Acres of Crooks

Is it possible? Is the scam finally unraveling? How long has it been? I would argue that it began in the sixties because certain people took the effervescent openness and optimism of that decade WAY too seriously and processed it as a real revolution (think: Dick Cheney). They saw it as an invitation to social upheaval and chaos requiring an authoritarian reaction, crusade and vendetta. Hell, it was nothing but another Great Awakening.

The sixties were puritanical and utopian--one generation self-righteously unloading on another, insisting on insight, moral superiority and a schismatic's demand for a level of individualism ending in isolation and doctrinal decomposition. Remember, Evangelicalism might seem stodgy but they were (are) mystics of a sort--believers in revelation and an individual, irreproducible, experiential and unscalable mind-meld with God. 

They are fans of gnosis, not reason. Similarly, hippies sought enlightenment through drugs and other irrational means. And they founded utopian communities, their versions of the New Jerusalem. How utterly American. Puritanism ruins everything in America. Even feminists succumbed, defining their successes and failures in left-brain, analytical terms and becoming famously strident, uncompromising, angry and judgmental. 

But, back to the scam. Republicans have descended into a pit of sin. Republicanism is now an identity movement and a morass of unreason--as self-righteous as it is self-serving, power-hungry and unprincipled. The fruit of their tree is death and despair. They have declared themselves the true inheritors of the American traditions and not because they act it. They are God's chosen people so it doesn't matter that they are crooks.

And the entire country is infested with them, gnawing away at its guts.