"You know, this usta be a hellova good country"
Said George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) in the movie Easy Rider shortly before he was bludgeoned to death by the good old boys who didn't want no hippies with no respect for the good old ways and traditions in their county. It's a very common thing to say in the USA of today. That's not to say we haven't done some good things, but I'm curious to know just when that golden age of America the Great and Magnificent was. The witch hunts, religious restrictions, the deportations and slaughter of Indians, a horrific civil war -- the Slavery, the Race laws, the lynchings, the unjustified invasions and foreign wars based on lies, the support for inhuman monsters abroad, the abuses of freedom while fighting various enemies, real and imagined. Just when the hell were we so great?
I'd like to know because it seems to be the same voices lamenting the lost paradise that decry efforts to move away from or undo all those Hobbsonian horrors. Advocates for a system of laws based on selected Christian literature, for enforcing selected taboos of selected Christian sects who advocate for the tyranny of clergymen and against the institutions of secular government: I'd like to know what the hell they're talking about and so far not one of them has given me a cogent, a valid or even an honest explanation.
'Back to the Future' seems to have been a meme since the first versions of the Garden of Eden Story was cooked up and seeing that not only the name "eden" but the concept of an original pure garden of bliss is described in the earliest writings known ages before there was a Bible, it's puzzling to contemplate how the past could always have been better and the future should be a return. All those horrors, the floods, the plagues, the genocides the divine retributions in the past -- that's because we weren't pleasing God or the gods and so we need to go back to when we did although obviously we never have?
Sounds demented, doesn't it and that's because it is, but it's also been the tool of tyrants and prophets and preachers and Sunday School Teachers, and it works. Yep they're all going to restore the greatness, Reagan and Trump with their shining cities and high rises towers and every damn Republican chump with their ethnic bias and religious intolerance.. Bring back the Roman Empire, start a thousand year Reich. A New Jerusalem, a new Zion in Utah a new Eden in Woodstock. Remember that the First Commandment is religious intolerance and we'll all be happy.
I got into it, earlier this week with some blowhard who insisted that the Pledge of Allegiance was fading away because the Liberals were making us embarrassed to say it. It was the God part, of course, forced on school children since 1954 thanks to the knights of Columbus having bullied the Eisenhower administration. The straw man Liberals are against "patriotism' and Patriotism means mandatory theological belief just like the old days when everything was wonderful and Christian Soldiers like Jefferson and Madison and Franklin and Washington fought the unbelievers to establish the Kingdom of Christ in the New World.