yank the Constitution out of its case and run it through a $19.99 shredder they just picked up on sale at Office Depot -- all in the name of fighting terrorism -- are simultaneously working frantically to make sure we don't do anything at all about the very real threat of global warming. Udickuitous Cheney once said that we have to pull out all stops in case there was even a one-percent chance of a terrorist attack that might kill thousands. But a survey of the experts on climate change suggests that there is a more than ninety-nine percent probability that whole countries will be drowned and entire groups of species eradicated in the coming decades. And that's just the easy part. Still, the regressive prescription for this looming nightmare is to continue to do nothing at all, lest we anger the supreme goddess Commerce.
I've always been a little weird this way, but where I come from, that ain't exactly the most responsible choice. Neither was invading Iraq. More than 4000 dead Americans later, and George Bush is still looking under his desk for the missing WMD (heh-heh, wasn't that a hilarious little comedy routine he did on that?). As if that would have been a valid excuse to invade a country that was neither attacking us nor threatening us, anyhow. As if dozens of countries don't have WMD. As if the Republican government of the United States didn't cover for Saddam at home and at the UN at the time he was actually using chemical weapons on his own people.
So perhaps a million Iraqis are dead now, American finances are in the toilet, the country's global reputation is too skanky to qualify for horizontal employment in a makeshift basement brothel in Tijuana, and our national security -- supposedly the purpose of the whole exercise -- has been radically diminished by the decimation of an army that even Colin Powell described as "broken". This is what you get from the "responsible" ideology, ladies and gentlemen.
But wait! There's more! How about a crushing national debt. Hey, why not borrow money recklessly to pay for these fun wars based on lies? And how about those super-rich folks out there? Don't they deserve additional tax cuts? I'm sure our children won't mind paying for the loans to finance those giveaways, plus interest, in the future. Why would those crazy kids want to actually bring home the fruits of their labor in a paycheck anyhow? They won't mind working long hours to finance the "responsibility' of unparalleled deficit spending by regressives, will they?
Well, actually, that question is likely to be a moot issue now anyhow. That's because the upshot from the "responsible' economic policy provided by our nice regressive friends increasingly means that the youngins won't have any jobs at all. That certainly solves the problem of spending a lifetime paying taxes to finance their parents' spending sprees, doesn't it? Pretty clever, is it not? No regulation, no economy; no economy, no jobs; no jobs, no income; no income, no taxes; no taxes, no worries! Damn! I wonder if the good folks on the right had this all figured out from the beginning!
Ho-ho, eh? Not so funny, though, if you're on the butt end of the joke. Which we all are, not least the younger generation. There is an era of bad feeling in America, long in the making, but hardly at its nadir. The United States has been on a southward glide path for three decades now, an act of political physics as natural and inevitable as gravity itself, but also deeply exacerbated by the predatory political movement pioneered by Reagan and Thatcher, and continued by Bushes, Blairs, Clintons and Obamas alike.
It was bad enough that we lived for as long as we did at a greedy and unsustainable level, stealing from other peoples, from our environment, from brown and female workers, and even from our own children. But now it's getting much, much worse.
In twenty years those children are all too likely to be living poor, on a hostile planet, working long hours to pay down the sins of their fathers.
And they might well be enraged, too, as they should be.
A decade or two from now, if they confront their right-wing elders -- gazing in anger and astonishment at the bottomless capacity of their parents' selfishness -- you can safely bet that their questions will be met with dissembling deception.
Twenty years from now, regressives will lie to their children.
We know this because those regressives are already lying today, covering their execrable crimes the only way possible.
With deceit.
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